Pod Insights Song Exploder Tears for Fears - Everybody Wants to Rule the World About this episode Tears for Fears is a duo formed in 1981 in Bath, England by Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith. They’ve sold over 30 million albums, starting with their first, The Hurting, which went to number one in the UK. But it was their second album, Songs from the Big Chair, that made them international stars. It came out in 1985, and had huge singles like “Shout” and "Head Over Heels.” But their biggest hit is “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” It won Best Single at the BRIT Awards in 1986, and it’s been streamed over 2 billion times. So I talked to the two of them about how they, along with their producer Chris Hughes and keyboard player Ian Stanley, made a song that would help define the sound of the 80s.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Hrishikesh Hirway? You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.
0:11 Hrishikesh Hirway? I'm going to be on tour, playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18. I'm going to be performing solo at Roughtrade Records on Denmark Street, and I'm going to be in conversation about my music moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carry. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast US. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net/live. That's songexploder.net/live.
0:55 Hrishikesh Hirway? This episode is sponsored by LinkedIn. Anyone who's ever had to spend money on marketing knows how tricky it can be to feel like you've spent that money wisely. Well, with LinkedIn Ads, you can be sure that you'll get a great return on your investment. You can target your campaigns by company, industry, job title, and more. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com/songexploder. That's linkedin.com/songexploder. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is sponsored by the podcast, What It's Like to Be. Do you ever think about what other people's workdays look like?
1:38 Hrishikesh Hirway? Satisfying some of that curiosity is the idea at the heart of bestselling author Dan Heath's podcast, which is called What It's Like to Be. In each episode, Dan interviews someone from a different profession to find out what it's like to be a professional Santa Claus, or a Secret Service agent, or a long-haul truck driver, or an aerospace engineer at NASA, just to name a few examples. The show gives you an insider view into all kinds of jobs from a wide range of industries, answering questions like, what do mail carriers learn about us from our mail? There are so many jobs out there that exist only as titles in our imagination, if they even register that much. This show is a chance to reach beyond what you know or think you know. If you're curious to learn more about
2:23 Hrishikesh Hirway? the work lives of other people, check out What It's Like to Be, wherever you get podcasts. This episode contains explicit language.
2:34 Hrishikesh Hirway? Tears for Fears is a duo formed in 1981 in Bath, England, by Roland Orzabal and Kurt Smith.
2:42 Hrishikesh Hirway? They've sold over 30 million albums, starting with their first, The Hurting, which went to number one in the UK. But it was their second album, Songs From The Big Chair, that made them international stars. It came out in 1985 and had huge singles like Shout and Head Over Heels. But their biggest hit is Everybody Wants To Rule The World. It won Best Single at the Brit Awards in 1986, and it's been streamed over 2 billion times. So I talked to the two of them about how they, along with their producer Chris Hughes and keyboard player Ian Stanley, made a song that would help define the sound of the 80s.
3:32 Speaker 01 I am Roland Orzabal.
3:34 Speaker 02 And I am Kurt Smith.
3:37 Hrishikesh Hirway? Before we get into the song, I was wondering if you two could tell the story of how you first met and started a band.
3:43 Speaker 02 Well, we first met at the door of my apartment flat in Bath.
3:47 Speaker 01 Snow Hill, yeah.
3:48 Speaker 02 In Snow Hill, which is a council estate. So I guess in America you call them the projects. And I was grounded for getting in a fight.
3:56 Hrishikesh Hirway? How old were you?
3:58 Speaker 02 14, maybe.
3:58 Speaker 01 14.
3:59 Speaker 02 14, I think. Roland came with a mutual friend. He was at a different school than I was in Bath.
4:05 Speaker 01 When I met Kurt, I thought, well, as he said, he was grounded. And I thought, who the hell is this hooligan? You know, so I was a little bit wary of him, while at the same time, kind of fascinated. Same as now, really.
