Rounding out a decade that had seen them triumph as transatlantic chart-toppers, the Bath, UK-hailing duo Tears for Fears’ extraordinary 1989 single Sowing the Seeds of Love firmly underlined the pair's knack for penning an era-defining earworm, soaring atop some characteristically exquisite music.
With its single edit coming in at a lengthy 5:48 (the album cut ran even longer, at 6:19) this ambitious song was Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal’s penultimate single of the 1980s, preceding the release of parent album The Seeds of Love by one month.
For Smith and Orzabal, their third LP’s long, and at times painful, genesis had tested their close bond. Their future plans as a creative unit would soon come to a dramatic halt, following a gruelling promotional world tour, and a furious dispute about their management. As a result, the pair wouldn't speak for nine years. More on that at the end of this article…
Back to 1989, and the release of Sowing the Seeds of Love came four years since Everybody Wants to Rule the World had impacted on the globe like a meteor. A monster hit, the song has now grown into arguably the decade's defining song.
Their second album, Songs from the Big Chair became a must-buy for musos and chart-devotees alike, launching Tears for Fears into an unexpectedly astronomical league.
Although they had accomplished what they’d dreamed of since first forming their creative partnership as teenagers in Bath, the weight of fame soon became unbearable for Curt.
“At the height of our fame was the unhappiest I've ever been personally,” Smith told People “I mean, the lack of personal life, the fact that we were so young and didn't really know how to say no, it was just not good for my mental health.”
Exacerbating the growing pressure on the two young men was increasingly frequent meddling in their music-making process by their record label Phonogram. Naturally, the label was counting on this pair of unlikely hitmakers to keep doling out commercially viable singles. Their interference was partly behind why album number three took such a long time to produce.
“I'd made most of the music, so it was like I didn't want anyone telling me what to do anymore,” Orzabal told Tape Op. “Curt and I, from the age of 18, had sat in recording studios, always the guys at the front, behind the producer and engineer. Always the guys who never leave the room. Always the guys with opinions. All we needed with The Seeds Of Love was the confidence of the record company, which we didn't get.”
The label breathing down their neck aside, the album’s production was beset with problems.
Although the Seeds sessions began in late 1986, numerous false starts, cul-de-sac creative directions and a rotating door of potential producers (including the return of trusted previous album producer Chris Hughes, for a while at least…) had resulted in a protracted gestation.
The constantly shifting deadline, plus the group’s penchant for inviting star-name session players, such as Pino Palladino and Phil Collins turned out to be costly. It would set the TFF enterprise back by at least £1 million.
As the band’s musical leader, Roland Orzabal had become increasingly wary of following the electronic-leaning trends of his contemporaries, and after the rigidity of relying on such tech during the lengthy Songs from the Big Chair tour, decided that it was something to be consciously shunned on the new album.
“We’d toured around the world for eight months, and the technology meant we had to play backing tracks on a Revox tape machine, assembled in a way that we couldn’t change our set for those eight months,” Orzabal told Classic Pop. “That drove us both mad. Whatever came next needed to get away from that, and we decided to go on a journey for the next record.”
Smith and Orzabal agreed that The Seeds of Love should wallow in a more organic field, with real instruments and looser time signatures underlining the fact that Tears for Fears’ musical range could be vast. It also showed that they were not afraid to ignore contemporary trends in pursuit of more worthy art.
At that time, in Britain, the preeminent ‘Eighties pop’ sound had slid into a faster-paced, high-energy, disco oriented mould, defined by the production-line of records released by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Orzabal and Smith had little interest in entering that world. “I love and respect Kylie,” Roland told Classic Pop. “But she wasn’t who we wanted to compete with.”
This urge to redefine the band ahead of a new decade was wholeheartedly supported by the record’s initial producers, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. But disagreements about song structure and production approaches led to their being fired.
“The problem when you’re working with producers is that you may like every record they’ve made, but you don’t know how much of that comes from the producer and how much comes from the artist,” Smith told Super Deluxe Edition. “When you go into a studio with these people, you may love their work, but it doesn’t mean it translates to working with you.”
The band's previous producer Chris Hughes returned to assist his former protégées, alongside eventual (named) co-producer Dave Bascombe. But even Hughes would ultimately leave after ten months of work, during which he helped steer many of the record's key cuts, such as the exceptional Woman in Chains.
