Happy Monday!
Today we’ve got Curt Smith from Tears For Fears to get your week rolling. It’s a lovely chat, and Curt also sent us a nice picture of him and his dog. You can go and read it in just a jiffy once we’ve finished this intro bit that I laboured over for way too long.
Today’s edition is a freebie but the best things are not free, that was a lie, it was fake news before fake news was even a thing, the best things in life cost £5 a month they are a subscription to The New Cue that mean you get the Wednesday and Friday editions too. That’s the truth right there!
OK, intro bit over, enjoy the edition and we’ll see you on Wednesday…
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Curt Smith
Next month, Tears For Fears will release their new album The Tipping Point. It’s Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal’s first record in 17 years but a lack of new material over the past almost-two decades has hardly done their standing any harm. If anything, the duo who emerged from Bath in the early 80s and became huge with a string of emotive, new wave pop anthems are as influential and well-thought of as they’ve ever been. In recent years, their songs have been covered by artists such as Lorde and Foals, sampled by Kanye, Drake and The Weeknd and you can also hear echoes of their luminous pop sound in songs by The 1975, Arcade Fire and more.
The Tipping Point is the result of years of stop-starts between the pair, an album that finally got on track when they ditched trying to work with hip young producers and sat in a room together playing acoustic guitars. Alongside reflective, stripped-down folk-pop, there’s synth-y stomps too, the themes taking in personal loss alongside topical ruminations. It’s worth the wait. Last month, Niall hopped on Zoom with Curt, who lives in Los Angeles, to hear all about what The Tipping Point’s tipping point was and what his favourite Tears For Fears cover is. Above is a picture Curt sent us with his dog Ivy, hey guys!
Hey Curt, how’s your morning been?
I’m in sunny Los Angeles. This morning has primarily been me talking to my sick daughter in New York who has the flu, thankfully not Covid. And I went running. That was it. That was my morning.
What’s your normal running route, same every time or do you mix it up?
No, it’s normally the same route. I do a circle from where my house is. I’m up in the Hollywood Hills, so it’s sort of round Mulholland Drive and back.
Any PBs today?
I’m past the stage of timing anything. When you get to 60, you’re not going to beat any personal best. Or maybe you could start a new personal best each year. Otherwise, it’s going to go downhill.
That’s also relevant to how long it’s taken Tears For Fears to make a new record, isn’t it?
Exactly. Basically it’s, ‘what can we do that might be good this year?!’.
This album was a long time in the making. How did you feel when you got to the end of it?
Oh, great. I mean, it was a relief. The biggest takeaway was that I really like it and that I thought was never going to happen. I thought it was going to be a point where I either would have to walk away because I wasn’t liking it - and not in a stamp your feet way, just if I didn’t like it, then don’t be involved, that’s an option - and I thought we were never going to get to the stage where both of us agreed on it. The fact that we came out with an album that both of us really like is great and a relief, as I say, after years of thinking ‘this is never going to happen’.
What was the turning point?
Well, I think the main turning point would have been us stepping away from the recordings we’d done and spending time away from it. I’d already voiced my dislike of it and the fact that I didn’t like it, so I kind of left it there and we toured again and we didn’t really discuss it that much more. Then eventually, Roland came to the same realisation after spending time away from it and listening to it again that he didn’t particularly like it either. And so then we plotted a path forward, we sat down and discussed what bits we did like about it, and that was primarily which songs we liked more than the recordings necessarily. We could agree on five tracks, so we had half an album and once we’d worked out that we’ve got half an album we can work with, it was ‘Where do we go from here?’. We started with this whole speed dating process of going in with the producer or songwriter du jour and seeing what would come and attempt to make a modern record. That didn’t work so it was, ‘let’s do the opposite, let’s get together just me and you with a couple of acoustic guitars and see what comes’. And that’s what we did. No Small Thing, the first track on the album, came from that, which as you can tell starts with the acoustic guitar. Then we slowly found a path forward from there to try and build an album that actually had a story and had an arc to it and a flow to it as opposed to an attempt to have 10 songs that were attempting to be a modern hit single.
