BY MIKE METTLER — JANUARY 14, 2015

TEARS FOR FEARS 2

Glass Ceiling: Smith (left) and Orzabal contemplate their next mix.

“Once we had dipped our toe in the water, it set us on a course to have a much bigger, much more robust, and not-so-introspective sound.” Roland Orzabal is describing the veritable aural sea change he and his Tears for Fears creative partner and bandmate Curt Smith underwent while recording Songs From the Big Chair, the 1985 followup to 1982’s The Hurting, their highly influential minimalist electronic-music confessional debut platform. Indeed, Big Chair sported a much more massive sound field in comparison, propelling deeply layered and inherently catchy songs like “Shout,” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” “Mothers Talk,” and “Head Over Heels” into international earwigs. No sophomore slumpers here, as Big Chair went on to sell over 5 million copies in the U.S. alone.

In celebration of the album’s 30th anniversary, Mercury/Universal has released a six-disc Big Chair box set that includes scores of demos, alternate takes, live sessions, and a documentary DVD, but the no-contest audiophile grail is Disc 5, a Blu-ray containing the 96-kHz/24-bit surround-sound mix of the original album done by none other than the super-guru of 5.1 himself, Steven Wilson. “I love this mix,” says Smith. “You get a far greater spectrum of sound, and the low end is definitely improved.”

I recently got on the horn across the Pond with Orzabal and Smith, both 53, to discuss the benefits of listening to Big Chair in high-res, what they’d like to do next in 96/24 and 5.1 (hint: the Seeds have been planted), and to analyze their favorite-sounding albums. Funny how time flies.

TEARS FOR FEARS _ SONGS FROM THE BIG CHAIR

Mike Mettler: So I’ve been immersing myself in my Big Chair here for a while now, and —

Roland Orzabal: What, your literal big chair? You’re sitting in a big chair, or do you mean the album?

Mettler: (laughs) Well, actually it’s both, since I have a nice big leather chair here, and that’s the only way to do it. Besides, Sybil told us about her big chair on that one B-side of yours [“The Big Chair”], so I figured we gotta follow suit, right?

Orzabal: Yes, exactly right. (chuckles)

Mettler: Well, I’d say it’s pretty impressive to compile such a big box set for this album. Did you ever think 30-odd years ago that you’d have an album that has such reverence toward it?

Orzabal: Uh, no. Not really. It’s been one of those nice surprises. I didn’t realize at the time that it would become iconic. And I think we were very, very lucky with its commercial success. I also think the whole package worked really well. I mean, the cover — black and white, very simple, and the title, Songs From the Big Chair. What did it mean? Yeah, it’s been a pleasant surprise.

Curt Smith: It seems strange that it was that long ago, but then I don’t realize how old I am.

Mettler: To me, the best thing is being able to hear Big Chair in a high-res surround-sound mix by Steven Wilson, which just gives the original deeply layered mix an added dimension.

Orzabal: Yeah, he’s amazing. He had to create the new mixes before we put it into 5.1, and after he sent them to me, it was like, “Wow!”

Smith: Yeah, he did a fantastic job.

TEARS FOR FEARS _ SONGS FROM THE BIG CHAIR DELUXE BOX ARRAY

Mettler: How did Steven get involved in the process? Who approached who?

Orzabal: It was the record company. He’s done a few for them, and he’s quite well known as being one of the best. And he’s a Tears for Fears fan, so that all made sense.

Smith: We had heard of him, obviously. The record company had suggested some people, but he was at the top of the list. And listening to his work helped. We all basically chatted over the phone — Steven, Roland, and me — and everything he said pushed the right buttons.

Mettler: Big Chair is in 96/24, and in 2013, The Hurting was also released that way on Blu-ray in the High Fidelity Pure Audio format, though only as a stereo mix. Do you think high-res 5.1 is the best way to hear your work?

Orzabal: Yeah, I do. I do. I think it’s really good.

Smith: I love 5.1 mixes; I have for a long time. I don’t know how practical it is other than for audiophiles — although it could be done in the car, and you’d have to fiddle with balances and things like that. But yeah, I like it.

Mettler: After having your historical content done in 96/24, does that give you the idea that when you get to the point of releasing new material, it should be done the same way?

