Countless upgrades in scale and daring signalled Tears For Fears’ new, more progressive direction on Songs From The Big Chair. It’s also famously home to I Believe, the plush, jazz-tinged ballad Roland Orzabal dedicated to Soft Machine’s Robert Wyatt.
Even circa their 1983 debut The Hurting there was more going on beneath the bonnet than simple tags such as “synthpop” or “new wave” suggested. If you knew your prog, it was easy to draw a connecting line between the pulsing marimba pattern that opened key single Change and the same sound underpinning No Self Control, a track from 1980’s Peter Gabriel.