Can you give me an insight into what this parallel universe new Tears For Fears record sounded like that you didn’t agree with?
The only way to describe it is that if you listen to the actual album now, there’s a track called My Demons on it, which I like because it has its place and fits exactly where it is and is different is slightly different to all the other tracks. It’s very electronic and it’s very in your face, very bombastic and brash, which works perfectly where it is. If you can imagine 10 versions of that back-to-back but the songs weren’t quite as good. That’s what we had.
Is it an emotional thing when you two get in a room together and realise you still have that songwriting alchemy after all these years?
Yeah. I mean, it’s a weird one because what we do together is not stuff that we would do on our own so it’s strange and it takes a while to appreciate the strengths of each other because we’re in a very peculiar situation where we are a duo. We’re a band of two people but we’re two frontman and with that comes a certain amount of ego involved. There aren’t really any other people like that. Normally, each person has a set job and we don’t. So that makes it slightly more difficult for us to agree on things because we’re both incredibly opinionated and both think we’re right. Always. To get to the point of us both agreeing on something takes a while.
Have you discovered what the solution is?
Weirdly, it’s actually easier as you get older, because with that comes a certain calmness and an appreciation for what other people bring. Calming down helps. I think it’s much harder when you’re that opinionated and have that big an ego for it to work when you’re younger. As we all know, younger people are really not very good at saying “I’m wrong”, as we weren’t when we were that age, we were incredibly opinionated and weren’t shy to share it, then you kind of look back and then go, ‘Woo, that was nonsense.’
What’s the silliest bust-up you’ve ever had?
Well, most of them are silly, to be honest, because they’re all basically involved in a pissing match. That’s normally what it is. Some of them last longer than others. But I think that the way we’ve chosen the other people we work with is important. And it’s interesting that the people that we end up successfully working with are people that understand and appreciate the strengths in both of us. So now, that would be Charlton Pettus. But also on this album, we worked with another guy called Sacha Skarbek, who was the same, he got where both perspectives came from and tried to forge a path in the middle somewhere. Charlton tries to do the same, Chris Hughes in our early days would do the same kind of thing. So it was trying to find that balance between the two of us, having someone to help with that is definitely beneficial. But I think we’re better at it now than we used to be. I mean, I think we appreciate what each other bring to the party, so to speak.
Was it strange that whilst you had all these travails making this record, you were also doing these triumphant tours and a new generation of bands were bigging you up? From the outside, it’s felt like you’re massively on the up again.
Yeah, it’s fascinating, but these things happen that you can be out of fashion and suddenly people are sampling you and covering you and then you’re kind of hip again. But this is what happens if you stay alive and stay around long enough, you will come back into fashion at some point! And clearly we might be on that sort of wave now, hopefully it continues for a little bit.
Was there a point at which you realised, ‘oh my god, we’re influencing loads of new artists’?
What’s interesting is not just that we’re influencing other bands that are younger and other musicians that are younger, but it’s their influences on our audience. Our audience has become a mixture of people our age and younger people now, because of the bands that cite us as an influence that have gone and listened to our music. The first time I realised that was we played this festival called Bonnaroo in America, which is primarily for younger people. It was about three or four years ago and we were sort of on the stage where maybe more, as they say, ‘legacy’ or ‘heritage’ acts would play and normally that would involve a few thousand people coming and listening to you. But the place was packed and they had to open up the back and it was about 10,000 people. What was interesting was the whole front of the audience were all younger, they were all 18 to 30 I would say, they were much younger and they were all singing every lyric to the songs from The Hurting, which was never big in America. You know, it was kind of known in LA and New York because of two big radio stations but in America it didn’t really do much. It was fascinating to watch. Then I realised 1/ it’s other bands’ influence because they’ve told this audience about us or talked to this audience about us and 2/ of course, it makes sense - we were that age when we wrote that record so they identify with the lyrical content, they identify with what we were talking about. Now what’s really gratifying is now our audience is far more mixed.
I remember watching a video on YouTube of you playing at Rock In Rio and there’s a really youthful excitement about it.