Orzabal: That’s going to be down to the record company and the market. Failing that, we’ll have to wait 30 years. (both laugh)

Smith: We don’t really plan ahead like that. The way we make records, the production is never really that simple. They’re really quite complex when we finish with them. That said, the tracks lend themselves to mixing that way.

Mettler: Let’s get into the first track on Big Chair, “Shout.” There’s so much going on in it to begin with, especially in terms of those big drums. In high-res, you can also hear the nuances of details like the triangle you have running across the channels at the beginning and all of the other percussion, which sounds soooo good. The track just gets deeper when you listen to it that way.

Orzabal: I think it gives you a chance to see what we were doing sonically at the time. That sort of got lost in all the pomp and commercial success, the videos, and all that kind of stuff. But we were really concentrating on the sound quality. When we mixed “Shout,” we had five Lexicons digital reverbs on the desk, and it took a long, long time. (chuckles) And it was done by committee. People would argue about the smallest things, you know?

Mettler: Certainly, guitars entered this album much more than on The Hurting, which must have been a very conscious decision.

Orzabal: It’s the way the songs were turning out, especially with “Shout.” I mean, you have to put guitars on it (laughs), because the drums are so big. I remember playing around with the guitar solo. It was a little of, “You can’t be serious, Roland. You’re really going to play that?” And I said, “Yeah!” It’s not something that I would have done during The Hurting at all — it would have been against our religion!

And it just all took off from there, really. The “epic” side took over on things like “Listen,” where you’re really in Pink Floyd territory. I mean, how did we get from being a duo mucking around with synths to that kind of epic sound — all that sort of “dripping” Fairlight and the crazy vocals? It was strange, really strange! (laughs)

TEARS FOR FEARS 1

Smith: I think the best thing about “Shout” in 5.1 is the ability we had to separate things more. Given with the two speakers left and right, you could move things behind, and especially for things like you say, where percussion no longer gets lost in the track. With surround, you get a far greater spectrum of sound, and the low end is definitely improved.

Mettler: Some of the lyrics in “Shout” seem to be as relevant today as they were then. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Orzabal: Well, unfortunately, some things don’t change, do they? When I came up with the chorus, that’s all it was — a chorus. My idea was that it was very similar to John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Give Peace a Chance.” I imagined a lot of people singing the chorus, and it going around and around and around, and it was only when I took it in to the studio and played it to [keyboardist] Ian Stanley and [producer] Chris Hughes that they said, “That’s absolutely commercial, but we need a verse.” And I said, “Really??” (chuckles)

Mettler: Well, it did seem to work out. Plus, you got a bit of a “Hey Jude” thing going there on the back half of it.

Orzabal: Yeah, and we had a bit of “Hey Jude” in the video at the end.

Mettler: Even a more basic track like “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” which has its own certain sonic character — it really comes across better in surround and in high-res, wouldn’t you agree?

Orzabal: I would! That was a gift of the track. It never appealed to me when it was just in song form. I sort of programmed up the rhythm as it is, and I was just playing it on acoustic guitar. It was really Chris who said, “We’ve got to do this song.” We were stuck on the lyrics, as it was originally called “Everybody Wants to Go to War,” which was good. But at the end of every session, Chris would get us to take about a half an hour to play the song to the rhythm, and we would jam. Once we got it down, once we put it onto tape, it was the easiest track to do — which was bizarre, because it had been constantly rejected. It was difficult to make, but every time we put the faders up, it sounded great, you know?

Mettler: As the lead vocalist on that one, Curt, you’re even a bit more “naked” than usual. Sometimes singers want a lot of things around them in certain mixes. But in this case, you didn’t mind, right?

Smith: No, not at all. It’s really one of the simplest recordings we’d made. It’s great to do tracks every now and then that don’t require that much. Obviously, we spend a lot of time on production and layering, so it’s fun to sometimes do tracks that are open like that one. Once you put a few things on it, you realize it doesn’t really need that much. It’s the song that stands out.

Mettler: Once you got down to recording, one of the breakthrough Big Chair tracks was “Mothers Talk.”

Orzabal: Oh yes. “Mothers Talk” was a transitional song, in so much that it set up and broke us past The Hurting. We were under pressure from the record company to follow up with a single, so it wasn’t so much what songs you’ve got but just any song. And that was “The Way You Are,” which was almost too arty to be a commercial single. We were making it sound different with a different rhythm, and a difficult rhythm at that. It didn’t really pay off.