4:20 Speaker 01 I was in a kind of really bad heavy metal band and I was wanted to be sort of Jimmy Page. I couldn't, I would never saw myself as a singer. And with Kurt, I remember being in a different apartment. And he was singing along to Last Days of May, Blue Oyster Cult. And he was unashamed. He was into the music and he wore his heart on his sleeve. I thought, you know, this was obvious to me Kurt should become a lead singer of our band. So yeah, that's how we first started the musical relationship.
5:01 Speaker 02 It was at that point in time that sort of opposites attract. I definitely was a troublemaker. He was, you know, good at school and straight A's and all that kind of stuff. But there was some mutual attraction.
5:15 Hrishikesh Hirway? When you two first started, was that band called Tears for Fears?
5:19 Speaker 01 No, no, no. We don't really want to talk about the names of the band we were in.
5:26 Speaker 02 They were pretty bad names.
5:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, they were pretty bad. And so we're best left to posterity.
5:34 Speaker 02 And it also came at a time when, you know, we were, I guess we were 18 then. We'd moved away from the sort of hard rock stuff listening to, we were getting into production. So we're listening to Peter Gabriel and bands that actually really made quite gloriously produced records. And suddenly we were like, that's the kind of thing we want to be doing or aiming for. We want to aim to be that good.
6:01 Hrishikesh Hirway? I think it's an interesting part of the band dynamic to bring up because it's not enough just to really be good together musically or even, you know, get along well. It's also really important to have a similar level of ambition.
6:16 Speaker 01 Well, here's the point about getting on really well, because I would argue, or I would suggest that if you get on really well, that's not a good thing, that there has to be an element of tension, there has to be fundamentally a different approach and disagreement at the heart of it. Now, you may learn over decades, which we have, to completely get on, but fundamentally, there has to be the grit in the oyster around which the pearl is formed.
6:47 Speaker 02 You know, without question, we have learned to deal with each other over the years, and it's become easier for us, without question. But we have musically very different tastes. Where Tears for Fears comes from is the middle ground between what we like individually.
7:07 Hrishikesh Hirway? As you were getting ready to work on this song, what was going on in your lives as a band?
7:12 Speaker 01 Well, we'd already been successful, probably beyond our wildest dreams. With the first album, The Hurting, we had three top five singles in Britain. We were in the teen magazines, we were on the same Top of the Pops, I Believe, as culture club in those days. But while this was all going on, we have this terrible sort of perfectionist slash progressive instinct.
7:43 Speaker 02 The record company were desperate for us to follow up what was a very successful album. But we were more concerned about doing something that's maybe different.
7:53 Speaker 01 So we were already at this house in Bath, the Big House, owned by Ian Stanley, and we were experimenting. We often experimented doing B-sides, no one cared. Okay, and they were great fun. So we experimented, we did this song very quickly called The Way You Are. And now that should have been a B-side.
8:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:12 Speaker 01 But the record company said to us, no, this is your next single. It was a kind of strange song, not written from the heart. And it only got to number twenty four. So like, whoa, what's going on?
8:26 Speaker 02 And the way you are, you know, for all its faults and it and it does, because it's really bad, I think. But it did teach us that that's not good enough. And so it was sort of back to writing the songs more than anything else.
8:39 Speaker 01 Maybe it's time to focus more on the songwriting.
8:43 Speaker 02 Hmm.
8:43 Speaker 01 So following that, we'd recorded a song called Mother's Talk. And that became a bigger hit than The Way You Are. So after Mother's Talk, relative success. I was then given a month off to write the rest of the album. And I was working back with all kinds of things. There was a song by Simple Minds called Waterfront with its bass part. Ba bom, ba bom, ba bom, ba bom, ba bom incessant. So I just put that on the bass drum.
9:18 Speaker 02 The Lyn drum machine had just come out.
9:21 Speaker 01 There was a song called Throwing Away The Key by a soul duo called Lynx. And it had this very, very strange hi hat going.
