In June 2009, TIME paid tribute to the 20 key world events of 1989 which had collectively characterized it as “one of those years that the world shifted on its pivot”. The events - the death of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the student protests of Tiananmen Square, the dissolution of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall - punctuated the end of a tumultuous decade. The early years of the 1980s had already threatened to overwhelm, with events such as the formal recognition of AIDS (1981) and the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands (1982) setting the tone for the years to come. Environmental issues surged into public consciousness with the discovery of a hole in the ozone layer in 9185 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. And yet, this was also an era of great promise. The Japanese economic miracle was still going strong, The Space Shuttle Columbia was launched, commercial cell phones, the Mac and Microsoft were introduced. The internet would go global at the end of the decade.
Michael Jackson and Madonna may have conquered the headlines throughout the decade, but it is English pop rock duo Tears for Fears’ (Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith) music that appears to truly capture the emotional upheaval of the era. As Pitchfork’s Tal Rosenberg argued in a recent reappraisal of their classic sophomore album Songs From the Big Chair (1985), it served as the “the one sound of pop-rock in the ’80s [italics added]”.
I did not grow up in the 80s, but their songs made it easy to slip into the emotional realities of the era. They were grand, urgent, raw, deeply felt, but also catchy and easy to sing along to: “Shout. Shout. Let it all out/These are the things I can do without.” When Gary Jules and Michael Andrews released a popular cover version of “Mad World” for Donnie Darko in 2002, they introduced a new musical approach towards teenage angst into my world. Instead of the Linkin Park’s destructive rage or Avril Lavigne’s solipsistic agonies, here was a vision of individual insecurities confronting the sociopolitical anxieties of the day. Intense lyrical introspection bled into anthemic confrontations of the status quo; the gap between the personal and the political bridged with accessible sophistication. The iconic and often-covered “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” has individual ambitions for power poetically come up against the various headlining issues of the decade.
Last month, the Bath duo released "I Love You But I'm Lost”, their first new song in 13 years. It was also one of the two new tracks that Orzabal and Smith have recorded for a their greatest hits collection (Rule the World, 10 November 2017). The upbeat and grandiose track plays to their strengths, once again deftly marrying personal and political tumult with stadium-sized melancholia: ‘From a flame to the spark of an ember/ To a fire on the 5th of November/ We are straight from the light/ Now we count the dots/ I love you but I'm lost/ I love you but I'm lost’. (November 5 is a reference to England’s Guy Fawkes Day, a landmark foiled attempt by Catholic terrorists to assassinate the Protestant King James I).
When the track premiered on NME, Orzabal explained that how it straddled the fine line between possession and loss: “This song is about the haziness, the blurred lines within a relationship, the sense of having someone and losing someone in the same instant; like putting your arms around that person only for them to instantly disappear into vapours, the idea or ideal of someone who is impossible to pin down or own.” The song elegant parsing of how we fail to grasp our elusive ideals as individuals (‘These are the reasons why your life is not quite what it was’) and a society seems to be slightly out of sync with these postmodern, dystopian times - but it is also a welcomed nostalgic detour into the more momentous perils and potentialities of a recent era.