We then had the same approach when we started “Mothers Talk.” It was very electronic-based with no guitars, but with sampled bass and sampled drums. And the record company rejected it, quite wisely. We did it with a guy called Jeremy Green, and they got us back with Chris Hughes, who had done [rhythm programming tuned percussion, and conducting] for the first album [i.e., The Hurting]. And Chris rewrote the script, really — or tore up the script. He started editing it, beefing it up, and talked about putting guitars on it — and it was quite a strange experience. But once we had dipped our toe in the water, it set us on a course to have a much bigger, much more robust, and not-so-introspective sound.

Smith: Yeah, “Mother’s Talk” was probably the track for us that was the most difficult to do. We did it a few times, and there are different versions of it, which tells you in the end it wasn’t as synched as some of the other songs, because we had to find a way to make it feel like it’s in a pocket. It’s a track that has a lot on it, and the 5.1 mix just makes it sound a lot more open.

TFF PROMO_(7x9 @ 300)

Mettler: Do you have a particular favorite track on Big Chair?

Smith: My favorite track, I think, has to be “The Working Hour.” It was a striking track in stereo, and in 5.1, even more so.

Mettler: Oh yes, especially with the full-channel treatment of that wonderful saxophone solo by Mel Collins.

Orzabal: “The Working Hour” is my favorite, yeah. We had used sax [also by Mel Collins] very briefly on The Hurting, on “Memories Fade,” so it wasn’t completely alien. Saxophone was always part of “The Working Hour,” because of the riff. The main saxophone riff is extremely important and powerful — it’s got that sort of “crying” quality to it.

Mettler: And then you guys became King Crimson and Roxy Music, without even realizing it.

Orzabal: Exactly. And then it got worse. Then we became The Beatles and Little Feat. (both laugh) Well, maybe not worse. Maybe better.

Mettler: “The Working Hour” almost became the album’s title.

Smith: Yes. Songs From the Big Chair came from a B-side we did [the aforementioned “The Big Chair”].

Orzabal: It almost was the title of the record, but (pauses) I put my foot down. The funny thing is, we played “The Working Hour” live at The Wiltern a few months ago in L.A., and that was the first time we’d played it since 1990. Recently, we did a Spotify Landmark Session [at The Village Recorder in November 2014], and we had half a day of rehearsal to work it up. I listen to that now and I think, “Wow, how the hell did we get away without playing that one all those years?” It’s got odd notes, it’s spinning around, and it has all those key changes — it’s just great.

TEARS FOR FEARS _ THE SEEDS OF LOVE

Mettler: I vote for you keeping it in the live set. I also love having all the demos and bonus material in this box set, which really shows us what I call the Big Chair sketchpad. Could we expect something similar for the next album in your catalog, which has such an incredible level of depth to it, The Seeds of Love (1989)? Are you thinking about that already?

Orzabal: I think we know where the tapes are, so that’s a start. (MM laughs) It was recorded on an early digital machine, a a 32-track Mitsubishi digital recorder. In fact, we had two of them at one point, when we were trying to bounce about the drums. We spent years on that and months mixing it, so good luck to anyone who has to recreate it. But what is on tape does sound great.

Mettler: Well, you’ve already got a built-in mixing man in Mr. Wilson, who probably would love to get his hands on that one. Would you vote for having Steven do it in high-res?

Orzabal: Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. I think it won’t be so difficult once he’s got all the parts.

Smith: Oh, yes, absolutely! Steven should do it.

Mettler: I’ll have to let him know! So if Steven does get to do Seeds in high-res, do you see listeners getting something even more out of an album people already feel is a sonic benchmark?

Orzabal: I think so. In the early days, we started mixing to DAT, and then things still had to be cut, and it still had to end up on CD. Hopefully, it should be better.

Smith: Oh, without question, yeah. To hear the depth in the production on “Sowing the Seeds of Love” — just that one song — would be great in surround, and so would “Woman in Chains.” Most records, to me, that are perfect for surround are ones that are that layered, the ones that have so much information on them that it’s sometimes hard to mix them, and sometimes hard to get the separation. And obviously, that’s easier with surround.

