Tears for Fears, named after a chapter found in Arthur Janov's book History of Headaches, are a British pop/ rockoutfit formed in the early 1980s by Roland Orzabaland Curt Smith, two school friends and ex-members of Graduate. Initially associated with new waveand the new romanticmovements, the duo's earliest work (through 1983's The Hurting) was explicitly based around the confusion and angst of adolescence - though top forty regulars on both sides of the Atlantic, Orzabal and Smith made their major international breakthrough with Songs From the Big Chairin 1985, which included their most commercially popular material to date (scoring two Billboard Hot 100 #1s and a UK #2). They released three albums - the synthesizer-based (1983), (1985) (which broke free from the new-wave mold) and the jazz/ blues/ The Beatlesinfluenced (1989) - before Orzabal and Smith had an extremely acrimonious falling out. The split of the duo was ultimately blamed on Orzabal's intricate but frustrating approach to production and Smith's distaste for the pop music world. The two spent the 1990s working separately.
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