Tears for Fears’ Roland Orzabal opens up in memoir ‘Welcome to Your Life’

Before Roland Orzabal tells you about his childhood, or the teenage band that became Tears for Fears, or drug addiction and the rest of the stuff you expect of a rock-and-roll memoir, there’s a preface that serves as a note of caution.

“Warning: This Book Contains Astrology” reads the title on the opening page of “Welcome To Your Life: Love, Death, and Tears for Fears.”

And it’s a true enough statement, too. You’ll learn more about the role of Pluto transits and Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in his life than you no doubt ever imagined. No worries if that’s not your thing, of course. “You can, if you like, ignore the astrology,” he writes.

But you shouldn’t ignore it, because Orzabal’s life in astrology is a large part of what makes this entertaining, enlightening story something deeper than the usual rock remembrances.

And, in fact, it’s the reason the book exists at all, Orzabal explains on a recent Zoom from the porch of a New England cottage where he was vacationing with his family.

“I’m no stranger to Word documents,” he says. “I wrote two books before this one, both fictional. One hasn’t come out yet, and one maybe shouldn’t have.

“It was my literary agent in New York, Mark Gottlieb and the Trident Literary Group, who said, ‘Have you ever thought about writing a memoir? Because all the publishers I go to ask about it,’” Orzabal continues. “I thought, no, I haven’t. In fact, I didn’t want to.

“But I had, at the same time as he was talking about this, an inkling about writing a book on astrology, simply because I knew a lot,” he says.

As someone who’d read many astrology books since the ’80s, he’d sensed a gap in the shelves that he thought he might fill.

“A lot of the books I’ve bought are menu books,” Orzabal says. “They’re saying things like, ‘This is what Mars in Sagittarius means.’ Thank you. ‘This is what Mars in Libra means.’

“It’s not living astrology,” he says. “It’s not astrology at work, you know? So I thought, ‘What if I combine the two? What if I combine my life, the story of Tears for Fears, with an astrological backdrop that can explain the principles at work?

“So that’s what I set out to do.”

“Welcome To Your Life” is out now. In an interview, edited for length and clarity, Orzabal talked about the death of his first wife, Caroline, which opens the book; how he and Tears for Fears partner Curt Smith made their first new album after 18 years; and the role of astrology in his life on and off stage.

Q: What was it like reliving moments like Caroline’s death and 35 years of marriage, your Ambien addiction, or the other tough parts of your story?

A: It’s like therapy without an outcome, without a positive outcome. You’re going over and over old ground, and you can’t help but feel very terrible, you know? Maybe it’s my destiny to regurgitate and regurgitate until I’m sick of it.

Things made me cry. The story of Caroline, it needed to be told, because even my sons don’t really understand their mother when she was 14 years old, and our relationship as we grew up together. She was the most amazing woman before the disease took hold. [Caroline died in 2017 at 54 of liver disease and alcohol-related dementia.]

The chapter on Ambien I love because it starts off just as I did, with this beautiful blue sky in L.A. I’m playing tennis; it’s wonderful. I take this tiny amount of a pill. Wow, it’s getting me into sleep finally. I’ve got sleep issues. And then it leads all the way to taking, what do I take? 150 milligrams a day, which was threatening seizures, and then I did have seizures.

Then I had the second time I was taking that much, [after] I’d been to rehab. I was making it all work with a constant drip, drip, drip of this little Ambien to stop me seizing, and also alcohol as well. I was on tour, and it was pretty bad. It was awful. I mean, I was losing it. So I’m not proud of it.

I also realized through writing this how little control I have of my life. Even the great things that have happened, all the huge success. I don’t know where it comes from. [He laughs] The good stuff, the bad stuff. I’m not neutral. No way. I’m not like a twig that’s floating down a fast stream. Not at all. I’m a droplet. I’m an eddy. There’s no doubt in my mind that these energies are turbulent, and they’re still turbulent.

Q: It must be strange looking at your life through the lens of a writer.

A: The thing I realized was that your life, and this is true for everyone, is a story. It has a narrative arc. And as I say in the introduction, you are not your [astrological] chart. You are in your chart, but you’re not it. I would also say, if I can be spiritual for a moment, you are not your life.

