March 1985, London: British duo Tears for Fears - Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith - release on Mercury Records the third single from the album Songs from the Big Chair - “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”. By April 1985 - #1 in Canada. By June - #2 in the UK. By July - #1 Billboard Hot 100 in the US, where it held for two weeks. Total sales by end of 1986 - over 7 million copies. One of the most successful British pop records of the 80s and one of the few written and recorded in under two weeks.
Who Tears for Fears were
Tears for Fears formed in Bath, England, in 1981. Orzabal and Smith - school friends, both born 1961. The name comes from Arthur Janov's 1970 book The Primal Scream, about primal therapy. In the book, Janov describes how patients relive childhood traumas through tears - “tears for fears” (tears replacing fears).
By 1985 the group had one successful album - The Hurting (1983), UK #1, with melancholic anthems “Mad World” and “Change”. The second album Songs from the Big Chair was more ambitious and more commercially targeted. But “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” itself was written at the very last moment.
How the song appeared
In January 1985 the album was almost finished - 8 tracks, mixing near the end. Producer Chris Hughes (ex-Adam and the Ants) told Orzabal: “We need something more for radio - every track on the album is too complex for mainstream”. Orzabal didn't like the framing, but he sat down and in three days wrote “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”.
“I wrote it as "commercial fluff" - that's literally what I called it. Trying to be as simple and accessible as possible. Funny thing - it became the central song of my career”, Orzabal told Q Magazine in 2004.
Recording took two weeks at Wool Hall Studios in Bath (owned by Queen guitarist Brian May). Hughes and Orzabal produced together. Mixing - four more days at AIR Studios in London. Total budget - around £40,000.
Instrumentation
- Yamaha DX7 - the main electric-piano line (E.PIANO 1 preset, the crystalline electric piano)
- Roland Jupiter-8 - pads
- Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 - chorus lead
- LinnDrum LM-1 - drum machine (the LM-1 specifically, not the LinnDrum - Hughes preferred the first model's samples)
- Live guitar - Neil Taylor (session guitarist later with Robbie Williams), Fender Stratocaster through a Marshall
- Shuffle rhythm - the key rhythmic discovery: drums don't play a straight 4/4 but a shuffle pattern (6/8 inside 4/4), producing the characteristic “rebalance” (echoing The Police - “Every Breath You Take”)
The song's “American” sound isn't the guitar - it's the LinnDrum with shuffle pattern plus finger-snap samples on top. For British Tears for Fears this was an uncharacteristic sound - more Californian AOR pop.
What the song is about
Orzabal's lyric - about the human pull toward power. The lines “welcome to your life, there's no turning back” sound like an elder addressing a younger who has just entered adult life. “Say that you'll never, never need it” - an allusion to the Marxist paradox (you should never need what you need).
For 1985 this was a rare type of philosophical pop song - not a love ballad, not a political pamphlet, but a reflection on the nature of power itself. That approach would emerge later in Sting (“Russians”), Peter Gabriel (“Red Rain”) and in late-period Bowie.
Numbers
- US: #1 Billboard Hot 100 (July 1985), 2 weeks; platinum
- Canada: #1 RPM, 3 weeks
- UK: #2 (June 1985); silver
- Germany: #6
- Netherlands: #4
- France: #2
- Norway: #6
- Australia: #3, 4× platinum
- Japan: #15 Oricon International
Total global sales by end of 1986 - 7 million copies. The album Songs from the Big Chair reached #1 in the US and Canada, 5× platinum in the US. Tears for Fears won the 1986 Brit Award for Best British Group.
What remains
Tears for Fears made one more major success after this - The Seeds of Love (1989), but of smaller scale. In 1991 Smith left; Orzabal continued under the name solo. They reunited in 2000. Their most recent album The Tipping Point (2022) hit UK #2, showing the band remains commercially viable.
By 2024 Spotify shows over 1.9 billion streams of the original. One of the most frequently cited pop-culture tracks of the 80s: used in Donnie Darko (2001), The Big Chill (1985), Watchmen (2009), hundreds of other films and series. In 2020 the track entered the Ted Lasso season 1 soundtrack - and Spotify logged another bump. Synchronous records breakdowns - “Take On Me” a-ha, “Never Ending Story” Limahl.