The Tipping Point has a really interesting backstory. I was curious about your previous management, the co-writing, and how that threw everything askew for you two.
Yeah, I guess there were a couple of false starts. I always write songs. I do it all the time. They're not always what I would consider Tears For Fears songs. The initial thrust was that we would try and do something that had the sparseness and honesty of The Hurting. But, again, that's easy to say if you're not in the grip of some belief system – which is what we were when we made The Hurting, with Arthur Janov's psychology and philosophy. We wrote a few songs in England. We also had another bit of a false start, making a bit more – shall we say – "bombastic" music. Think Queen. We jokingly called the album Tears For Fears, The Musical. That was the point at which our manager, Gary Gersh at the time, came in. We were working with Charlton Pettus, who is our guitarist, co-songwriter, and co-producer; he's been with the band for many years now. We'd made Everybody Loves a Happy Ending with him in his studio in L.A. Gary came in, and we had about four songs on the go, none of which have made it onto this album. It was a very pleasant meeting, and Charlton's wife made a lovely lunch. At some point afterwards, Gary said to us, "You're not going to get a good record made with that guy in that studio."
Wow.
I mean, based on the material we played him, he had a point. So, we started off on this journey. At the time, Gary was listening to Sohn [Christopher Michael Taylor]. Very contemporary at the time; absolutely beautiful album [Tremors]. The first thing he said was, "Why don't you do some tracks with him?" That started a whole procedure. At least Sohn tried to come up with very original material. We did a couple of tracks with him. Then we did what we call the "speed dating" writing, with modern hit songwriters. As opposed to not modern hit songwriters? It was all a bit strange. This process took years. I was working in a studio with a collective group; sometimes four or five people, sometimes even more. They're bringing in what are called top-line guys nowadays.
Melodies and all.
I'm thinking, "Well, what am I then? What am I supposed to be doing here, if I'm not doing the top-line?" I don't mean to sound arrogant, but here I am working with guys who aren't as successful as me.
Well, you've written some pretty iconic melodies!
Exactly. It's all quite strange. I also am one of these people who can come up with ideas very quickly when I'm in that slightly meditative state; where I'm opening a part of the brain up to the ether, as we say. I can do that. Also, I can just riff. I can come up with gobbledygook. I am not self-conscious at all. A lot of it is noise, a lot of it is crazy, and a lot of it is dark, like David Bowie. But that's not how we got the new Tears For Fears album. We got it in the usual way, by a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. A lot of banging our heads against a brick wall. There's nothing much spontaneous about the new album.
Did you have to take a break, scrap this other way of working, and then reconvene?
Well, no. We actually finished an album. We had 12 tracks in 2016. We had been signed to Warner Bros. Our manager Gary decided that that wasn't the right place to be, so he approached Universal, who have our back catalog. They had this plan, which is exactly what they'd done with Jeff Lynne [Tape Op #92], and it worked. They took two of the songs ["Stay" and "I Love You but I'm Lost"] and put out a greatest hits with the two new songs [Rule the World: The Greatest Hits]. Once that got in the charts, they would come out with our new album. In the process, Universal managed to get the two tracks off us for Greatest Hits and then didn't sign the album.
Oh, no.
That was a management/lawyer fuck-up, okay? Having said that, it worked in our favour long term, because when we removed the two tracks from the Greatest Hits, we looked at the album, and Curt specifically didn't like it. It's not surprising, because that songwriting process, where everyone is shouting out ideas, didn't suit Curt. Curt is more studied. He'll sit in a room and won't say anything until afterwards.
Right.
In order for us to make a balanced Tears For Fears album, we scrapped half of what we had. We kept the songs that we agreed on, the songs which we felt were absolutely vital, and then we started again. I got together with Curt at the beginning of 2020, before the pandemic was announced. Curt wasn't into it. He wasn't into being in Tears For Fears. He didn't need to be in Tears For Fears and didn't need the money. Fair enough. So, for the first time in many, many decades, we sat down together at his house in L.A. with two acoustic guitars and an iPhone, recording, and came up with a song called "No Small Thing." That was the point at which Curt became interested again. He sprang to life. Then "Rivers of Mercy," "Master Plan," and "Break The Man" all came afterwards. We ended up going full circle, working with Charlton Pettus in his studio.
He ended up co-producing and mixing a lot of the album.
I did a lot of recording at my home in England, and I was sending it off to Curt to listen to. It all came together. What's beautiful about working with Charlton is that he's an incredible interpreter and moderator. He understands what I'm talking about, all the detailed aspects of recording. He also understands what Curt talks about; all the big picture elements not being correct sonically or sounds not being emotive enough. It works really well. I think getting together with Curt and actually making music again was the cure for everything.
You've described the Tears For Fears recording process as being insular. It sounds as if you were trying something very non-insular before this.
Well, nowadays people have got [Apple's] GarageBand or Logic Pro on their laptops. They have [Antares] Auto-Tune, and all these little boxes. They can plug in a decent microphone. As long as they've got soundproofing in a room, they can make a record in a bedroom. We couldn't do that back in the day. We had 12-foot-long mixing consoles and seven-foot-tall computers that had less computational power than laptops. I feel very privileged to have started recording on analogue tape machines, plus getting to follow through the birth of digital to what we have now.
When you guys started, it was some of the earliest samplers. I assume the Fairlight CMI. It was a new process of recording, especially on The Hurting.
Oh, yeah. It was an incredibly exciting time. We were kids and very much in the right place at the right time. If you think about every time a new keyboard would come out… I remember the [Yamaha] DX7. I remember the first [E-mu] Emulator, which was 8-bit. I wrote most of Songs from the Big Chair on a [Sequential Circuits] Prophet-5 and a [Linn Electronics] LinnDrum, the LM-2. It was having access to those instruments that gave birth to the music. We wouldn't have done it otherwise. I remember when the DX7 came around, you saw the presets being used on virtually every hit song at the time. The 8-bit sampling gave it a specific sound, which translates onto every speaker because it's not hi-fi. It's limited amounts of information.
Definitely.