I’m just watching a video this morning. It was about, um, who wrote “Robinson Crusoe”?

Q: Daniel Defoe?

A: Thank you very much, well done. So, “Robinson Crusoe” is your life, but you’re also Daniel Defoe. So I wrote the story of my life. I probably feel best when I’m not there. When I’m not it. But I’m the storyteller, not a character.

Q: I remember reading about Tears for Fears and you and Curt [Smith] being interested in Arthur Janov and primal therapy when the first few albums came out. You write about it here, especially in the context of figuring out who you were after an unusual childhood.

A: I would say up until about the age of 17 I never really questioned my inner world. I was successful at school, and I plowed everything into that structure, being a good student. I was told I should try for Oxford and Cambridge because I was this working-class loudmouth, and that they would like my eccentricity or something like that.

When I didn’t get in, I dropped out of school, and I was no longer the A student; I was lying in bed most of the day. I started to feel depressed, and I felt that there was something wrong with me. I was introduced to Arthur Janov’s writings, and it was like a eureka moment where I realized that something that was wrong with me was due to my childhood.

[His father Georges and mother Margaret had a tempestuous, sometimes abusive relationship, Orzabal writes, which in the ’60s included a period where his father ran an eccentric entertainment agency out of their home that included his mother working as a strip-tease dancer.]

That’s not much of a revelation to a lot of people. [He laughs]. This coincided with the new movement of electronica in England through people like Joy Division, where you were allowed to gaze at your shoes and wear black and talk about how meaningless life was. Kind of an existentialist perspective. And this was all at the beginning of Tears for Fears.

In fact, Tears for Fears, the name, comes from a Janov book. Tears as the replacement for fears.

Q: And that’s how it started?

A: That’s how we started, and we were evangelical about it in interviews in 1982, ’83, and these journalists are like, “What are you talking about?” It didn’t fit with their narrative, which, as I say in the book, is love, death and socialism. We weren’t talking about that. We were love, death and psychobabble.

Our plan was to get right, get famous, and get therapy. But [the 1983 debut album] “The Hurting” was successful more than we’d imagined and that rolled straight into [1985’s “Songs From the] Big Chair.” It wasn’t until after “Big Chair” that I did primal therapy in London, of all places, because it had only previously been available in New York, L.A. and Paris.

I thought there was something deeply wrong with me that even massive success in America couldn’t heal. So I started the psychotherapy for four years, no, five years. It was only me. Curt decided he didn’t want to do it. Curt didn’t think there was something wrong with him. He does now. [He laughs]

Q: So how did astrology come to replace primal therapy?

A: There was this lady across the road from us in London. We knew she could draw up charts for people and I thought, “Draw up mine and Caroline’s.” I thought she was going to explain the chart, what it meant, and all this kind of stuff. Wonderful. But something went on. Caroline and her didn’t see eye to eye. There was an argument. It’s not really surprising with Caroline; she used to argue with everyone.

So I was left with these two charts and a fuming wife. I didn’t know what [the charts] meant. Squiggles, glyphs and lines. No idea. So went up the road to Belsize Park, up to the bookshop, and I bought loads of books on astrology, and an ephemera which tells you where all the planets were and are.

I was shocked because I could look to my father’s chart, a Capricorn with a Leo moon, and I looked at my chart, a Leo with a Capricorn moon, and I thought, oh no. Because the whole premise of primal therapy is that you’re born a blank slate. You’re innocent, you’re neutral, and I loved that perspective. It’s the victim narrative, you know? Child, the baby, is a victim. The patient is a victim.

No, it’s not true. You’re born with, not exactly the same, but an iteration of the same energies from your parents. Astrological signs and angles and degrees are inherited. This is hard for people to understand. So therefore, the perspective that there’s something wrong with me bled into this. What am I made of? Who am I?

Now I’ve been studying for 40 years. I can read the explanation in a book, but when you start to feel it, it’s a different thing. So, for instance, when Pluto squared my parental axis, the fourth house, that coincided with my father’s death. When Pluto squared my sun in Leo, that coincided with the birth of Raul, my first child.

