‘The Hurting’: When Tears for Fears revisited their “traumatic” childhoods
The 1980s was a sharp turning point for music, a decade that stripped away the hard-edged guitars of 1970s rock to embrace a new technological future, buoyed by synthesisers and programmable drum machines.
Generally, the sound of this new era was upbeat, capturing the optimistic energy of a new booming capitalist society that revelled in the newfound prosperity of this forward-thinking new decade, but perhaps the most interesting music to come out of that era wasn’t that of blissful ignorance, rather of nuanced juxtaposition. The music that took the upbeat backdrop of electronic pop and paired it with the darker, more sinister realities of day-to-day life.
The Smiths, The Cure, and New Order all pioneered this movement, with some of the more commercial players taking their lead. Tears for Fears are perhaps the finest example of that, with their most notable hit ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World’ a cautionary tale laid on top of a catchy pop melody.
But it was their song ‘The Hurting’ that dug a little deeper into that idea, and mined trauma from their own childhoods. The song was the title track from the concept album of the same name, which mused on the writings of psychologist Arthur Janov, who was the developer of primal scream therapy.
“Curt and I were council house kids,” Tears for Fears’ Roland Orzabal said. “Not easy upbringings. There was illness with Curt’s father. Illness, and mental illness with mine, and domestic violence between him and my mother. Both middle children of three boys. We identified with Janov’s beliefs that the child is the victim, in a sense, and all the traumas of your childhood, even pre-natal, form your personality and are the cause of neurosis and depression in later life.”
Their experiences turned them onto the work of Janov, who became somewhat of a guiding light for the pair. Through his teachings, the pair discovered the power of primal scream therapy, which essentially involved participants screaming and behaving violently as a way of reliving birth and the sufferings of infancy. In fact, it was the same form of therapy that inspired John Lennon’s ‘Mother’ and ‘Working Class Hero’.
“For us, it was sort of like meeting your hero at that point of time,” Curt Smith told Consequence of Sound of Janov in 2014. “So we went out to lunch with him, and the entire lunch revolved around the fact that he would like us to write a musical about primal therapy. And that’s why it was too Hollywood for us.”
Instead, the pair settled on the album, which ended up becoming The Hurting. Showcasing the sort of shimmering instrumentation we had come to expect from Tears for Fears, it delved into a darker, more introspective compositional style and helped foreground the deeply painful narrative of this record.
The lyrics, “Could you understand a child / When he cries in pain / Could you give him all he needs / Or do you feel the same,” left little to the imagination and resulted in the song and album becoming the most personal work of the band.
