Tears For Fears’ ‘Songs From The Big Chair’ Set For 35th Anniversary Reissue

Spring 2020 sees the 35th anniversary of Tears For Fears’ iconic ten million-selling album Songs From The Big Chair.

The 35th celebrations will include the broadcast of a ‘Classic Album’ documentary on BBC 4 on 14 February at 9.30pm featuring all-new interviews with the band and people who worked on the record, in addition to the 13 March release of a limited picture disc version of the album and a reissue of the much sought after super deluxe 4CD/2DVD boxset edition (which currently changes hands for hundreds of pounds) through UMC/Virgin. The long deleted super deluxe edition of the band’s debut album The Hurting will also be reissued.

Songs From The Big Chair was Tears For Fears’ second album and spawned classic worldwide hit songs such as the US #1 singles ‘Everybody Wants To Rule the World’ and ‘Shout’ as well as ‘Head over Heels’ and ‘Mother’s Talk’.

Upon its first release, Songs From The Big Chair spent 30 weeks in the UK top ten-album chart; a whole year in the top 30 and only left the charts 18 months later. The story was very much the same all over the world, the album spent five weeks at No.1 in the US, and much like the UK, it was in the Billboard Chart for 18 months.

Looking back at the album, Roland Orzabal commented, “Pop music was still a growth industry. It hadn’t sort of stagnated, stalled, diversified into streaming like it is nowadays. We were young, we were both good-looking and we had the right music. As we move further and further from that decade and you keep hearing ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World’, in various forms I do think it is an era-defining album”.

Curt Smith “You would never normally get three songs that strong in an album. But balance that out with tracks like ‘Listen’, ‘The Working Hour’; all those things that give it air and give it time to breathe I think is what makes it something more than just the sum of its parts. I think the album had a lot more depth than a lot of those other albums of that time. And albums of more depth tend to stick around longer”.

The new ‘Classic Album’ documentary, to be broadcast on BBC 4 on 14 February, sees band members Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith speaking openly about that period of their career along with new interview with producer Chris Hughes, engineer Dave Bascombe, musician Ian Stanley, artist John Grant and the band’s then A&R man Dave Bates. This all-new documentary will be followed by another chance to see the band’s BBC Radio 2 In Concert from 2017.

The album is being made available for the first time as a limited edition picture disc, and due to overwhelming demand; the super deluxe version will be reissued. The 4CD/2DVD box set features a multitude of remixes, live tracks, BBC sessions, B-sides, previously unreleased tracks and 5.1 surround sound and stereo mixes of the album mixed by four-time Grammy nominee, Steven Wilson.

Songs From The Big Chair is out on 13 March and can be bought here.

Format: UK English