Prog Curt Smith has a framed picture of on his bathroom wall. It’s not just any old photo. The occasion is April 30, 1981, in the confines of Bath’s Moles club, where a fresh iteration of the band – tentatively called Discipline – is returning to the stage for the first time in seven years.
Bassist dominates the foreground, while the 19-year-old Smith stands directly in front of him, utterly transfixed. “A friend of mine got Tony Levin to send that picture to me,” explains Smith, who went on to form with Roland Orzabal later in ’81. “Apparently, Tony used to have this side-stage camera that he’d take pictures with during a gig, using a footswitch.
So it’s taken from slightly behind him, with me watching him play a Chapman stick. In the picture I’m like, ‘What is that?’” To the uninitiated, it may come as a surprise to discover that Tears For Fears are big prog fans. After all, they became synonymous with the new breed of British synthpop with 1983 debut, , before conquering the rest of the 80s with platinum-selling monsters and .
But there was always something much deeper going on. was a concept album about childhood dysfunction and trauma, with allusions to Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy – dark themes cloaked in mainstream pop. The title track was an inventive mini-suite, while songs like boasted the forceful complexity of the best prog.
Even King Crimson veteran Mel Collins popped up on sax. And while 1985’s yielded the mega-hits and .