Tears For Fears: In the name of love

Last week Mat Smith heard how Tears For Fears had grown out of the trivial
pretty-boy pop market and discovered a social and political conscience in
the process, why they hate Stock, Aitken and Waterman and their
apprehensions on re-entering the pop-business after a four year absence.
This week Roland Orzabal talks us through "The Seeds of Love" - an LP which
took four years and three different producers to create and which is finally
released by Phonogram on august 25. Pics: Tom Sheehan.

"We've expanded our horizons considerably since the release of the last
record. We've both read a lot of different things and expanded our quest for
knowledge. I think, deep down, we both think that knowledge is the one thing
that is gonna save this planet."

Sitting alone in the hotel suite, his partner departed for a weekend in
Scotland with the remark -"I'll think of you"- (I bet!)- Roland Orzabal
leans back into the sofa, hands clasped tight around a bare knee and pauses
for thought in the way that a schoolmaster, deciding how to educate, rather
than indoctrinate, a persistantly disobedient child, might.

Roland is very much the thoughtful half of Tears For Fears. He reads
voraciously, and anything he hasn't yet devoured he questions you on
relentlessly. He exhibits a thirst for knowledge that goes beyond the
excepted rock 'n' roller's self-aggrandising, pretentious desire to impress.

A lot of it comes out in the songs, but much of the reasoning behind his
lyrics could never be picked up on without explanation. He realises this and
accordingly jumps at the chance to explain himself.

Woman In Chains:

"The song is an anthem for the women's movement, if a man can write such a
thing. It comes from a sadness in a way. I was reading some feminist
literature at the time and I discovered that there are societies in the
world still in existence today that are non patriarchal. They don't have the
man at the top and the women at the bottom. They're matricentric -they have
the woman at the centre and these societies are a lot less violent, a lot
less greedy and there's generally less animosity.

Ambition is viewed with suspicion in these cultures. If anybody wants loads
of anything they are looked upon as odd.

But the song is also about how men traditionally play down the feminine side
of their characters and how both men and women suffer for it. I think that a
lot of the spiritual side of men and man's soul are seen as feminine
qualities. I think it's sad cos we miss out.

I think men in a patriarchal society are sold down the river a bit -okay,
maybe we're told we've got more chances and we're told that we're in control
but there are also a hell of a lot things that we miss out on, which women
are allowed to be. Women are allowed to be more emotional, more sensitive
and receptive and I think it's a bit of a bum job!

The finger is often pointed at men for keeping women down but it's not only
men who keep women down, sometimes it's women themselves. I sometimes wonder
who's in charge."

Badman's Song:

"We were on tour in America and we'd just played Denver Red Rocks, where U2
did their 'Under A Blood Red Sky' video. We went back to the hotel. Now,
generally we book a party room where everyone piles off to do whatever they
do. And it just so happened that night that the party room was next to mine.
About three in the morning I couldn't sleep because of the noise and I was
getting really f***ed off. I was gonna ring 'em up and tell 'em to shut up.
So just to make sure it was that room - cos I didn't want to hassle anyone
who might not be involved - I put my ear to the wall and heard f***ing
Roland this, f***ing Roland that. Basically it was certain members of the
crew bitching about the band with our management.

They were pouring out their hearts. It had been a difficult tour, with loads
of pressures, but this was incredible. All this stuff that I had no idea
about was coming out in torrents - that's what it means in the song when I
sing - 'Here's to the boys back in 628 where an ear to the wall was a twist
of fate.'

It was a strange interface for me cos I'd always thought I had a quite
developed superego and that I was very conscious of the effect I had on
people if I was doing something weird, malevolent and subversive. But in
this case I wasn't aware at all.

Anyway, the next day we travelled to Oklahoma and I went off to get my hair
cut. And as I was sitting in the barber's chair this chorus came to me. 'In
my head there's a mirror when I've been bad, I've been wrong/Food for the
saints that are quick to judge me/Hope for a badman/This is the badman's
song.' Cos I'd certainly been a good figure for everybody's projection.

I sang it at the soundcheck for the next day's show and one of the roadies
came up to me and said - 'Wow, what a great song, I really like the words!'
And I thought, you should do, you helped me write it!

I think by that point in the tour I was too stressed to be hurt by what I'd
heard them saying. To be hurt you have to be open and I wasn't open so it
hit me on a subconscious level. In some ways I was a little bit amused.

Basically in the song I was trying to defend myself. That's why there's that
line - 'Once in a while when I feel no shame I get down on my knees and I
pray for rain'. When I feel guiltless I pray for something to bring it back
on cos there's almost a fear of being free from guilt.