9:35 Speaker 01 It was square against the, what we call the shuffled beat.
9:44 Speaker 01 So I put that all in and put in a cabasa to play the other beats to the hi hat. And I was playing on the acoustic guitar.
10:04 Speaker 01 I tuned the E string down to a D and there were just two chords. And the chorus was, everybody wants to go to war.
10:12 Speaker 02 Hmm.
10:13 Speaker 01 I didn't feel very good about that. This is at a time when obviously Russia and America was still had the nuclear threat. They still do. Things haven't changed.
10:23 Speaker 02 It was the height of the Cold War back then. It was Reagan era.
10:27 Speaker 01 And so I wasn't sure about the song. I had the chords, I had the climb.
10:34 Speaker 01 Everybody wants to go to war. Hmm. I didn't like it. My wife at the time, Caroline, said, no, it's really good. I was really? Okay. So I took in a bunch of songs into the studio and I played them to Kurt and Chris Hughes and Ian Stanley and Chris Hughes producing. Everybody Wants to Rule the World was never finished.
10:56 Hrishikesh Hirway? Hmm.
10:57 Speaker 01 Just had, it didn't have a middle eight or anything like that.
11:00 Hrishikesh Hirway? Kurt, do you remember hearing that unfinished version?
11:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, the feel of it was great. And I think that was the hard part of doing everybody was to make it into something more than just a track that felt great. Cause your first feeling is, you know, this is a wonderful driving song. But there are times when you're doing a project where you kind of may like a song, but it doesn't fit into what you're doing. And we were trying to do things of more depth and something bigger than that. Or we want a bigger track, which ended up being Shout, you know, like a big sounding track. So once we had Shout and once we had Head Over Heels, which is kind of bombastic. It wasn't until then that it fit in where we needed that breath of fresh air.
11:44 Hrishikesh Hirway? Were you looking for a way to try and include the song? Like after you had Head Over Heels and you had Shout, did you say, oh, now I know, now we can fit this song in?
11:53 Speaker 01 Well, no, what it was, you know, I don't think either of us were very keen on that song.
11:58 Speaker 02 No.
11:59 Speaker 01 Probably because of the title, Everybody Wants to Go to War. What the hell? You know, it's not very nice. It's not very positive. And Dave Bates, our A and R man at Phonogram, kept going on about America. We didn't care.
12:14 Hrishikesh Hirway? Going on about America in what way?
12:17 Speaker 02 The hurting was successful everywhere in the world, pretty much apart from America. I mean, it had minor success in America. So he, he, he was constantly, because his whole thing was making the band bigger.
12:28 Speaker 01 That was his job.
12:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, that was his job. I mean, we actually didn't care that much. We were sort of happy with where we were.
12:34 Hrishikesh Hirway? And so did his comments play into how you were thinking about the Everybody Wants to Go to War song?
12:41 Speaker 01 Well, as I said, it was bugging me and lyrics do, do bug me. This is where they're incredibly important, especially for titles.
12:49 Speaker 01 You get a great title. It's half the battle, really. Good beat, good title. Okay, the rest is simple. It just was one of those things that popped into my head, you know? Well, this guy is telling us what to do. He wants us to break America. He wants to rule the world. It's personal now.
13:09 Speaker 02 And that flows off the tongue. You know, everybody wants to go to war, does not. Flow off the tongue. When it became everybody wants to rule the world, suddenly it was like, that sings well.
13:24 Speaker 03 Everybody wants to rule the world.
13:32 Hrishikesh Hirway? My conversation with Tears for Fears continues after this.
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15:26 Hrishikesh Hirway? Thanks to Stio for sponsoring Song Exploder. I took a trip to Iceland this summer. And because it was the summer, I didn't really think about dressing for the cold. Even though I was hiking and I was planning on seeing some glaciers, I thought, it's August. But then I got there and I realized I made a huge mistake. Now, though, I have a Stio Hometown Hooded Jacket, and I just wished I'd gotten it before my trip. All of Stio's clothes are designed and tested in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, by locals who live, work, and ski in below-freezing temperatures. I'm headed back out into the cold this winter, but now I'll have my insulated, hooded Stio jacket. Ski season's almost here, so gear up now, the way the locals do.
