To continue the discussion from the Remain in Light review about classifying late 70s / early 80s music; are Tears for Fears post-punk, new-wave, or new romantic? Their music definitely has the downbeat sound and cryptic, tormented lyrics of post-punk but, in terms of instrumentation, it’s synth-infused rock, like New Order or a much darker version of Duran Duran, so it can surely be classed as new wave. Probably they weren’t flamboyant enough to be considered new romantic which, from what I understand, was more about visual than musical style and basically involved dressing up like a pirate on Top of the Pops.
Overall, perhaps, this flags the problem with any attempt to categorise bands according to musical genre. In my vague and nebulous historical imagination, Tears for Fears are a quintessential new wave act, an 80s synthpop duo, fileable alongside the Pet Shop Boys, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, or Erasure. And yet the actual sound of The Hurting is post-punk; synth-heavy, rather chilly rock, more reminiscent of Joy Division or Berlin-era Bowie than, say, the unadulterated synth sound of Yazoo.
Fuck knows. It’s all a bit byzantine. But anyway, as esoteric as such discussions may seem, they are interesting and important to me, because 80s synthpop is one of my very favourite genres. As a mere whippersnapper, I systematically explored the back catalogues of Depeche Mode, New Order, the Human League, and Gary Numan, amongst others. But for some reason, I never really engaged with Tears for Fears, who I long perceived as a mere singles band, purveyors of enjoyable but disposable chart music like, say, Spandau Ballet. But that just goes to show what I know or knew, because it turns out that they have a vast discography spanning four decades, that their first two records were critically acclaimed and that, most surprisingly of all, their debut album The Hurting is about madness.
Which means that, after Remain in Light, this is the second consecutive new wave album reviewed here that’s about going insane. The Hurting is a relentless engagement with the topic of mental illness, a veritable Dark Side of the Moon for the 1980s. Its songs examine, variously, child abuse, self-harm, psychotic breakdown and, I assume, primal scream therapy, judging by some of the lyrics. We might usefully divide its contents into treatments of (i) the causes of, (ii) the experience of, and (iii) the possible cure for mental illness.
By the 1980s, psychology as both an academic and as a helping discipline had largely rejected the Freudian paradigm of previous decades in favour of a mechanistic behaviourism. “Mental illness” was a matter of learned, maladaptive responses to external stimuli or, at best, to “unhelpful thoughts” engendered by “irrational thinking patterns”; the solution, learning to think rationally or to break pernicious behavioural cycles. The Hurting is manifestly not an expression of this tradition. It very explicitly roots our neurotic disturbances in traumatic childhood experiences and the emotional repression and turmoil they give rise to, and it locates a possible solution to our malaise in emotional re-experiencing and catharsis, a dramatic departure from the cerebral process of “relearning” characteristic of behaviourism.
Almost half of The Hurting’s songs, including three of its four singles, are dedicated to an examination of the formative traumas that give rise to madness in adulthood. It’s surely no coincidence that the throbbing synth-pop of “Suffer the Children” was selected as the first single, because it is arguably the most pointed articulation of the album’s central thesis that shitty parenting is the cause of adult anguish. The lush but fractious “Pale Shelter”, the album’s second single, was described by Orzabal as “a love song to one’s parents” and, unfortunately, it’s one example of where the album’s otherwise interesting leitmotif drifts into the risible whining that can be characteristic of therapy speak (why don’t you love me, wah wah wah).
Parents aren’t the only villains of the childhood drama, however. “Mad World”, the album’s third single, fingers the soul-crushing inhumanity of the post-war British education system. Apparently, and somewhat incongruously, this song was inspired by Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film”, but its lyrics are more redolent of “The Headmaster’s Ritual” or “Another Brick in the Wall”, while its chorus essays a most un-Simon Le Bon-like meditation about the best dreams being the ones in which we die. The Hurting’s Freudian postulations reach their zenith on “Memories Fade”, an unambiguous linking of contemporary symptom with historical trauma.
