A shuffle that almost died of its lyric
Two bright chords on an acoustic guitar, a shuffle that should belong to a lighter band, and Curt Smith’s voice comes in as if the sunshine were a cover for a colder sentence.
Everybody Wants to Rule the World was written by Roland Orzabal, Ian Stanley and producer Chris Hughes for Songs from the Big Chair, released in 1985. Orzabal arrived with two chords and a title he disliked, Everybody Wants to Go to War, a Cold War shrug he knew was wrong. His wife Caroline liked the music. He did not like the words, and a song whose writer rejects the lyric, he has said, dies. Hughes would not let it die. At the end of sessions he made them spend an hour on it, again and again, until Orzabal found the guitar figure and changed war to rule. Smith sings it. The shuffle, alien to the square pulse of Shout, was built from rhythms they had been feeding a LinnDrum, cousins of Simple Minds’ Waterfront. Hughes programmed the bones on a little sequencer and watched the track almost mix itself.
The single reached No. 1 in America and No. 2 in Britain, the summer song of a band that had been thought severe. Smith has said the themes are serious, power, warfare, the misery of it, dressed as a drive with the windows down. That dress is the production’s genius. Nothing on Songs from the Big Chair is this light, and the lightness is what lets the line about ruling the world into a car without a lecture. Orzabal, who had not wanted it, ended up with the guitar hook people hum when they cannot remember the verse. Hughes called the recording, as history, bland as hell, and meant it as praise. It was too quick to overwork.
It was originally called Everybody Wants to Go to War, which I knew didn’t work. When you’re a songwriter who doesn’t like the lyric, the song dies.
(Roland Orzabal, Classic Pop)
Live, Smith still sings it, and the room treats it as weather, welcome, expected, a little sentimental. The guitar figure, high and chiming, is the part that photographs. Under it the lyric has not softened. Everybody wants to rule. The song does not exempt the singer, or the listener in the convertible. Tears for Fears spent the album talking about primal screams and control. This track is the one that put the diagnosis on the radio between adverts, and it worked because the shuffle smiles. A sermon at this tempo would have failed. A hook with a knife in it did not.
What remains is the corrected title. Go to war was too on the nose, a pamphlet. Rule the world is the same fear wearing a melody you can whistle, which is more dangerous and more honest. Hughes’s hour at the end of the day, the boring persistence of a producer, saved a song the writer had nearly buried. Smith’s voice, lighter than Orzabal’s, is the right messenger. He sounds as if he is enjoying the afternoon and telling you the truth about it. Both are in the record. The sun is real. So is the line.
