Back in the day, forty years ago to be exact, VH1 hit cable TV. If you’re a bit fuzzy on it, VH1 was essentially MTV’s grown-up sibling. Where MTV was all about the younger crowd (13-25), VH1 catered to the 25-54 age range. They played a lot of smoother, more mellow music from artists like Stevie Wonder, Linda Ronstadt, Diana Ross, and Kool & the Gang. Basically, the kind of music your older brother, maybe eight years older than you, would have been into.
My oldest brother is eight years older than I am — and he liked VH1 when it made its debut in January of 1985. I just laughed at him at the time because I was 19 and he was a 27 year old man. And because I was cultivating a new wave/alt rock vibe in music and fashion, I felt VH1 was just a video version of any lite rock station that was popular at the time. I wasn’t wrong about that, but because I’m the youngest of the brood, my opinion was usually minimized or ridiculed. I was regularly called a twerp by my oldest brother for no other reason than I was a twerp. But that’s okay. I thought he was a dork with a dull career-track job and thinning hair.
Around late February/early March, VH1 started playing “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tear for Fears — a band I knew from MTV and whose song “Change” got some plays on what was the cool music on the channel. One day, I came home (I was still living with my folks at the time) and my oldest brother was there and he was looking at my albums (sidebar: I was buying about 3-4 albums a week back then, so my record collection was pretty fat), and he picked up “Songs From the Big Chair” and said, “Oh, I like one of the songs off this album.”
“Which one?” I asked.
“It’s the one they play on VH1…what’s it called? Oh yeah, this one” he said, pointing to track three on the album.
“VH1 plays that?” I exclaimed.
“Ha ha! Looks like the cool music has made its way to VH1” was his retort.
“But, that’s not even the best song on the record!” I argued.
“That’s not even the best song on the record,” he replied in that annoying big brother way that underscored how much of a twerp he thought I was. Then he added:
“We can’t all be cool like you. But your band sounds like they have a hit.”
That damn song!
No doubting that this song was hit material. Interestingly, it was the last song written for “Songs From the Big Chair.” It took about a week for three members of the band to write the thing — and it turned out to be unlike anything Tears for Fears had written in their short career. The song has a jaunty shuffle groove, some pleasant-sounding vocals by Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, and great hooks throughout the song. Yes, it had #1 written all over it, which is why I loathed it.
See, back in 1984-85, it seemed like many bands I liked at the time — bands that I discovered — quickly went mainstream because of massive video support from MTV and radio playing these songs over and over. This, my friends, was a betrayal to me. A personal offense to my music tastes because a band that I glommed onto was now having a moment of well-earned success. But I wanted them to be my secret. I wanted them to be my band. A band that was only known to other cool kids — even wannabe cool kids like me. So, when I saw my oldest brother grooving to Tears for Fears…well, that’s just adding insult to injury. So what did I do? I skipped the song whenever I listened to the album — or the cassette dub I made to play in my car. And when “Shout” became a hit, I skipped that one, too. God help me if the band had more hits off this record! Well, they did. But I figured with eight songs on the album, if kept skipping the hits in favor of the deep cuts, I’d probably have four songs to listen to. So, I grudgingly muscled through the hits so I could get the what I perceived to the be the good stuff.
I have to add one more layer to this tale. 1985 was the year I worked as a mobile DJ. It was good money back then. If I worked Friday and Saturday, I could clear about $500 in two days. Far better than working for minimum wage at the local radio station I started at in 1983, but would return to in 1986 with a one dollar bump up from minimum wage. But as a mobile DJ, I worked more wedding receptions than anyone should. Remember the movie The Fabulous Baker Boys? Remember how burned out Jeff Bridges’ character was working the same clubs, corporate parties, and wedding receptions playing the same tired old songs? Well, that was me. When people would request “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” at a wedding reception, the dance floor would be packed because that damn shuffle groove was excellent for white folks. Brides, grooms, parents, grandparents, snot-nose kids, and new moms bouncing their babies would all join in a multi-generational dance to a song about greed, the Cold War, and power. How very ’80s.
“Can I have my own music?”
-Me
Well, I lied. There’s another layer to this self-absorbed story, and that’s radio. I worked in the radio business for decades. It’s an accidental career, but one that I have fond memories of. I should clarify that I have fond memories of the people I worked with. The music? Not so much. And that’s because when you work for a pop station, you burn out on the music because you have to hear it so often. Being a DJ is a lot like working at an ice cream shop. At first, it’s great. You’re awash all that cold, creamy, sugary goodness — and you can consume as much as you want. But after some time, the ice cream doesn’t taste as good as it did when you first got there. And then you start to hate ice cream because it’s a job to scoop that stuff onto cones and give it to people. And you have to fake it by being all smiley and upbeat because ice cream makes people happy. But deep down, you’re miserable. That goes for working in music radio — well, it does for me. By the time you’ve been in the business for decades, the music has left such a sour taste in your mouth that the thought of listening to a song like “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” for pleasure can cause some moments of gagging. Plus, a song like that never goes away. It becomes like nuclear waste in that it has a half life of millions of years. I can’t stress it enough how much this song will not go away. Not in my lifetime. Not in my daughter’s, nor her kid’s (if and when she has kids). It will always be with the collective “us” — or so it seems.