I'm not Christian. I was brought up an agnostic, but my father, who brought
me up agnostic and actually stopped me going to religious instruction at
school cos he didn't want me indoctrinated, spent six weeks in bed before I
was born cos he thought he was God. His initials are actually G.O.D. and he
was born on December 25."

Sowing The Seeds Of Love:

"I wouldn't take the credit for this one. A lot of it came and I just picked
up on it and tried to assemble it the best I could. Basically I just
unscrambled it for everybody else.

For instance, here's an example. "I love a sunflower", right? "I love a
sunflower" is a piece of graffiti on a wall near my home. I see it every
day. I didn't know what to sing on a guide vocal for the track so I sang
that instead of "dada dada dada". Then all of a sudden, "Sowing The Seeds"
is just about to come out and the Ecology Party do really well in the
Euro-elections and their emblem is the sunflower. I didn't know that, it all
seems to be fitting in now. These things are synchronous.

When I wrote "Shout" there were four or five other songs around with "shout"
in the title and I thought, 'F***ing hell! What's going on?' I do let things
take me over when I'm writing. It comes from a part of my brain which is
more connected with the ether. It's a beautiful feeling. It's almost
womb-like -a feeling of being contained and of being incredibly fluid.

I do believe there's a greater scheme of things. That's why I'm into
psychological astrology. It's a blending of mainly Jungian psychology with
astrology and it's absolutely fascinating. Astrology has an awful lot to
give to psychology. I could go on for days when I talk about the spiritual
world and the oceanic realm of the imagination and being one with the
universe, but astrology brings it down to one word, and the word is Neptune.
This one word is the symbol for books and books and books.

People say "Seeds" is a naive song but I don't have any problem with
naivety. People, especially in England, have a tremendous problem with
vision and creativity because it's intangible and because they may not
themselves be able to materialise their vision, to earth their vision. So I
don't have a problem with naivety or the archetype of love because from
writing to recording, I'm turning the intangible into the tangible. So if
something's naive and full of hope, then if you can make it happen it's fair
enough.

People have a problem with faith and they have that problem cos they've been
let down so many times and they've grown very pessimistic of anything that
smacks of that kind of promise.

That's why people slammed the door on the Sixties, cos it didn't fulfill
everything that it promised. But I don't see it in those terms. For me, any
society or system is naturally repressive. It has a structure and it keeps
itself together. Now, I think that everybody would agree that society needs
to open up. It's a good thing to grow and for consciousness to develop. So,
every now and again, if a system is too repressive something has to break.
China was a beautiful example of the power of peaceful demonstration. I
mean, bloody 'ell, if that didn't remind me of the Sixties I don't know what
would. It's just sad that the powers above reacted in such an appallingly
evil way."

Advice For The Young At Heart:

"There are a few Martin Fryisms in there! "I could be happy, I could be
quite naive/It's only me and my shadow, happy in our make believe."

It's actually a reference to Jung's shadow theory. The shadow is a part of
your psyche which you can't bear -an aspect of yourself that you hate and
which gets locked off in a part of the brain which forms the shadow. What
happens is that the shadow is projected so if you meet somebody you really
don't like, it's generally cos they've got the traits that you can't bear in
yourself.

The song expresses a desire to grow up and get things together -to let go of
the past. I think it's just an awareness of getting older, that's what it
stems from. And also an awareness that certain aspects of you aren't getting
older.

Sometimes we tend to wall off an event that happened years ago and keep it
inside us. What it is, in effect is that there's a part of you that's
left...back there. It's like time travel.

It's almost as if a part of you didn't leave the time of that event and as
you get older it starts to become a problem because, in one sense, you're
moving further and further away from it but you may need those aspects of
yourself which are still locked away. When you unlock them, you gain back
some of what you've lost but you lose other things. So it's very much a
death and a birth situation."

Standing On The Corner Of The Third World:

"Let me explain this. It's another example of what I was saying earlier -the
thing about womb-like containment, the oceanic realm of the imagination and
picking up things in a subconscious manner. There's a line that goes -"Man,
I never slept so hard, I never dreamt so well/Dreaming I was safe in
life/Like mussels in a shell."

The vibe is one of containment and safety and peace and solitude. "Rolling
and controlling all the basements and the backroads of our lives", is a
reference to how you get rid of all the shit and the dirt of life -it's
swept under the carpet, or, at the very least, out of sight.

I think music is still cathartic for me. Certainly it's got me from A to B.
It's been a friend. But what I've done in this case is use the Third World
as a symbol for everybody's dumping ground. It's a place that's barren,
without life and full of abuse and exploitation. The line, "Standing on the
corner of the Third World" brings to me this feeling of containment, yet,
just in the background you're slightly reminded that there's this massive
grey and barren area that needs attention.