That’s living astrology because that’s your life. Welcome to your life.

Q: Let’s go back to music, and especially Tears for Fears in Southern California, where Curt currently lives and you lived here for years as well. What was it like for a couple of English guys to come to sunny California?

A: You said the answer right there: sunny California. We’ve grown up in winter. You do get summer in England, but of course it can be extremely hot. Spring is beautiful, but the summers can be a bit of a humid nightmare. Yeah, the first thing that struck me really about L.A. was the light and the weather and the incredible sense of freedom.

I can understand why English people, who live most of the time under this low cloud, [come here and] suddenly there are no clouds. And I liked being a foreigner. I loved it, maybe because my dad was French and he was a foreigner. I don’t know; it just really very much relaxed me.

Q: There’s a great anecdote in the book about a show you played in Orange County on one of your first big U.S. tours. Helicopters rising over the amphitheater, you and Curt in the spotlight.

A: It was just a pure joy. As I described in the book, that show in Orange County, that for me meant more with the helicopters and the lights coming over the horizon to the backdrop of the song “Listen.” That meant more to me than the sort of intellectual knowledge of, “You’re No. 1 in the States.”

Because that actually doesn’t affect your life. I mean, it does obviously with career and finance and stuff, but that actual, dare I say, spiritual experience that we were having, they weren’t very often. But that one show I thought, “Wow, this is incredible.”

Q: L.A. comes back into the narrative later in the book when you talk about making “The Tipping Point” over a number of years before it came out in 2022.

A: I think the thrust came mainly from Curt. I think he could sense the appreciation [for Tears for Fears] that was going on in America. He was living in America; I was living in England and dealing with Caroline. I didn’t really think about it.

So we started this exploration. That’s all I can say. We were looking for a direction. What was it going to be? After Gary [Gersh, their manager in the late 2010s] got a sense we didn’t know what we were doing [he laughs], rightly or wrongly, he suggested we try writing with different people, which is something I’d never done.

And we assembled a lot of up-tempo, dare I say, commercial-sounding tracks, but the heart and soul that goes into a Tears for Fears record wasn’t there. And Curt also didn’t like it because it didn’t have the heart and soul, and it didn’t have any balance. Meaning there weren’t enough songs that Curt was singing, which is true and is right.

But I didn’t give up; I never do. I knew there was great stuff. I knew it wasn’t right sonically. And that’s when I got together with Curt. We were without a manager at that point, so it’s just me and Curt left. I went around to his place with the acoustic guitar. I wanted to see if the two of us being in the same room could produce something original and give us the direction.

Which is what it did. I knew the astrology at the time, and I knew that the cosmic wind was blowing in our favor, which is what it did. We were all singing from the same hymn sheet. Obviously, because of “Everybody Loves a Happy Ending” [the 2004 album that was Tears for Fears’ last before 2022’s “The Tipping Point”], I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be received. [He laughs}. Curt was far more confident, and he was right, of course.

Q: So you guys have played an occasional residency in Vegas. You’ve remarried and have a daughter who is … maybe a 1-year-old?

A: Thirteen months.

Q: Thirteen months. And you live in Colorado, which is neither Bath, England, nor Los Angeles.

A: I love it. It’s a healthy environment based around the nature. The mountains, the forests are beautiful.

So what are you looking to do next in Tears for Fears?

A: I’ve recorded about nine songs this year. I had quite a creative burst last year when Emily was pregnant with Eula. Some songs about unborn children, some songs about what it’s like to be a dad when you’re 60-odd and staring down the barrel of death. I recorded those.

This book is going to come out and I think that because of the astrology, hopefully, people will understand what it means. Explaining my life not just as a rock-and-roll memoir but having a little bit of explaining the moves that have been going on.

I hope that this will open some people’s minds to not just what’s going on in their lives, but why Tears for Fears was always a little bit strange or a little bit different. I think this may change people’s perspective because I don’t think we were really ever understood by the music press in the old days at all. I think it’s easier now.

Q: Well, thank you for your time today. I really enjoyed the conversation and the book, though I didn’t always understand the astrology.

A: Re-read it. [He laughs]