Amidst the drama of this roughly four-year period, Orzabal surmised that the band’s lead single should clearly be a step away from the surrounding pop milleiu. Instead it would look back, to the more avant-garde attitude of on the pair’s key influences, the Beatles, in their later era.
It was a song that would eventually stand as one of Tears for Fears' high watermarks. The beguiling turn of phrase that marked its anthemic chorus stemmed from a story Roland had heard on BBC Radio 4 concerning a collector of traditional songs.
Roland was entranced by the discussion of one such folk song, which the collector had learned of via a gardener called Mr England. It was dubbed ‘The Seeds of Love’.
“I thought ‘wow, Mr England, sowing the seeds of love’ and from that I just wrote the thing,” Orzabal recalled in an interview with Super Deluxe Edition.
“Also, there was a piece of graffiti across from my house, in England’s Lane (in North London) and all it said was ‘I love a sunflower.’ Don’t ask me what it means or what it meant, but I managed to get it in the song.”
The demo of the song was made on Orzabal’s Fairlight, and was framed around an undulating, I Am the Walrus-evoking verse, and a lyric that was teeming with overtly political lines, including direct references to Britain’s then Margaret Thatcher-led government.
Triggered by Thatcher's re-election in June 1987, this marked another shift for Tears for Fears, becoming (overtly, at any rate) political for the first time.
Politician granny with your high ideals
Have you no idea how the majority feels?
So without love and a promised land
We're fools to the rules of a government plan
“I was reading for the first time books like Marxism for Dummies, Thatcher for Dummies, all those ‘…for Dummies’ books and A Brief History of the Working Class,” Orzabal told Super Deluxe Edition. “I was getting a little anti-government and for the first time quite political, in a left wing way.”
Whilst Roland was often the spearhead for the duo’s music, the other half of the partnership was starting to become ticked off with Orzabal's perfectionism in the studio. Roland sought to have oversight on every element of the production process.
Though this was still a few years ahead of their acrimonious split, the seeds of discontent were certainly being sown.
In the studio, though, Curt and Roland still behaved as professionally as ever, and their bond was strong. This was an important relationship, especially in the face of the external interlopers trying to steer the record into more profitable waters.
“Curt and I always get on very well when we're recording together. We talk to each other and listen to each other. We argue. I think both of us were ready to do something solo after [The Seeds of Love],” Roland reflected in an interview with Tape Op. “It was really the touring; that's when we fall apart.”
Smith’s contribution to the song was hugely important, understanding that what was needed following Roland’s snarling whirlwind of a verse was a pivot into a simple, and easy to sing, chorus. A modern nursery-rhyme that would conclude this most selfish of decades on a utopian note.
“I played [the demo] to Curt. He just started singing the backing vocal from nowhere, which was obviously way more than a backing vocal,” Roland told Classic Pop. “As soon as Curt began singing, I thought, ‘That’s it!’”
Curt’s idea - that singsong repetition of the titular line ‘sowing the seeds of love’ in the chorus had a beautifully naive quality that deftly counterbalanced the intellectual intensity of the verses.
“I think Roland loved the fact that he’d come in, in the middle of this big work, with something quite childlike. I don’t mean that disrespectfully, I mean genuinely childlike and brilliant,” said Chris Hughes in an interview with Super Deluxe Edition.
Sowing the Seeds of Love’s initial musical form was built using a drum machine, and had a (according to co-producer Dave Bascombe) much more ‘hip-hoppy, Prince-style thing’ about it, before being re-arranged to suit the pair’s looser concept.
To get that authentic '1967'-ness, a click-track free live band was recorded at London’s Townhouse Studios. On the piano and Wurlitzer was Roland, on bass was Curt, Chris Hughes took up position behind the drum kit and Ian Stanley played the Hammond.
The four played through the basic track numerous times until Roland was satisfied they had it down. Orzabal had intended the arrangement to hark back to the Beatles’ psychedelic maelstrom I Am the Walrus, and gradually increase in tempo. But, making that idea work was no small feat.
Ultimately, the best way to achieve that aim was to activate the dreaded click track, and make the tempo shift incrementally forward in BPM.
