Tears for Fears guitarist Roland Orzabal says he wasn’t convinced about the hit potential of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” when the group recorded it 40 years ago. And neither, he adds, was his bandmate, Curt Smith.
But thanks to a chance riff he came up with on his Fender Stratocaster, the song generated enough interest to keep its creator from throwing it away.
Released on the group’s 1984 album, Songs From the Big Chair, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” was in fact Tears for Fears’ second number-one single, following on the success of its predecessor, “Shout,” which had ascended to the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100.
Now three-times Platinum, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is the band’s top-selling track of all-time, winning the Brit Award for Best Single in 1986 and helping drive Songs From the Big Chair to five-times Platinum sales. Tears For Fears recast it as “Everybody Wants to Run the World” to raise money for the African famine relief organization Sport Aid in 1986.
Amid its prominent synthesizers and drum machines, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is awash in electric and acoustic guitars played by Orzabal, who handled the song’s first break — the “rhythm solo,” as he calls it — and a second burning guitar solo played by the band’s touring guitarist, Neil Taylor.
Orzabal says his indoctrination into the guitar universe began “around the age of 13, 14,” while he was growing up in Bath, England.
“A guy on the same street as me introduced me to bands like Budgie, Uriah Heep and a band called Led Zeppelin or something like that,” he says with a laugh. “I didn’t like it at first, ’cause I was into glam rock. It took a long time for that music to wash over me. And, of course, once you start trying to copy Jimmy Page it becomes a little bit off-putting. But I appreciate a lot of those artists now.”
Today, Orzabal’s guitar collection numbers about 50 specimens, including the walnut Fender model known as “The Strat” he played on “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Manufactured from 1980 to 1983, this deluxe version of the Fender Stratocaster offered nine pickup combinations and featured gold hardware, a colored headstock and a unique bridge.
But as Orzabal explains, guitar didn’t figure much in Tears for Fear’s music at that point. Roughly six months before writing and recording Songs From the Big Chair, the band released the single “Mother’s Talk,” a track they’d recorded with great difficulty, using primarily synthesizers.
“It had been a very painful process,” Orzabal says of that song’s creation. “It had been mainly synthesizer and marimbas and xylophones. There wasn’t much rock about it. Chris Hughes [who produced the group’s 1983 debut, The Hurting] was brought back in to produce us, and he changed it all around. It was a difficult process, but the record company seemed to like it.”
With a month off to write songs for the new album, Orzabal retired to his home in Bath, England, and got to work using his walnut Strat, a Prophet 5 synthesizer and a LinnDrum rhythm box. “The downstairs had no furniture in it, so there was a lot of echo,” he says. “I would copy the drum parts from certain records into the drum machine. It gave me confidence knowing that had produced a great song, and I would write to those beats.”
One of those rhythms was from “Waterfront” by Simple Minds. “Just that simple ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump,” Orzabal says. “So that was the bass drum and the snare. There was another track by Lynx called ‘Throw Away the Key,’ and that had a very strange high-hat part. And I had this other pattern to counteract the high-hat part and put that in.” Together, the three rhythm tracks inspired the compelling shuffle rhythm that is the hallmark of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”
“And then,” Orzabal continues, “I tuned my guitar’s E string down to D, and I came up with this riff.” He sings the percolating arpeggiated guitar line that opens the song. “I didn’t really think anything of it, to be honest with you. It didn’t have the depth of the other material I’d been working on.
“But my wife at the time liked it. So I thought, Okay, maybe I’m wrong.”
I tuned down the E string to a D, and I came up with this riff… which I didn’t really think anything of, to be honest with you.”
— Roland Orzabal
Once in the studio, Orzabal shared his songs, which were still in their early stages of creation. They included “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” which at the point was called “Everybody Wants to Go to War.” Although Orzabal wasn’t convinced of the latter’s value, Hughes and the duo’s label rep, David Bates, were immediately interested.
“Chris and David were adamant about it,” he recalls. “They wanted some kind of drive-time American hit — whatever that was — and they thought this could be. But neither Curt nor I were convinced. So Chris said, ‘All right, we’ll do a proper day’s recording on the other songs, and at the end of the day we’ll put up the beats and just jam and muck around with it.’ “
When they finally returned to the song, its appeal slowly became apparent to its creator. “At some point I realized that it shouldn’t be ‘Everybody Wants to Go to War,’ which was an annoying title,” Orzabal says. “We recorded it with Curt singing it. I didn’t want to sing it — I didn’t want anything to do with it.”
Besides, Orzabal had enough to do playing his walnut-bodied Strat. “I’d just bought it for its looks alone,” he says of the instrument. “It had gold everywhere. Where you would have the bridge tone control, you had a [nine-position] pickup selector switch. I played the guitar through a Boss compressor — I remember it was blue [most likely the Compression Sustainer CS-2 pedal, released in 1982] — into a Roland JC-120 with the chorus on. That’s all.”
I played my walnut-bodied Strat through a Boss compressor into a Roland JC120 with the chorus on. That’s all.”
—Roland Orzabal
When it came time to record a solo, Orzabal took a chordal approach to the job. “The rhythm solo is my kind of thing, but it was a lot of drop-ins — all kinds of things just to sort of get the shape of it.”
But when Hughes and Bates decided he song needed a blazing-hot solo for the song’s outro, Orzabal knew it wasn’t his thing. “At the end they decided to put on a real, proper lead guitar solo,” he recalls, “and the first thing we said, without thinking, was ‘Neil Taylor.’ Neil had been floating around Tears for Fears for awhile, but he wanted to do his own thing. But we always knew he had a very idiosyncratic way of playing —far better than us when it comes to playing lead.”
Orzabal recalls that as recording proceeded, they often felt the beat needed to be faster. “We thought it was too slow, so every time we would record on it, we would put it up at least two percent,” he says. As a result, he says, the pitch “ended up between D and E flat.”
Released on March 22, 1985, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” began its chart ascent, reaching number one in the U.S., Canada and New Zealand, and number two in the U.K., Australia, Ireland and the Netherlands. The song’s music video went into regular rotation on MTV and became a staple of the channel through much of that year,
We always knew Neil had a very idiosyncratic way of playing — far better than us when it comes to playing lead.”
—Roland Orzabal
Forty years on, Tears for Fears now have seven studio albums to their credit, including last year’s The Tipping Point, the group’s first in 18 years. October 25 will see the release of Songs for a Nervous Planet, which includes a set from the band’s latest tour plus four new studio tracks. It will be accompanied by Tears for Fears Live (A Tipping Point Film), which screens in theaters on October 25 and 26 (tearsforfearsfilm.com). Orzabal and Smith are also about to start work on the next Tears for Fears album, with the former predicting that “there will be more guitar” this time around.
As for the popularity of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” Orzabal says he’s gotten used to it, as well as fans’ reactions when it’s performed in concert. “You’re never really surprised by the hits,” he says. “What’s shocked me was that people were so keen to listen to the new material, and so patient. When Curt decided to do [2022’s] ’The Tipping Point’ as the first song of the show, I was a bit nervous of opening with a new track. But moving from that into ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ — it was just fantastic. It’s the old and the new, and it all works together.”
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