Yeah, that was crazy. And if you ever go online and look up Tears for Fears live in Manila, in the Philippines, it’s fascinating because you won’t hear us play. You’ll just hear an audience sing every lyric.
What did you learn about yourself in the course of making the new record?
For me personally, it’s that life’s too short to be doing things you don’t feel passionate about or feel an affinity to. The music we ended up doing in these speed dating sessions and the recordings we did were nothing that I felt an affinity to. I just didn’t feel it was me, I felt it was dishonest. Finding out that at least you still have that passion is a great thing. We could have just made that record and went ‘fuck it’ and put it out and a certain amount people would would accept anyway just because it’s us. But I wouldn’t like it. I found it gratifying that I still have that passion, that I really want to do something that I think is really good.
What’s been the hardest moment for you in Tears For Fears?
Oh, the hardest time was me leaving the first time probably. I mean, it wasn’t hard, it was something I had to do but it wasn’t an easy decision. The fact that we are two people and two quite different people means the nature of the beast is compromise. And that’s never that easy to do but we’ve become better at it. But the hardest would have been anytime I’ve felt that I’ve had to step away from it. The first time leaving, and the second, and this time going through this recording and sitting down with Roland at one point and saying “I can’t be involved with this record”. That was a difficult dinner, it wasn’t particularly pleasant!
Did you do it over the starter or dessert?
Haha, no, it was during. It was a grown-up conversation. Unfortunately, in black and white when it’s put down ‘you were thinking of leaving at this point’, that’s not the entirety of the conversation, because it sounds like someone stomping their feet and going, ‘that’s it, I’m going!’ It wasn’t that, it was a musical disagreement, where at that point Roland was enjoying what we were doing and I wasn’t, and it wasn’t me saying ‘you’ve got to listen to me, it was me saying, “if this is what you want to do, I can’t be involved in it because I don’t like it”‘.
Once you were on a creative roll again, what did you find yourself writing about?
The newer songs are obviously written after Roland’s wife passed away. A lot of the earlier ones are not, they were during Caroline’s illness, or even prior to that couple of them. In the end, it was more influenced by Caroline’s passing, politics here and in the UK, there were so many things going on, the #metoo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, the pandemic, if you can’t find material there, you’re never gonna find material.
When you think back to the early days of you two writing together, what are the first things that come into your head?
It’s that they were primarily conversations. It was talking about stuff and then a song would come from it. So we’d be talking about the inanity of people going to work and then Mad World would happen, people on the sort of work treadmill that we were looking at out of the window of Roland’s flat at the time. So it was always conversational more than anything.
To finish off, what’s your three favourite covers of Tears For Fears songs?
Wow, that’s a difficult one. I guess my favourite is the Lorde version of Everybody Wants To Rule The World because it’s so dark. It’s interesting to me because with that, and actually with Gary Jules and Michael Andrews’ version of Mad World, weirdly their recordings are actually more in tune with the lyrics than our versions are. Normally what happens with us is we have dark lyrics with actually quite bright pop songs or they’re more up tempo. So their versions were more in tune with the lyrics. The other ones are really more kind of like samples. It’s always gratifying when someone uses a sample from The Hurting which, as I said, in America wasn’t big yet the samples from The Hurting were what Kanye picked, were what Drake picked and these are young modern artists in a different musical genre than us picking samples from a 1983 record by two young white boys. So in that sense, I find that very interesting and gratifying.
Have you ever had it where someone has assumed that you were doing a cover of Mad World or anything and it wasn’t your song?
Oh yeah, well worse is that it was my kids’ nanny who came to see us play live because she was looking after the kids. She came to see us play live just outside of LA. We played Memories Fade and it was one of the first times we’d reintroduced it back into the set and she came up to me literally afterwards said “you did that version of the Kanye song, that’s fantastic!” And I’m like, “actually...”!
Haha! Curt, thanks so much for your time.
You’re very welcome, good talking to you.
ND
Tears For Fears’ new album The Tipping Point is released on 25th February and they tour the UK in July. Head here for details.
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