TEARS FOR FEARS’ SIXTH ALBUM HERALDED A REUNION THAT’S NOW LASTED A QUARTER OF A CENTURY AND WARRANTS BELATED ACCLAIM FOR ITS SWAGGER AND CRAFT
WYNDHAM WALLACE
When Tears For Fears returned with 2022’s The Tipping Point, it’s not like it came out of the blue. This comeback represented the culmination of an increasingly triumphant, and lengthy reunion. Largely absent from the charts though they may have been – their last UK Top 10 single had been 1989’s Sowing The Seeds Of Love – they had nonetheless kept themselves active. From 2010 they’d undertaken multiple tours covering much of the world, and in 2014 there’d been a covers EP, Ready Boy & Girls?, a self-proclaimed warm-up exercise for the ultimately prolonged making of their next album. Deluxe editions of their first three long-players, as well as a B-sides compilation, had also helped raise their profile, while in 2021 they received an Ivor Novello Award for their ‘Outstanding Song Collection’.
People, in other words, weren’t so much taken aback by the release of their seventh album as impatient to hear it. Hitting No.2 in the UK and the Top 10 in the United States, The Tipping Point provided a happy ending everyone could enjoy.
But this campaign had actually begun much earlier, back in 2004, when Tears For Fears were yesterday’s news, considered symbolic of 80s pop’s excess and far from an object of feverish anticipation. That their sixth album was made at all was something in itself. During the preceding years, Curt Smith would have literally crossed the street to avoid Roland Orzabal.
It was following the legendarily exorbitant three years of sessions for 1989’s multi-platinum The Seeds Of Love, not to mention a subsequent world tour, that two, in a sense, became one. Orzabal’s exacting studio methods are said to have contributed to Smith’s departure, but the latter was also struggling with fame and the attendant demands of commercial expectations. He was in the process of divorcing his first wife, too, eager to start afresh in New York with his new partner. With Orzabal resenting the delays caused by his constant travelling, Smith consigned Tears For Fears to his former life.
To be fair, the band had also parted with their manager in 1990 – he’d be imprisoned in 2004 for defrauding investors with crushed volcanic rock masquerading as a drunkenness cure – and anyway, they’d been living out of one another’s pockets for well over a decade. Having formed their first band, Graduate, as teenagers in 1978, it was perhaps only
