Good morning. Hello, there. How’s tricks, my friend? I am good. A bit tired. Was up till 1, driving back from Charlotte. Slept an extra hour, because Jane is at Grammy’s, but still, less than seven hours of sleep.
Look I consider myself to have the finger on the pule of Middle America’s nostalgic attachment to various formerly huge new wave bands. I’m the sort of dude that goes to a “legacy act”s how, like, say, A-Ha or something, having listened to all of their albums from the 2000’s and having opinions on Analogue not being as good as Minor Earth Major Sky (an underrated masterpice if you ask me), and gently chiding the crowd for not keeping up with this band they purport to like, and only being there for “Take on Me” and not even really appreciating “The Sun Always Shines on TV” or “The Living Daylights” enough. That is how it goes 99.9% of the time when I go see a “legacy act.” The crowd is generally as old as me, if not older. The “fan club” members are a cliquey group of greying dads, and the youngest person there is usually in their mid-to-late 30’s.
That is not how it went at all with Tears for Fears last night. I am still trying to process how weird it was. There was so much weirdness.
First, Tears for Fears are stunningly popular in America. Just insanely, absurdly popular. I mean, I have seen Tears for Fears twice before, but both in Boston, both in the same place on Landsdowne, actually (once as Avalon, once as House of Blues), so I thought I had a handle on their popularity. And sure, Songs from the Big Chair went 5x platinum in a since season in 1984, making it the number one album in America for over a month, when being the number one album meant you were moving serious units. But I have routinely seen other bands that were that popular, like, say, Duran Duran, and while their current crowds are enthusiastic, they are nowhere near as big, and no one there cares about Paper Gods or All You Need Is Now except for me and my friends. Past popularity does not predict present crowd sizes, save for the fact that you can probably get a gig in America somewhere.
But people in the mid-Atlantic (what I call this region so I don’t have to admit I live in the South) fucking love Tears for Fears.
Virtually everyone at the show knew the new album. Everyone loved the new album. Far and away the largest crowd reception to any song of the entire set was inexplicably “My Demons” off of their new album, The Tipping Point. I mean, “My Demons” is a great song, and live it is ten times better, it was just a phenomenal performance, but still! This was not a fluke. Major portions of the crowd were clearly obsessed with the new album. The two middle-aged women behind us knew every word. Non-single album cuts had major portions of the crowd singing along, and got much more enthusiastic receptions than supposed previous “hits” like “Change” or “Pale Shelter.” I legit do not think I have ever seen a “legacy act” whose new album is so absolutely beloved. The closest thing would be Slowdive, but that is on an order of magnatude smaller scale.
The whole thing was so weird. Before they went on, and all through Garbage, I was composing a very different GMHHAY in my head. I was musing at why all of these total normies paid good money to see a band they don’t keep up with, they don’t really truly know. I idly mused whether there was a cohort of people in America that just loved to go to outdoor festival shows with tailgating opportunities, and went to a ton of them, even if they knew a song or two. I’ve definitely felt this before at shows like this. You know, there’s this whole world of 80’s nostalgia packaged tours, and people go to have a good time, and if they know “that one song” from each band, they are happy.
But no, no, no, that is not what was going on at all. These people fucking love Tears for Fears. The dude in the utilikilt? Loves them. The woman in the busty black tank top with skeleton hands grabbing her boobs? Loved them. The middle-aged mom inexplicably wearing a Dropkick Murphys shirt? Loved them. Dude with a mullet and a sweet vintage Reach the Beach The Fixx shirt? Loved them. Okay that one makes sense. Aside from us (and that is a stretch), there was only a single Goth that I could see. But these people were obsessed.
And they weren’t all just X-ers and boomers! There were three teenage kids sitting by us, from two families. A very gender fluild looking boy. I only know he was a “he” cuz I chatted with them between bands. He just turned sixteen, he told his dad, who had a tattoo of a hand grenade on one arm and a tattoo that said “major firepower” in large red script on the other, that the thing he wanted most for his sixteenth birthday was tickets to Tears for Fears. It was a bonus for him, as it was for my wife and his dad, that the opener was Garbage. Dad was fifty-seven. He’d never seen Tears for Fears, but he’d seen Garbage ten times.