“I Am the Walrus starts off at one tempo and ends up at another tempo,” Roland told Super Deluxe Edition. “So we programmed the click from 84.5 BPM to go all the way up right at the end when it’s going mad to 88.5 beats! Then we recut it and then we had it.”
Beginning with a wash of oddly-phased drums, the song leapt straight into Orzabal’s Walrus-recalling, lyrically-dense verse. It was housed within a cloudy, complex (for the charts) G minor key.
As the track marched through the morass of Orzabal’s stream of consciousness tirade, the clouds sonically parted to usher in the warm glow of Smith’s gorgeous chorus. Musically, this was sold by an ascension to C major.
The duo’s stacked vocals made for a gorgeous and uplifting contrast. It was a chorus that summoned the revolutionary spirit of the sixties and reframed it as an optimistic riposte to the selfish avarice of the have-it-all '80s.
The protracted bridge sections developed into an extended outro, that featured further musical colouration, harmonic shifts and counter melodies atop the established hooks. It grew from irresistible pop hit into, ostensibly, a mini-prog epic.
In these sections, further instrumental flourishes added to the psychedelic euphoria. Most notable was the French horn part, being quite the most conspicuous nod to the Beatles. Penny Lane and For No One in particular.
Although by now the track had grown into something quite majestic, Phonogram wasn't entirely satisfied. They found it tricky to make their mind up as to which version of the track they preferred.
“When Sowing the Seeds of Love was mixed - just before Christmas 1988 - we were happy. Curt was happy. I was happy. [Co-producer] David Bascombe was happy,” Orzabal told Tape Op.
“We took it away. It was called the ‘overnight’ mix. This will give you a bit of history. We came in the next day, and all we did was edged down Curt's chorus vocals about half a dB. It was nothing. That mix was rejected by the record company. We then spent six months remixing that song.”
At the end of this gruelling remix process, much to the duo’s chagrin, that same label executive astoundingly pointed back to the original ‘overnight’ mix as his favoured one. “He said, ‘That's the one.’ Did he think about how much money we spent - or was charged to us - because he had no confidence?”, Orzabal continued in his Tape Op interview. “He had no confidence, and he couldn't deal with us as individuals.”
Released as a single on the 21st August 1989, Sowing the Seeds of Love narrowly missed the top spot of the US Billboard Top 100 Chart on its ninth week, held at bay by Janet Jackson’s Miss You Much.
Despite this being an enviable, huge success that many UK pop artists would be delighted with, for Tears for Fears it was a notable drop down from the group’s gold standard pair of US chart toppers Shout and Everybody Wants to Rule the World.
“Our single was No. 1 in sales, but Janet beat us on airplay,” reflected Roland in his Classic Pop interview, blaming label Phonogram for a lack of promotion. “At one point, we had to go round checking to see if the album was actually in the stores in certain places in America and it was all getting a bit nasty,” Orzabal told Super Deluxe Edition.
Outside of the politics of the industry, contemporary listeners were absolutely head over heels in love with this bizarre, bucolic, extraordinary modern hymn. It soon became one of the group’s most cherished cuts.
Its effect was perhaps best summed up by The New York Times’ Stephen Holden; “The song, which lovingly imitates the treadmill rhythms, trumpet-laced textures and exhortatory mood of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, updates the Beatles' utopian sentiments to the present by proclaiming 'an end to need and the politics of greed with love.' At the same time time it recreates the childlike playfulness of late 1960's pop psychedelia.”
Falling short of the number one spot was perhaps an indication that momentum was slowing, and the record’s promotional tour would serve as the group’s final act before their bitter split.
Although Curt and Roland went their separate ways in 1991 - and didn’t speak for nine years - Roland continued to make music under the Tears for Fears moniker until, after a surprising reconciliation, the pair came back together as a considerable creative force once again.
2004 saw the release of the aptly-named Everybody Loves a Happy Ending and, most recently, the duo released The Tipping Point, an inspired return to form for one of the UK’s greatest pop exports.
“One of the big lessons, which really I think we knew at heart anyway, is that there’s no one better to produce our music than us,” Curt told us in an interview last year.
“I feel [Curt] is an important part of my entire life,” Orzabal said of his musical partner in an interview with GQ. “It’s kind of like we have a blood bond.”
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