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16:30 Speaker 01 Chris Hughes, our producer, went to the same school as Dave Bates, the A and R man. And he also was confident about the song. So he had us, every day, at the end of the recording session, every day, we would all sit together and we would play through the song. And that was a first.
16:52 Hrishikesh Hirway? And so did this song feel different from the others that you were working on?
16:56 Speaker 01 Well, recording can be a little bit stressful. There would be a lot of discussions, arguments. When we finally came to play Everybody Wants to Rule the World, at the end of the day, it was a relief and a release. So that's the atmosphere. You have to realize that music should be fun. And it kind of, when it is, when it is fun, it's a lot easier. We used to get bogged down in so much detail. And suddenly, we were playing. So you'd hit the drum machine and it really didn't matter what you played.
17:42 Speaker 02 Because it's so open, every part has to be really, not necessarily catchy, but something about it that draws you in and they all work against each other rhythmically. So it took a long time to find all the parts where you're like, oh yeah, that, that sounds great.
18:07 Hrishikesh Hirway? What would Chris do? Just would he play along with you or he'd just sort of take notes?
18:11 Speaker 01 He'd play some bass notes, yeah.
18:16 Speaker 01 It was wonderful.
18:19 Speaker 01 And it was a contrast to how we worked, but that's how the song was finished. It's all the little missing bits, like that crazy guitar intro.
18:39 Speaker 02 So it was a question of finding those bits and each bit had to do its little part. It's interesting to listen to it because it took so long, the keyboard bit at the very beginning to give the intro.
18:53 Speaker 02 That took a long time till that came along. You know, Roland's incredibly angular, weird chordal guitar solo in the middle.
19:20 Hrishikesh Hirway? You said there wasn't a bridge or a middle eight originally. So how did that eventually come about?
19:26 Speaker 01 Ian Stanley, our keyboard player, it's so funny because a lot of things never dawned on me. You know, Chris would say, oh, we need a middle eight. And Ian goes, okay, we'll try these chords.
19:45 Speaker 01 And they are, to be honest with you, if you analyse them, stock chords. They're pretty straightforward, G, D, A.
19:53 Speaker 01 But sometimes when obvious things are presented to you from other people, they seem more exotic.
20:14 Speaker 01 So Kurt and I were introduced to a book called The Primal Scream by Arfa Yanov. And coming from sort of, I guess, broken homes, utterly bought into this theory, they fuck you up, your mum and dad, that kind of theory. It was perfect for us to see the child as a kind of blank slate with no real soul, personality, and all the bad things that happened to him or her. From the womb onwards would create this personality, the pain and all this kind of stuff that needed to be, through primal therapy, exercised. If you think about the lyric, "There's a room where the light won't find you,
20:57 Speaker 01 holding hands while the walls come tumbling down", it's really a reference to the primal scream and the padded room where you are alone with the therapist and can pour your heart out.
21:14 Speaker 01 That is two of us, yeah.
21:15 Speaker 02 No, I'm the one that goes up.
21:17 Speaker 01 Kurt goes up and I go down.
21:23 Speaker 01 And a lot of the time, recording is tough. A lot of the time, recording is stressful and everyone's getting on each other's nerves because of the stress.
21:32 Hrishikesh Hirway? Was there anything that stressed you out or any parts that you didn't like that actually made their way into the final recording?
21:39 Speaker 01 For me, yeah. And it comes to the second verse and then there's this sound that goes
21:48 Speaker 01 and it just used to drive me mad because it was never enough. I never thought that that sound was enough, but we stuck with it.
21:57 Speaker 02 Rhythmically, what it does is great, it's not the best sound.
22:00 Speaker 01 No.