Having said that, “Woman in Chains” is a bit more similar to “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” in the sense that there’s not a lot on that song, believe it or not, but I know that you would get a bunch more out of it — you’d hear more of the guitars and different things doubled and separated. It would be so great. Once you start separating them more, you get to play with them more.

Orzabal: For The Seeds of Love, we worked on six songs for years, and the last two songs written were “Sowing the Seeds of Love” and “Woman in Chains.” You can’t have the album without those songs. We’ve been working on new material on and off since April 2013. We are amassing quite a lot of songs, but we’re still in that “pursuit” stage, if you see what I’m saying. It’s not that we’ve settled on 10 tracks and we’re going to make them work, or whatever. We’re still hoping the next song and the song after might be the cornerstones, like those two were [i.e., “Seeds” and “Chains”]. I feel that we’ve been working away and working away while doing a bit of touring, which is a nice thing to do since that rubs off on you. So yeah, I’ve been writing here in England, and I’ve got a couple of new things. Progress is being made, yeah.

Mettler: The more layered the better, I say. You guys cut so many tracks per song — did you feel like you had to make some compromises for the original vinyl mix of Big Chair?

Orzabal: There were lots of things we had to be mindful about. One thing was obviously getting it to vinyl. But in our heyday, we still had to mix for mono radio.

Mettler: Oh, right, radio was only mono in the UK at the time.

Orzabal: And if you’re only listening to an okay pair of speakers for stereo, or at times you were listening to something monotone and tiny, it just didn’t level sometimes. It was kind of heartbreaking.

TEARS FOR FEARS _ READY BOY & GIRLS

Mettler: Do you still have an affinity for vinyl?

Orzabal: Yeah. Well, for instance, vinyl’s got, what’s the word — it seems to be quite special these days. To actually hold something in your hands. And there’s so much free music, we did that EP of cover versions last year [Ready Boy & Girls, for Record Store Day], but putting them onto vinyl made it seem real. There’s a change in sound quality. It’s nice. There may be deterioration, but it’s quite attractive. (chuckles)

Smith: I like it. I don’t have a vinyl player in the house, but I like it when I hear it. It’s more the depth to it. There’s a warmth to vinyl you don’t get anywhere else. And that was the case when CDs first came in — everyone was going on about the quality, and there was more information you could put on a CD. But it lost the warmth to me, a bit. I do love vinyl as an art form as well. I just prefer, when you’re doing the artwork, to have a large sleeve to work with.

Mettler: Yeah, I hear that. The artwork for Seeds of Love just doesn’t have the same impact at CD size, that’s for sure. And the way Big Chair was designed, there’s a certain feel to opening that one up in the vinyl format. I’m glad we were able to get a nice big 180-gram vinyl package for it.

Smith: Like I said, for me, vinyl does sound warmer, and I do prefer the packaging. I prefer to see the artwork that big, and especially when you get older, you can read the lyrics. They’re a bit too small on CDs.

Mettler: Sequencing albums became a lost art in the world of grabbing Track A and Track B, and a record like Big Chair tells a certain story in a certain order. By the time we get to “Listen,” that needs to be the last official track of the record, rather than accessed via a random play. We’ve been brought to that point.

ALICE COOPER _ WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE

Smith: I do think an album needs to tell a certain story, and I think it needs a certain ebb and flow. One of my favorite albums ever for that is [Alice Cooper’s] Welcome to My Nightmare (1975). It was the first kind of concept album I’d heard, which blew me away.

Mettler: And that maybe gave you the idea that you could tell a full story yourself on an album, as it unfolds.

Smith: Exactly. Yep.

Mettler: It seems pretty obvious that “Shout” has to be at the beginning of a side. The original eight songs on this record showcase the art of sequencing. You really needed to shift from mood to mood, something that must have been important to you specifically when this running order was presented.

Smith: When we’re pulling an album together, we don’t usually think of sequencing until we’re done. But that’s not necessarily true for Songs From the Big Chair, since, for one thing, since we already had the live transition for “Broken” to go into “Head Over Heels.” You just play around with it at the end to see what feels right. But the first track on an album, you want it to have some impact. And “Shout” seemed like an obvious one.

Orzabal: Chris Hughes was good at sequencing. It was pretty obvious we were going to start with “Shout” and end with “Listen.”

Mettler: Today, people jump around when listening to tracks digitally. Would you prefer we listen to an album in the order you gave it to us?