As well as railing against the baleful impact of neglectful parenting and harsh educational institutions on the evolving psyche of the unspoiled child, The Hurting brutally details the lived experience of adult mental illness in the present. A particularly anguished and discomfiting example is “Watch me Bleed”, a demonic synthpop number about self-harm which hints at the terrible consequences which ensue when we stoically refuse to reexperience and thus reprocess our childhood trauma. The opposite end of this manic-depressive spectrum is represented by the languid “Ideas as Opiates”, which sounds a note of defeat, exhaustion, and indifference.
Towards the end of the album, the subject matter transitions from neurotic despair to a psychotic miasma reminiscent of Remain in Light. “Prisoner” is a deranged, cacophonous, tuneless mess in which repressed childhood memories reemerge into consciousness and threaten the cohesion of the psyche. This is followed by the album’s closer and one of its highlights, “Start of the Breakdown”, a deceptively pensive and plaintive calm after the storm of “Prisoner” which is perhaps intended to conjure the resigned detachment of the heavily medicated mental health patient waking up in the clinic after their “episode” has abated.
Overall, then, this is a remarkably and perhaps unbearably oppressive body of work about human misery. And yet hope is not lost; The Hurting offers a possible solution to its vivid accounts of past neglect and present despair, in the form of a purposive program of emotional re-experiencing and catharsis. In fact, the album draws on a very particular therapeutic tradition: Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy, the kind of trendy, post-hippie approach to treating mental illness that flourished in the foothills of California after the disintegration of the 60s counterculture. Janov advocated hysterical flipping out and emoting as a way of re-experiencing childhood trauma, in order to “unfreeze” the blocked emotions which, he alleged, contrive our adult malaises. Clearly, then, we’re dealing here with a fundamentally romantic approach to psychological distress; the human being, the child, is fundamentally good and pure, until we are corrupted by a wicked civilisation and discombobulating experiences.
Did Roland Orzabal or Curt Smith ever actually undergo primal scream therapy? This I cannot divine from the available sources (i.e. a five minute google search), but The Hurting is basically a manifesto for it, most notably on the album’s self-titled opening track. “The Hurting” initially sounds remarkably chirpy, until an unexpectedly haunting middle section which declares that, if we learn to cry hysterically, then the pain of childhood trauma can be resolved. This cautious optimism is reiterated on “Change”, which initially sounds fractured and distressed, an anxious missive from Orzabal to a clearly depressed friend, but which closes with the rousing (if somewhat desperate sounding) assurance that change is possible. In essence, the whole album could be read as an exercise in emotional catharsis, an attempt by its authors to render their childhood traumas as four-minute slices of radio-friendly synth pop, which presumably carried the advantage of being both therapeutic and potentially lucrative.
Overall, the idea of white-collar workers in Thatcher’s Britain on the morning commute, singing along to a pop song about childhood trauma, is deliciously subversive. Yes, The Hurting has its problems – its central idea constitutes a simple-minded romanticisation of pure, innocent, unspoiled children being corrupted by a wicked society, a Rousseauian conceit that Orzabal has subsequently distanced himself from, now that he too has had the pleasure of being a sleep-deprived parent who didn’t much enjoy changing shit-filled nappies five times a day. And, as alluded to above, the articulation of this idea in the lyrics is sometimes clumsy and incoherent, tipping occasionally from affecting anguish into brattish whining. But no matter. It’s one of my favourite genres of music, expertly executed, focusing on a single compelling theme which is anything but typical of pop, and – crucially – without a single skippable song. Perhaps the maddest thing about The Hurting is that, at the time they wrote it, Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith were two wet-behind-the-ears twenty-year-olds from Bath, a position of obscurity and inexperience from which they were somehow able to concoct this compelling, cohesive, accessible classic of – I maintain – new wave music.
10/10
Highlights: “Pale Shelter”, “Mad World”, “Start of the Breakdown”