Tears for Fears The Hurting

30 years after they appeared with their debut album, what do Tears for Fears mean to people? Do they mean anything to anyone under the age of 30? Did they influence anyone? I've read several articles or blogs where they are described as 'ambulance chasers' who got the hits that other artists should never had.

I've never taken that line myself. Maybe because I wasn't particularly aware what was going on in the period they were at their peak, I can just take the music. I remember seeing the video for Sowing the Seeds of Love when I was 8 years old and thinking it was great; and when I was a stroppy teenager, their music seemed to fit the way I felt.

Guitarist/singer Roland Orzabel and bassist/singer Curt Smith had initially appeared in the late 1970s as part of five piece mod revival band Graduate, whose main achievements were doing pretty well in Spain and a single called Elvis Should Play Ska that had a little pop at the E of Costello variety. They became frustrated, tired of the group format, and elected to go it alone as a duo, opting for the name Tears for Fears after buying into Arthur Janov's ideas of Primal Therapy in a big way.

Local musician Ian Stanley offered to help Smith and Orzabel by giving them use of his studio; he would eventually go on to become a quasi-full member of the band alongside drummer Manny Elias. Signing a singles deal with Phonogram Records (because they wanted to share a label with the Teardrop Explodes, according to Julian Cope) the band's first two releases, Suffer the Children and Pale Shelter, produced by David Lord and Mike Howlett respectively, went nowhere.

While in 2013 this tends to mean you're on your arse, their A&R instead kept faith and the band released Mad World in September 1982, the first fruits of working with producers Ross Callum and Chris Hughes, the latter having made his name as one of the two drummers in Adam and the Ants. A brooding synth-pop number, it still seems surprising that a song with a chorus pay-off of "the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had" managed to be such a huge hit. But it was, making #3, helped or hindered by an odd video that saw Smith looking sulky by a window while Orzabel did a strange dance reminiscent of Ian Curtis on downers.

From there, it was success all the way. The Hurting topped the album charts and follow-up singles Change and Pale Shelter made the top 10 too. After the blip of The Way You Are, a mediocre single that did nobody any favours, the band would fly off into the stratosphere when their second album Songs From The Big Chair sold around six million in the US alone. There then followed the nasty break-up after third album The Seeds of Love and the reunion that brought the criminally underrated Everybody Loves a Happy Ending.

All of which is mainly irrelevant to this article: The Hurting has been reissued to mark the 30 years since it was set out into the world. As is the way with such things, there are another two CDs of various add-ons, bonuses, live tracks and suchlike, plus a DVD of a live show. One question these expansive reissues always raise is does anyone really need them? Does anyone bar the most hardcore fan need four versions of Suffer the Children? But they're all here and to these ears there's nothing revolutionary different about the various versions - perhaps a consequence of having a sound built around drum machines and sequencers. Still, the DVD of what was released on VHS as 'My Mind's Eye' is a nice little capsule of the band between their first two albums - atrocious haircuts and all.

The album itself remains as it always was: a mix of synth-pop and young man's angst. Joy Division without the unhappy ending, perhaps. It was written entirely by Orzabel, whose childhood appears to be have been defined by a father who was emotionally distant due to numerous psychological issues. Pale Shelter and Start of the Breakdown would appear to be the key tracks in this respect, with Orzabel lamenting that "you don't give me love... you give me cold hands" and "Is this the start of the breakdown? I can't understand you..."

Naturally, the sound itself is easily pinpointed as being from the early 80s, especially the clank of electronic drums, though bass and guitars appear on most tracks - Smith in particular plays a blinding bassline on Start of the Breakdown. And despite the odd lyrical clunker (I've never liked the opening line from the title track of 'could a person be so mean as to laugh and laugh?') that can be excused by youth, it's still to the writer's credit that such lyrical topics fit in well with the more mainstream musical structures. The Prisoner (not referencing the TV show, at least directly) offers a more experimental side of the band, coming straight after Change, perhaps the most straight-forward 'pop' number on the album.

It could have been the band's image that left them out in the cold for so long - Orzabel's dancing, Smith's dubious haircuts - not to mention that they were from Bath, rather than London or Manchester. It may have been Donnie Darko that made them gain hip status again - both the film's use of Head Over Heels and the cover of Mad World that topped the UK charts. Further nods came from the hit American show Psych, whose main character (and the actor who plays him) is a huge fan. Smith would eventually appear in the show as himself. Pale Shelter has also featured on the soundtracks to the video games Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Sleeping Dogs. Chuck in Kanye West pretty much lifting Memories Fade from The Hurting wholesale for his song Coldest Winter and the hat-tips have added up. Smith and Orzabel still tour frequently, but no new material has been forthcoming for the past part of a decade now, bar a recent free download of their take on Arcade Fire's Ready to Start.

The Hurting deserves whatever new attention comes its way from this reissue. Though the whole package may only be for the obsessives, or those with cash to spare, the album alone is easily available for all people who need more music to listen to in a dark room whilst depressed - hey, it happens to us all - or just synth-pop fans in general. The band would go to bigger things throughout the rest of the 1980s, but the album stands as a great example of how to infiltrate the mainstream with something more than a little off-kilter.