22:04 Hrishikesh Hirway? Can you tell me about this other guitar solo?
22:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, Neil Taylor, bit of history. Neil played with us in 1983's In My Mind's Eye Tour. So he came in to play the solo at the end of Everybody Wants to Rule the World. And it was two takes.
22:27 Speaker 02 Yep.
22:28 Speaker 01 Guys, world class.
22:29 Hrishikesh Hirway? What made you want to bring someone from outside of the band just for that moment?
22:33 Speaker 01 Well, he'd been playing with us.
22:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, he'd been playing with us. We loved his guitar playing because it has a style. I mean, he sounds like him, you know? I mean, it's hard to find those people that actually have a distinct style of their own.
22:49 Speaker 02 It's incredibly melodic.
22:56 Speaker 01 The complete opposite to my first rhythm guitar solo.
23:01 Speaker 02 And then we did actually finish and mix stuff in Germany. We went off to Germany at the end, a place called Union Studios in Munich, which is actually where we finished Everybody Wants to Rule the World.
23:11 Hrishikesh Hirway? Oh, what, besides mixing, were you finishing at that point?
23:13 Speaker 01 Well, you know, I had one night to come up with the lyric. Because again, I don't like, I was very slow with lyrics back then, incredibly slow. So I had one night to finish the lyrics. And the first verse was, "It's my own design, it's my own remorse." And Kurt went in to sing.
23:33 Speaker 03 It's my own design. It's my own remorse.
23:41 Speaker 01 And everyone's going, including Kurt, hmm, maybe it should start with "Welcome to your life."
23:47 Hrishikesh Hirway? Was that a lyric that had already been written?
23:48 Speaker 01 That was the second verse.
23:49 Speaker 02 The verses got switched.
23:51 Speaker 03 Welcome to your life.
23:55 Hrishikesh Hirway? I can't imagine, so you're about to go mix the album.
23:59 Speaker 02 We haven't finished the lyric or the.
24:02 Hrishikesh Hirway? Or the vocals.
24:02 Speaker 02 Or done the vocals.
24:03 Hrishikesh Hirway? But you knew that that song was going to be on the album.
24:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
24:06 Hrishikesh Hirway? I can't imagine having so much of the song still be unfinished and going to mix.
24:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, but I think, I don't know, it's funny because Chris Hughes, the producer, was always totally confident. He never needed, oh, it's going to be finished before we go. Oh, I got to hear the lyric before I go. No, he knew fundamentally that it was right.
24:27 Hrishikesh Hirway? So Kurt, how long did it take for you to feel comfortable that you could be familiar enough with the lyrics and the melody to say, yeah, I'm ready to record this?
24:36 Speaker 01 Well, he was reading off the page, moaning my handwriting.
24:38 Hrishikesh Hirway? You didn't think, oh, I need three weeks with this song before I go to put it on tape?
24:44 Speaker 02 I'm not that singer. No, I mean, you, you get it pretty quickly or you don't. I mean, I think the thing is, if it has an overall emotion, then it becomes pretty simple. And, and you know, with the title and the opening line then being what it was, it became more of a kind of, a bit more of a joyous song, even though it was not really joyous lyrically.
25:06 Speaker 03 So glad we've almost made it. So sad they had to fade it.
25:15 Speaker 02 There's a lyric in it, so sad they had to fade it, which was, you know, directly from Dave Bates's influence because we had Shout as a single and he was adamant we had to shave how many seconds off?
25:26 Speaker 01 Shout was eight minutes long. We knew that was long for a single. And he wanted to edit it down to three and a half or five minutes. And, and we said, no, absolutely. And so in the end, he said, all right, well, I'm just going to take three seconds off. So he took three seconds off. And it was, yeah, it was Dave fading, Shout, three seconds early.
25:46 Hrishikesh Hirway? As your A and R guy, when you were working on this song and writing those lyrics, did he know that that's what you were writing about?
25:54 Speaker 01 No.
