Thanks to being half of Tears For Fears, Roland Orzabal has certainly had a life and career to shout about. But doing that himself was not really on his bingo card.
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Orzabal — whose Welcome to Your Life: Love, Death and Tears For Fears (Dey Street) publishes on Aug. 4 — had no desire to write a memoir. He’d written a novel, 2014’s Sex, Drugs & Opera, and was, in fact, shopping another one, Truthwall, when his literary agent Mark Gottlieb broached the autobiography idea.
“Every time he took (the new novel) to a publisher, they would say, ‘What about a memoir?'” the British-born Orzabal, 64, tells Billboard via Zoom from his current home on the south coast of Massachusetts. “So he said, ‘Have you ever thought about writing a memoir?’ And I said, ‘No, I haven’t.’ But I always wanted to write about astrology because I’ve been studying it for 40 years, and I always wanted to write about metaphysics, my philosophy, my take on life, my understanding of the human condition. So I thought maybe I could combine the two and explain my life astrologically — along with Tears For Fears, obviously. And Mark said to me, ‘Just write three or four chapters and leave it with me.'”
The result is a 268-page tome that Orzabal further subtitled An Astrological Memoir, with a foreword dubbed “Warning: This Book Contains Astrology” to explain his fascination and introduce the concept. Welcome To Your Life makes plenty of references to star patterns and Zodiac signs in explaining some of the events in Orzabal’s life, but he worked hard to make sure that never interferes with the narrative readers come for.
“My initial feeling was to weave it in like a tapestry,” Orzabal explains, but his publisher, Carrie Thornton, instead recommended he “put it in as interstitials at the end of a chapter, so people can read the story and ignore the astrology. I understand that completely. The astrology is another layer of explanation, and once I attempted it a few times I thought, ‘Yeah, this is brilliant.’ I spread it throughout the book, so it becomes more understandable, and if someone doesn’t want to get into it, it’s easy enough to skip it.”
His bandmate Curt Smith apparently felt that way when Orzabal sent him an early edition of the memoir. “He texted me or emailed me and he’s just finished it, and he was in tears, so I thought that was a good sign,” Orzabal recalls. “And then I said to him, ‘What do you think of the astrology?’ and he said, ‘Oh, I didn’t read that,’ or ‘I didn’t understand it.’ [Laughs] So there you go. Curt hasn’t seen (the book) since, but I’m sure he’ll find it more accessible now.”
Welcome To Your Life offers a deep and earnest dive into Orzabal’s life, from a difficult upbringing (his parents divorced when Orzabal was a teen) through his youth in Bath, England and his developing passion for arts. He and Smith met during their early teens and formed a band called Graduate, which released one album and broke up, leading to Tears For Fears. The two developed a deep interest in psychologist Arthur Janov and his primal scream therapy, which informed songs on Tears for Fears’ 1983 debut The Hurting and 1985’s Billboard 200-topping Songs From the Big Chair, which spawned two Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s.
“We were young and evangelical,” Orzabal says. “We believed (primal scream) to be the absolute truth…So no one ever understood us. We weren’t ever understood by journalists ’cause we started off, as it says in the book, talking about Janov. The Hurting was a good body of work, and it bled into the massive success of Songs From the Big Chair. Then the thing that inspired us, that made us completely different to every other band, was forgotten — which is fine.
“So in (the book), I wanted to fully explain that, because it was very much what set Curt and I apart from the music scene. There’s a chapter called ‘A Process of Becoming,’ which is the story of primal therapy. It’s a lovely story.”
Welcome To Your Life also delves into the dynamics of the Orzabal-Smith relationship and their 1991 split, with Orzabal retaining the band name and recording two more TFF albums as well as a solo album, Tomcats Screaming Outside, in 2001, before they reunited around the same time. Despite disagreements, particularly over management during the late ‘80s, Orzabal says he had no desire to make Smith a villain at any point of the story.
“Had I written the book in the ‘90s, he’d definitely be (a villain),” says Orzabal, who also writes candidly about his late first wife Caroline’s struggle with depression, substance abuse, dementia and cirrhosis before her passing in 2017. (He remarried in 2020 and has a one-year-old daughter in addition to two adult sons from his first marriage.) “We had a bit of money after Big Chair, and even after The Hurting. I think Curt realized the change of status quite hugely; he recognized he was a pop star, and I didn’t. He bought a massive house in the south of Bath and he lived the life of the nouveau riche. I had other priorities.
“The thing is, (Smith) is a very good partner, and we have a very good balance and I don’t necessarily want that to end. He’s seen me through some very, very bad times and some ugly times, and he’s one of these people that doesn’t panic. And we are in our mid-sixties — he’s 65, I’m about to be 65 [on Aug. 22]. I think the relationships you have that have lasted decades, albeit with their ups and downs, become so precious as we get closer to the D-Day, so you appreciate them that much more.”
Rather than feeling like a rock star in TFF, Orzabal says now that, “I always felt like I was part of something. I never felt that I was the center of it. There are some moments I describe in the book…like in the Big Chair days we were in Orange County and we had helicopters coming over the brow of the hill, shining lights on people and ‘Listen’ was playing on the PA and I just thought, ‘This is incredible — not because of me, but because I’m part of something which has taken off like this.’
“I still don’t think about (stardom), really at all, which is a good thing. The other day I was in the garden center here and I’m cashing out with some plants and a woman said, ‘I’m a big fan.’ And I thought, ‘Of the plants?’ I forget, because I’m thinking about other things.”
Orzabal is nevertheless hopeful that Welcome To Your Life will shine a bit of light on some of the overlooked music, especially the two non-Smith TFF albums and his solo effort — perhaps even back to Graduate. “I hope that people will go and listen to anything, really,” he says. “When I read Bono’s book (Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story) he mentions a lot of songs that I really didn’t know about, so I went back and listened to them as a point of reference, just to make myself more knowledgeable.”
Welcome To Your Life has its rock star moments, however. One anecdote shares that the late Joe Strummer admonished Orzabal that he “owes me a fiver” because the phrase “everybody wants to rule the world” appears in the Clash’s 1980 song “Charlie Don’t Surf”; Orzabal signed a ten-pound note and gave it to Strummer, which he writes “made the great man smile.” In another, Orzabal recalls his luggage being accidentally taken by Michael Jackson’s handlers after a Concorde flight to London.“He had a very large guy who’s picking up these sort of rock n’ roll black bags,” Orzabal says, “and I was too frightened to go up to him. But my manager didn’t have the same fear, and we got it back.”
Orzabal and Smith’s last TFF studio album,The Tipping Point, came out in 2022, and they included four more new songs on the 2024 live album Songs For a Nervous Planet. The group did a residency last fall at the BleauLive Theater in Las Vegas, but it currently has no plans for recording or touring.
“I’ve been recording songs,” says Orzabal, who plans to shop the Truthwall novel again after Welcome To Your Life runs its course. “I recorded about eight last year, and I’ll probably write another eight and record them and see where they are. Our lives are quite different at the moment: Curt’s coming into land, and mine’s just taken off. I’ve just had a baby. I’ve been married again for six years, but it still feels very new. At the moment we’re on different paths, but at some point there’ll be an intersection, no doubt about it. I would say this book might have an impact — I don’t know — and then we’ll see how the dust settles before we start another project. And there’s some talk, I believe, of some big shows in 2027.”
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