Orzabal: Oh, definitely. That’s the whole point. And likewise, when we play live, it’s all about the transitions.

Smith: Right, yeah. We played around with a couple of different sequences, and that one felt like the most comfortable one. Something that is musically dense really needs to be followed up with something a little more open, and with a little less information.

PETER GABRIEL _ MELT _ COVER

Mettler: Do you have any favorite-sounding albums you’d personally recommend?

Smith: Of other people, you mean? I go back to the earliest stuff, since that was the biggest influence on me. I have to go back to the first time I heard Peter Gabriel’s third album [Peter Gabriel, a.k.a. Melt, 1980]. In one year, there was Peter Gabriel’s third album, Remain in Light by the Talking Heads, and Scary Monsters by David Bowie — three amazing records, and the three albums that influenced me the most, showing me what you could do with production and how much bigger things could sound, if only you spent the time and effort.

Mettler: Any specific songs you consider examples of that in terms of percussion, guitar lines, programming…?

Smith: The first time I heard “Once in the Lifetime” was amazing. And I think my favorite track off of Peter’s album was “Biko,” just because of the depth of it. But also, the first time I heard the Frankie Goes to Hollywood record [Welcome to the Pleasuredome, 1984] — Trevor Horn’s production on that and the Yes album he did [90125, 1983] were amazing.

Mettler: When Pleasuredome came out, I listened to that on cassette on headphones endlessly, because it felt like the first side of it was one long seamless song full of different movements and transitions. So many elements that I wasn’t expecting beyond what I already liked about the radio hit, “Relax.”

Smith: The depth of that was ridiculous. Another album when it came out was the Robbie Robertson album [Robbie Robertson, 1987] — we listened to that endlessly.

Mettler: Yeah, I got to talk with Robbie about that one, the one Daniel Lanois produced, with “Somewhere Down the Crazy River” on it —

Smith: I listened to “Crazy River” on some big speakers in the studio we were recording in, and I was like, “Whoa!”

Mettler: Still one of my favorites. In terms of equipment, what do you listen to at home?

Smith: I do have a Bose 5.1 setup in my den, but a lot of the time kids are listening to stuff, so we actually also have the Sonos system. They’re great-sounding speakers, with low maintenance.

ROXY MUSIC _ AVALON

Mettler: Roland, do you have a personal favorite record, your own benchmark favorite to listen to?

Orzabal: Oh cor, there are so many … blimey, let me think. (pauses) Going back in the day, it used to be Roxy Music, Avalon (1982), mixed by Bob Clearmountain. If you wanted to really feel worthless, you would listen to the sonic quality of Avalon. (chuckles)

Mettler: True, the gauntlet is totally thrown down with that one. Coming back to wrap up with Chair, we’ve got a new generation who are now getting exposed to that album, which must be a pretty good thing.

Smith: We’ve noticed when we’ve been playing live that it’s already appealed to a second generation. Our audience these days are primarily our age, and 19-25-year-olds.

Orzabal: It’s also nice when people like Lorde completely reinvent a track [“Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire soundtrack, 2013]. I had no idea it was coming. I was approached by the publishing company. They sent me that idea. I was just blown away, really. How the hell did she think of that?

Mettler: It is a pretty stark reading. But if you’re going to cover things like that, it needs to be 180 degrees the other way.

Orzabal: Absolutely, yeah. Wow, it’s brilliant.

Mettler: Curt, how about your historical assessment of Songs From the Big Chair — did you ever think, 3 decades on, that it would have an impact that just seems to be getting bigger?

Smith: You really don’t think of that when you’re making a record, to be honest. All you can do at any given time is make the best record you can at that moment in time. And we tend to get so wrapped up in what we’re doing that we don’t really think of how it will be perceived and whether it will have a long life or a short life. That’s not what we’re thinking about when our primary concern is whether we’re making a good-sounding record or not.

Mettler: When you originally got done recording Big Chair, did you feel it was up to the sonic standard you wanted?

Smith: Oh yeah, yeah. When we started getting feedback from people we respected, our peers, we knew. I remember meeting Elton John for the first time in Europe, and he came straight up to me and said, “The first time I heard ‘Shout,” I was blown away.” It’s those kind of things where the people you respect and admire appreciate what you do that let you know it’s good.

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