Tears For Fears – Shout

A front-room mantra, then half the Big Chair sessions

In late 1984, at the Wool Hall in Beckington, producer Chris Hughes came in on a Monday and asked Roland Orzabal to play a song their keyboardist Ian Stanley had heard over the weekend. Orzabal set up a small drum machine and a synthesizer, hit a bass tone, and sang the only part he had finished: shout, shout, let it all out. Hughes has called that first pass astounding. Orzabal heard an album track. Stanley heard a record that could travel, and he stayed on the song long enough to take a co-writing credit.

Mercury released Shout on 23 November 1984, the second single from Songs from the Big Chair, three months before the album. It opens on a percussive loop from an E-mu Drumulator, then the chorus, a short repeating progression that does not bother with a clever verse first. Orzabal sings lead. Under him are power chords, a heavy drum part (Hughes plays drums as well as producing), a synth-bass line, and a guitar solo long enough to feel unusual in a Tears for Fears single. The album cut runs 6 minutes 31 seconds. The UK single is 4:52. American radio got 3:59. Stanley plays Hammond organ and Prophet-5. Sandy McLelland sings backing vocals. Curt Smith is on the track, but the voice that carries the chant is Orzabal’s.

Orzabal has called it a simple song about protest. Because the band took its name from Arthur Janov’s primal therapy, listeners file the chorus under a scream. He has pushed that reading aside: the lyric is more concerned with political protest than with therapy. The track does not need you to pick a side before you sing it. That is why it still fills a room. The video, the second Tears for Fears clip directed by Nigel Dick, was filmed in late 1984 at Durdle Door on the Dorset coast and in a studio with Stanley, drummer Manny Elias, and a crowd of friends and family. MTV played it hard. With Everybody Wants to Rule the World, it is the clip that made the group readable in North America.