As people, we tend to project elements of our own conflict on to global
situations -it may be a pet love or pet hate. It might be the Third World,
or apartheid or the ecology. All these things reflect conflicts within
ourselves. People don't tend to look inside themselves because it's simply
far easier to look outward. You tend to think that by changing the external,
the internal will change as well. Sometimes it does work like that. Many
people's lives revolve around doing that but, quite often, they're only
righting problems that are internal."

Swords And Knives:

"Nicky Holland and I originally wrote this for Alex Cox's "Sid 'N' Nancy"
film. I was inspired to write it after reading Deborah Spungen's book about
Nancy -"And I Don't Want To Live This Life". In the book her mother draws an
analogy between the syringe marks in her baby's heels when she was born and
the track marks on her arm just before she died.

Nancy was born with the cord around her neck, she was ABO incompatible with
her mother and she was jaundiced. I mean she really came out screaming. It's
not surprising what happened, there was so much pain she just couldn't
handle it.

The vibe is -"When life begins with needles and pins, it ends with swords
and knives". There's also an analogy there with Sid -"Oh danger man, oh
danger man, your blade fits like a glove"- the knife as the phallus. You
could say that Sid and Nancy's love was very Plutonian -it was on a life and
death level.

In the end they rejected the song, simply because it wasn't punk enough. I
think that was a real shame."

Year Of The Knife:

"This is gonna be difficult to explain. For me, it was the hardest song to
record cos it's so fast, yet it's supposed to be soulful.

I think it comes from my childhood more than anything. There comes a point
in your life when everything is turned upside down and everything becomes
like a life and death struggle even though it isn't. In a way it's about how
rejection can feel like you've been stabbed - 'See the mountains
crumble/Feel the fire grow cold/Summer will turn to winter/Love will turn to
stone.'

Some people are born with conflicts which are dying to get out and I think
your childhood often mirrors this into an uncanny degree. Don't ask me how
but it does. That's really the point. This is where you get into the
subjective view which is how you actually experienced it.

I don't think I had a particularly difficult childhood, but I have come to
terms with it more and more through astrology. It teaches you that different
people have different energies.

If you're a certain way, say an energetic or a powerful character, or
slightly different and individualistic from the word go, then, obviously,
that's how you'll experience things - you can't experience them in any other
way. You could have the gentlest of childhoods but you may experience it as
one hell of a violent struggle."

Famous Last Words:

"At the start of it you can hear someone in the background saying -"Okay.
Let's take five minutes." We put that in, obviously because the album didn't
take five minutes!

The song was inspired by a book called "The Fate Of The Earth" by Jonathan
Schell. I read it in 1986 when people were still a bit worried about the
arms race -this was before the reduction, that's meant that now everyone can
worry about ecology. In the book he talks about the facts of the arms race
and how many mega-tons we've got to blow up the earth. He talks about what
would happen on a small scale and what would happen on a large scale.

In the book he makes the point that even if we did get rid of all the
nuclear weapons, we can never get rid of the knowledge of how to build them.
This made me relax.

So I wrote the song which is a scenario for a couple of lovers who have one
night left before the bomb goes off. And they decide that instead of
panicking they're just gonna stay in the real life situation for one last
refrain. They light a fire -"I will decay, melt in your arms", they put on
an album by the band that made them cry, Tears For Fears! -they listen to
the album and then...BLAM!

At the end of the song there's a line that goes "We will carry war no more",
cos once everything has gone there will be no more war, no more destruction.

I look at these things philosophically. It's a standpoint that many people
find hard to take. Man is egocentric, he thinks that he can destroy the
world but we are only one species, we're not all life on this planet, who's
to say that we're the most valuable species?

When I wrote the song I didn't want to sing it. I wanted to get Tom Waits or
Robbie Robertson -someone with a gravelly voice. I always felt uncomfortable
singing it. I couldn't leave it alone enough. Cos you have to leave it alone
and let it speak and I always tend to URGH! when I'm singing.

But I'm glad I eventually mastered it. I'd do one take, then go away for an
hour, then come back and do another, then go away again and so on. I had to
keep really calm and not interfere with it.

But the song is also about making the record as well, especially the middle
bit -"All our love and all of our pain will be but a tune". It's about
everything you do, everything we've been talking about for hours and hours.
In the end it's a tune. That's it. It's something you can't hold, something
you can't touch. It's all of your experiences, everything you've ever seen,
everything you've ever heard, everyone you've loved, tasted, smelt, cried
over. In the end it's all gone. It's disparate. What you've done and
experienced has added to the world and one generation, but in a tangible
sense, it's gone."