With all that said, I’ll state the obvious: Tear for Fears wrote a great pop song — which is why it will endure. That’s a loss for the cool — or wannabe cool –kids and a win for everyone else not affected by the neurosis of coolness.
“But What About The Rest of The Album?”
– Greek Chorus
Take the hits out. Remember, that was my M.O. on this album in 1985. How did that work out? Well, to be frank, omitting the hits elevates the other songs in such a way that it becomes a much more forward-thinking album.
At first blush, “The Working Hour” may sound like smooth jazz at times. Okay, it does sound like smooth jazz, but that soft sax stuff was very popular in England at the time. A year after “Songs from the Big Chair” came out, Belouis Some released his second self-titled album, which has a rather long smooth sax jam at the end of the song “Some Girls.” Those jazz-like (or is it jazz-lite) flourishes get mixed in on The Working Hour,” but the song isn’t Kenny G saxy. Instead, underneath a very ’80s smooth jazz surface, there’s a kind of anti-corporate message in the lyrics that highlights the drudgery of working for The Man. Is that forward-thinking? Maybe not so much, but in the structure of the song, the lyrics add an effective contrast to the pleasantness of music.
“Mothers Talk” is, according to Orzabal, the band’s attempt to sound like the Talking Heads. Personally, I don’t hear it, but there is some creative uses of sampling at the beginning of the song. According to a Rolling Stone article penned by David Fricke in 1985, “the “Shaft”-like string introduction to “Mothers Talk”…is actually a computer sample of strings pinched from a Barry Manilow record.” But what makes the song exciting to me is the busy bass work from Curt Smith — or at least I think that’s a bass guitar getting all slappy. It’s possible it’s synth programming by keyboardist Ian Stanley, but to my ears, it’s a-Curt slappin’ the bass. The lyrics are about nuclear war (which was a topic among a lot of musicians at the time), but instead of getting all boo-hoo, the lyrics have a hopeful message of people power (“[Only] We can work it out”). “Mothers Talk” is quite overblown in terms of it’s production elements, but the song is reflective of some bands who were going for that aggressive sound with synth stabs, over the top vocal delivery that screamed “We’re earnest,” and a digital patina for the era of compact discs. It’s kind of surprising that “Mothers Talk” was the first single off the album in the UK because, let’s face it, it’s a weird choice.
“I Believe” seems a bit out of place in the track list. It’s a calm-before-the-storm song with a gentleness that gives the listener a a bit of a break before the last three songs. If I were sequencing this record, I’d move this song to after “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” I’d also omit the long ride out of “Mothers Talk” and replace it with a segue into “Broken.” Doing so sets up the undeveloped, but almost progressive rock theme of “One little boy, one little man” that’s part of “Broken” and the major theme of “Head Over Heels.” Plus, “Head Over Heels” has its own cool ride out into the great album closer, “Listen.” Yes, this song is pretentious, but we’re talking about Tears for Fears here. Not U2 level pretentious.
What I like about “Listen” is that after the aggressiveness of the previous songs, this is a 6 minute and 54 second meditative and ethereal journey with what I think (and some internet sites say) is a phrase in Spanish that translates into something odd in English. The phrase is (if the internet is to be believed) “Cumpleaños chica, no hay que preocuparse” — which is translated into English as: Birthday girl, no need to worry. The Spanish words sounds great in the song, and I’m glad they didn’t use the English version because it would have been stupid.
Not-So-Famous Last Words: “Songs From the Big Chair” is a fascinating album. The band was under pressure by their record company to produce some hits so everyone could make some money. They did just that. “Shout,” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and “Head Over Heels” did gangbusters in the U.S. The band ought to be proud of being able to write songs of that calibre that have endured for 40 years. That’s no small thing (to quote a great song from the band’s excellent “The Tipping Point”).
But the album is more than their hits. It stands an impressive sophomore record that beat the slump that plague many bands. Tears for Fears’ songwriting, production choices, and embracing of a variety of styles made “Songs from the Big Chair” such a gem from 1985. And the fact that the band would progress beyond what they wrought in 1985 four years later with “The Seeds of Love” shows that while these records slowly fractured the relationship of childhood friends Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, as artistic statements, both albums stand as some of the best rock albums of the 1980s.
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