25:54 Speaker 02 At the time, no.
25:55 Speaker 01 No, he does now. He's a great guy, you know, he's.
25:59 Speaker 02 No, we had definitely.
26:00 Speaker 01 Wouldn't be anywhere without him.
26:01 Speaker 02 No, without question.
26:12 Hrishikesh Hirway? Were you already thinking about singles the way the label had been thinking about singles?
26:16 Speaker 02 We were, yeah, we had disagreements about that. Well, because "Shout" was released as the first single everywhere else in the world, apart from America. And America, you know, decided they wanted to release Everybody Wants to Roll the World first, and we disagreed on this occasion, which is very rare. We were wrong.
26:34 Speaker 02 And they seemed to be correct.
26:36 Hrishikesh Hirway? Was there a moment where it felt like you realized this song was going to change your life?
26:42 Speaker 01 We were actually in Toronto. We were on tour. We were playing multiple nights at Massey Hall. And I remember sort of having early mornings, seven o'clock in the morning. I had a headache, a migraine or something like that. And I think Kurt was asleep.
26:57 Speaker 02 I was.
26:57 Speaker 01 Our manager called me and in jubilant tones announced, "Congratulations, you're number one in America." And I was like, "Well, I've got a migraine and right now I don't really care." Because of the workload, that's what it was.
27:14 Speaker 02 Because we were on tour, I know it became so huge in America so quickly. The workload was unbelievable. I remember it as not a particularly enjoyable time at all.
27:25 Hrishikesh Hirway? Did your feelings for the song change over time?
27:27 Speaker 01 My response to it now, every time I hear it on the radio, I just think, "Wow, that's amazing. Absolutely amazing."
27:32 Speaker 02 Well, I'm playing it live as a jury, you know, because we used to open with the song, use it as the first song on the set. And you'd have a, say, arena full of people that are just sitting there kind of waiting and anticipating what you're going to play. And then the first doo doo doo doo, and then guitar part comes in. And, you know, it's a few notes of music. It's all it is. Changes the mood of up to 100,000 people.
27:57 Speaker 02 And that's the power of music that never ceases to astound me.
28:19 Hrishikesh Hirway? And now, here's "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears, in its entirety.
30:04 Speaker 03 Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down When they do, I'll be right behind you So glad we've almost faded So sad they had to fade it Everybody wants to rule the world
30:31 Speaker 03 Welcome to your life. There's no turning back. Even while we sleep, we will find you. Acting on your best behavior. Turn your back on mother nature. Everybody wants to rule the world.
31:11 Speaker 03 It's my own design.
31:12 Speaker 03 I can't stand this indecision It's my own remorse.
31:16 Speaker 03 Memories with a lack of vision
31:20 Speaker 03 Help me to decide.
31:21 Speaker 03 Everybody wants to rule the world
31:24 Speaker 03 Help me make the most of freedom
31:25 Speaker 03 Say that you never, never, never, never needed
31:28 Speaker 03 and our pleasure.
31:30 Speaker 03 What have I, why believe it?
31:31 Speaker 03 Nothing ever lasts forever.
31:34 Speaker 03 Everybody wants to rule the world
31:35 Speaker 03 Everybody wants to rule the world. There's a room where the light won't find you.
31:46 Speaker 03 All for freedom and for pleasure Nothing ever lasts forever Everybody wants to rule the world
32:36 Hrishikesh Hirway? To learn more, visit songexploder.net. You'll find links to buy or stream Everybody Wants to Rule the World, and you can watch the music video. This episode was produced by me, Mary Dolan, Craig Ely, and Kathleen Smith, with production assistance from Tiger Biscuit. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, you can sign up for my newsletter. You can find it on the Song Exploder website. You can also follow me and Song Exploder on Instagram. And if you want to support the podcast in another way,
33:20 Hrishikesh Hirway? you can get a t-shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Thanks for listening.
33:30 Speaker 03 Radiotopia. From PRX.
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