Tears for Fears - Change
The back end of the two-day anniversary fest concerns a monster debut album and its aftermath, still being felt 40-something years later.
It's an age old question, what are the most towering 1st LPs, where a band or artist just arrived on the scene and crushed the public from their first recorded chord?
For me, these guys are most unusual, in that their initial album arguably saved my life, whilst their second one -- released just 18 months later -- is the equivalent of Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip to my ears.
In fact, the gap between those two records is, in my world, as wide as any I can think of, and as true a testimony as any to what happens when the suits decide who will be The Next Big Thing.
The first Tears for Fears album is not just as colossal a debut as any on wax, it's also in the conversation for Greatest Concept Album of ever, with the subject matter being the most sensitive possible: the effects and results of child abuse.
Full disclosure: when The Hurting dropped at the start of 1983, I was in a catastrophic adolescent spiral of depression that was, in no small measure, the result of having been badly beaten up by an abusive parent.
This was in the 11th grade, when the only things between me and teen suicide were my friend who had the locker next to me -- one of life's true cultural adepts whom I still talk to and think is tremendous to this day -- and this wild, iconic radio station we both loved called WLIR-FM in Garden City, Long Island.
We weren't the only ones who worshiped at the altar of WLIR... there's a whole cult around it to this day and a great documentary that gets into what made it the force it was at the dawn of the 1980s.
One of the things that distinguished it was the fact that they'd send people over to the UK to locate and snap up 12" records of new bands hot off the presses, and slap them into rotation on the airwaves before anyone else in the US heard them.
So when the first TFF 12s came out, they were on the radio in my Fortress Of Teenage Despair the next morning, pretty much. Once I got the whole album, it kind of took over my musical life and was really instrumental in me making it through that year.
When their 2nd one came out and proceeded to take over the entirety of global culture, I had just graduated high school and the huge hits on it -- that infernal Shout song is playing somewhere, right now, irritating me from 1000s of miles away -- sounded like sugarcoated, confectionized shadowplays on what they'd gotten into on the first one.
Gone, or receded into the background, were the jazzier, more indeterminately Proggy chords and the raw, primal screaming emotions filtered through the complexities of the tense, third rail subject matter of The Hurting. They were to be replaced by the classic, mid-Eighties click-track paradigm, featuring more straightforwardly major key sequences and candy-coated, Big Chair choruses in cloying contrast to the lyrical themes, which IMO became simplified and overstreamlined by the record company dudes eager to makes these cats the billion sellers they wanted to help them Rule The World.
Anyway, enough of my pissant opinionizing... here is the audio from the Rockpalast on German TV these guys did in the Spring of '83, 42 years ago today, where they play the whole 1st record, the non-LP B-side and alternate takes of the two big singles current at the time.
Tears for Fears
Rockpalast
Sartory-Säle
Köln, Germany
5.12.1983
01 Rockpalast introduction
02 Memories Fade
03 The Way You Are
04 Suffer the Children
05 Pale Shelter
06 The Prisoner
07 Ideas As Opiates
08 The Hurting
09 Mad World
10 Watch Me Bleed
11 Change
12 Start of the Breakdown
13 Mad World II
14 Pale Shelter II
Total time: 1:03:57
Roland Orzabal - guitar & vocals
Curt Smith - bass & vocals
Ian Stanley - keyboards
Manny Elias - drums & percussion
David Lord - keyboards
1536/48k mono PCM audio, extracted from a PAL DVD of a master VHS of a 1994 WDR rebroadcast
converted to 16/44 CD Audio, demuxed, edited, repaired, remuxed & remastered by EN, May 2025
365 MB FLAC/direct link
This mainly circulates videologically from a crappy VHS capture of the original broadcast, with the requisite screechy, substandard audio as well, but because I'm always scouring Soulseek for upgrade goodness, I was able to score someone's master VHS dub of the 1994 rebroadcast, with that delicious PCM Audio we all know and love. I even subtly boosted the singing in spots, using the happy AI stem splitter in Audacity, for the moments in this thing where Roland and Curt -- in the usual effort young folks make to look charismatic and rockstar sexy for the cameras -- drifted area codes away from their vocal microphones. So this is as good as this thing is gonna likely sound until we get the much-needed official release on that cool WDR label the German broadcast service has to put out all the myriad, indispensable episodes of Rockpalast in all their remastered, original master tape glory.
That should be all The Hurting anyone can handle for an hour. I shall return soon, but do enjoy this unbelievable anniversary concert from the dawn of this most beloved band, guaranteed to provide a Rosetta Stone blueprint for their eventual Mad World domination that followed.--J.