(This, by the way, marks the fifth or sixth different city in which Emma and I have seen Garbage. Garbage is actually a great example. I love Garbage’s later albums, and I think “Even Though our Love is Doomed” is a late-career masterpiece. They did not play it this time but they did when we saw them in Raleigh pre-pandemic, and even though the crowd loved Garbage, no one cared about “Even Though our Love is Doomed.” This crowd was the same way. They really loved Garbage, they were very excited to hear “Paranoid” and “Push It” and “Stupid Girl” and “Happy When it Rains” and their Bond theme, but didn’t particularly care about album cuts or new songs. This is how it always goes with “legacy acts.” But not Tears for Fears.)
(Also Shirley Manson asked “how many times do you get to hear a Bond theme live by the people who originally played it? And I remember one time at Coachella, Emma and I tried to make this exact calculation. The answer for us is four: A-Ha, Duran Duran, Garbage and Paul McCartney.)
In front of us were two teenage girls, maybe fifteen ish, one with grey-blue dyed hair, one brunette, with the parents of one of them, or maybe they were sisters, hard to tell. But they were kids.
I am telling you all this to report this mind-boggling fact: all three of these teenagers loved and knew all the words to “Break it Down Again” off of Roland’s 1993 faux, Curt-free Tears for Fears album, Elemental. This song barely charted in America, by my calculations over thirteen years before any of these kids were even born. And they fucking loved “Break it Down Again.” They knew all the words! And so did the rest of the audience! They loved album cuts from Seeds of Love and knew the words! What world is this? I am so confused!
I mean, maybe some of this is letting pandemic steam off, and maybe I can’t tell anymore, lord knows I am not the show-going guru I once was, but it seemed to me that the applause at the end of the show was some of the most rapturous, happy I have ever heard.
And it was 95°F.
Oh! And before Tears for Fears went on, the venue played Tears for Fears. This is stunningly not okay. The sixteen year-old next to me was like “I meticulously spent all day carefully not listening to Tears for Fears because I did not want to ruin it.” And, like, I feel like this is universal Concert Law? You do not listen to the band that day, and the venue certainly does not play it. I was very worried this was going to jinx the show. It was one of those luxury venues that brings you food at your seat, and there was this sign in front of our seats that said “text this number with your seat number and what you want we’ll bring you stuff!” So I texted the number: “Dude you gotta stop playing Tears for Fears before a Tears for Fears show it is bad mojo!”
And, to their credit, they texted back:
Cheeky venue.
Anyway, fun night. We drove two hours through North Carolina farmland to get there, which was weird. Weird sensation to be, in your head, leaving the city, but headed to see a big rock concert. We passed maybe ten shed stores, lotta shed stores. Lotta Food Lions. Lotta Bojangles. Lotta tractor stores, used car shops with empty lots. Lotta farms, some even had a few cows. There’s this one guy on the Chatham Chatlist who’s always going on about premium North Carolina beef and I’m like, yeah dude, I don’t know, not a lotta cows in North Carolina, and while we did see a few, nothing to support that dude’s proclamations of the superiority and viability of North Carolina beef. Then again, North Carolina is, like, the largest or second-largest (don’t make me Google it) producer of pork in America, and we didn’t see a single CAFO. I spent a lot of time wondering if they hide these things from us, not putting them next to even our most minor highways. On the one hand, this makes sense, buy the cheapest land possible to turn into a pig shit cesspool, but on the other, you need trucks going in and out? A mystery. A gross mystery.
On the drive back, we re-listened to The Hurting, Elemental and Everybody Loves a Happy Ending. The latter two I don’t think I’ve listened to more than a handfull of times each. I dozed off a lot, trying to get some sleep to make today less miserable. We took the Interstates. It was dark. We saw no CAFOs but still a lot of Bojangles and Cook Outs. Keep your Shake Shacks, Cook Out rules.
I just made this mix right now, it is almost entirely comprised of songs from albums I recently bought, or, you know, ‘recent news’ acts, Julee Cruise, RIP, Tears for Fears and Garbage from last night. And I have inexplicably included a Molly Tuttle song because I had completely forgotten about her and she deserves a revisit.
Okay. Wow. Slept an hour late and only about 30 mins late on delivering this GMHHAY. Thank you for your patience, East Coasters who read this before work. West coasters, you’ll never know the difference. Whew!
this is a fantastic little micro-ethnography and I am now extremely invested in why they are still so popular. Just FYI, looking at their new album, the first few songs have 2.3m, 3.9m, and 1m plays on Spotify - they are the #443rd artist in the WORLD with 11m monthly listeners-- more than Duran Duran (8m) and Depeche Mode (!!!) (10m).
All of that about Tears For Fears, every bit of it... incredible. Also I love that circular screen onstage... Pink Floyd-ish