"Songs From The Big Chair" at 40

Graphic by Remy Foeller

by Charlie Desjardins

There’s a distinctive sound in Tears For Fears’ 1985 synthpop masterpiece Songs From The Big Chair that I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on. It’s spacious yet tight, catchy yet elusive, menacing yet beautiful. It’s simply catchier than any pop music released in the ‘80s, a musical era respected purely for its catchiness.

It simply sounds like no other.

In 1983, two years prior, vocalist/guitarist Roland Orzabal and vocalist/bassist Curt Smith, along with keyboardist Ian Stanley and drummer Manny Elias, faced criticism for their music being just the opposite: derivative. Their debut album, The Hurting, a monumental odyssey about childhood trauma, shot them to superstardom in a UK music scene dominated by happy-go-lucky Spandau Ballet and Bananarama. As a result, Tears For Fears, like many other groups flirting with the dark wave genre, found themselves categorized with mood-centric bands—what I like to call “mood minions”— like Joy Division. Although Orzabal and Smith acknowledged the two groups’ mutual darkness, introvertedness, and strangeness, they later expressed their uncertainty about these comparisons.

NME’s scathing review of “The Hurting,” 1983

“The thing that set us out from the crowd, I think,” Orzabal told The Quietus in 2013, “was that we were quite happy to take on slightly more semi-intellectual concepts, you know, and try and turn them into hits. We were young, weren’t we? And relatively handsome! In chunky knitwear!”

It was that fearless intelligence that led Tears For Fears to ask the tough questions on The Hurting—questions like, “What if we made music that aspires to silence but can’t help but scream?” and “What if “Mad World” becomes better known as a shitty piano ballad in twenty years?” Yet, as evidenced by their spanking from the British music press, intelligence wasn’t going to cut it. They needed to be bigger—not just in scope, but in sound. Tears For Fears were never a quiet band, but in 1984, taking shelter in a village recording studio with producer Chris Hughes, storied engineer Dave Bascombe, and an army of LinnDrums, they achieved the peak of their maximalist powers.

Songs From The Big Chair is Tears For Fears’ bid for cool dissatisfaction. They’re as motivated as ever, but they hardly want you to know that. Just look at that cover! Disappointed men in chunky knitwear! It’s a striking image, one that perfectly sums up the blend of casual anger and snobbish confidence present on album opener “Shout”— a militant anthem with rollicking percussion and a synth bass so chunky it evokes spoiled milk.

“Shout, shout, let it all out / These are the things I can do without…”

“Shout” doesn’t do without much, and its mammoth glory is the sound of a band embracing the sleekest production techniques of its time while looking forward to an apocalyptic future of its own making. Suddenly, Tears For Fears weren’t just guys with keyboards but genuine proprietors of dancefloor bloodshed, and they’ve made sure to blow it out to a nearly unbearable size, adding in sick guitar riffs for good measure. It's an absolutely exhilarating achievement, but judging by its lasting popularity, you probably realized that long ago.

Of course, one cannot mention the word “achievement” without also mentioning the biggest hit from Songs From The Big Chair, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” This song, like “Shout,” is one of those rare, near-perfect tracks that many would agree defines its generation—and perhaps every generation. I’ve heard it so many times by now that, much like the album itself, I find it difficult to articulate its magic. Is it in that shuffling drumbeat, those lush synths, or those ambiguous lyrics about war? Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. By the time you come to a conclusion, you may find yourself completely captivated, mindlessly singing that refrain over and over and over and over and over… Or maybe you’ll hear it on a bank commercial and linger by the television a little longer. Hell, it’s a song so well-written that it serves pubs, football arenas, and Targets across the globe equally well. 

That’s an award reserved for a select few (I’m looking at you, Kenny Loggins and Toto).

Yet, it's the album tracks (half of which were released as singles) that make Songs From The Big Chair such a monumental achievement. Take “The Working Hour,” for instance—a seven-minute piece of grandiose brightness that predicts the best of late-stage Genesis but lands somewhere higher due to Orzabal’s soaring vocals. Then there’s “Mothers Talk,” a go-for-broke-hunk-of-white-boy-funk that sounds so dated that it somehow circles back to awesomeness. And I couldn’t possibly forget “I Believe,” an unexpectedly sultry jazz exercise with a subtle saxophone sound that likely gave Sting a few wet dreams.

“I think the album had a lot more depth than a lot of those other albums of that time,” Curt Smith said in 2020. “And albums of more depth tend to stick around longer.”

With each subsequent listen, I find these hidden gems stick out just as much as their more popular counterparts, a sign of an album that not only possesses an enormous staying power but flows phenomenally. This flow climaxes with a three song mini-suite that begins with “Broken,” a muscular Girogio Moroder pastiche, and ends with “Listen,” the album’s hazy, largely instrumental closer. What’s in the middle you ask?

It’s hard to select a favorite track from such a remarkable project, but my pick will always be “Head Over Heels.” Like Talking Heads on “This Must Be the Place,” “Head Over Heels” finds Orzabal and Smith in previously unexplored waters, talking of love, touch, and, to paraphrase George Harrison, all the good things we can have if we close our eyes. However, the group’s overwhelming chilliness still manages to seep through, making the song a lasting, if not entirely euphoric, romance for the usually unromantic (see: the song’s music video, which is unsurprisingly set in a library, as well as its usage in Donnie Darko, which is probably your least favorite person’s favorite movie). 

“I wanted to be with you alone,” Orzabal sings in the song’s opening verse. “And talk about the weather.”

Better hit the books, Roland. It appears women aren’t your strong suit.

Forty years later, I find myself entranced with Songs From The Big Chair in a way that defies any sense of lethargy. It’s that sound again—that unmistakable, undefinable sound—a sound far slicker than any New Order album, far more foreboding than Pet Shop Boys, and far more sincere than Simple Minds (whose hit “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” was released the same year). It’s not as horned-up as INXS and it’s not as sterile as OMD. It beats Wham! to death with a wooden bat and smears its guts on the wall. Could it be that Tears For Fears created a sound so innovative that we’re still trying to understand it today?

Yes. I really do think so. 

Even Tears For Fears struggled to figure it out. Their next album, 1989’s solid The Seeds of Love, ballooned past £1 million in production costs but didn’t feature a single as immediately captivating as anything on Songs From The Big Chair. At this point, Elias and Stanley had left the band, and Orzabal and Smith were heading toward an oft-acrimonious creative divorce. 

Perhaps it was Tears for Fears’ reformation and resurgence in the twenty-first century that contributed to the lasting cultural impact of Songs From The Big Chair. This influence can be seen in countless covers by countless artists—from Weezer to Lorde, it seems every musician wants to rule the world. The album also makes frequent appearances on decade-end and all-time album lists, and every time I close my laptop, I’m greeted by the “Shout” single cover in sticker form. When two guys from Bath, now in their mid-60s, attract more monthly listeners on Spotify in 2025 than Troye Sivan, Daft Punk, and Paramore, you know they’ve struck a chord. That chord is a huge one, and chances are it was played on a Fairlight synthesizer by a man with a mullet and a somber British accent.

Songs From The Big Chair is a timeless ‘80s classic, plain and simple. You probably already love it, so find the biggest speaker you can and let ‘er rip. 

“All for freedom and for pleasure,” Curt Smith sings in “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” “Nothing ever lasts forever.” 

Thankfully, good music does.