Tears For Fears – Mad World

Orzabal wrote it at 19, then handed over the vocal

On 20 September 1982 Mercury put out Mad World, catalogue IDEA3, as Tears for Fears’ third single. Roland Orzabal had written it at 19, in a flat above a pizza restaurant on Barton Street in Bath, near the Theatre Royal. He looked down at people on their way to work. A tinny radio was playing Duran Duran’s Girls on Film, and he tried to lift the rhythm. What came back was slower and stranger. On acoustic guitar, with his own voice, he thought it sounded bad. His voice, he has said, wants drama, enunciation, a jump into falsetto. He asked Curt Smith to sing it. Smith could sit inside the lyric instead of climbing over it. The song locked.

It had been lined up as a B-side to Pale Shelter. The label heard a single on its own. Orzabal and Smith re-recorded it with Chris Hughes, the former Adam and the Ants drummer who produced with Ross Cullum. The track was cut at Britannia Row in London and mixed at Crescent Studios in Bath and at AIR. Smith sings lead. A drum machine and a soft synth bed carry him. Orzabal’s guitar and keyboards stay low. Ian Stanley, whose house synthesizer and drum machine hosted the first demo, and drummer Manny Elias sit in the lineup that would make The Hurting. The single runs about three and a half minutes. It does not shout. It circles the same few lines until they feel inevitable.

The lyric comes off Arthur Janov’s shelf, the same primal-therapy books that named the band. “The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had” is Janov turned into a chart sentence: an intense dream as a way to let pressure out. On the album version the last chorus slips in a nonsense planet, “Halargian world.” Smith added it as a joke in the lead-vocal session. Hughes or Cullum had invented Halarge while they were recording. For years people heard “illogical world” and a pile of other guesses. Smith confirmed the real line in 2010.