Tears for Fears - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1982-1995

I'm rather surprised this is the first time I'm posting a Tears for Fears album, because I like them a lot. I guess part of it was that I didn't have anything worthy to post. But I've put together several BBC albums for them. Here's the first one. It's a collection of radio sessions.

The British duo Tears for Fears was formed in 1981. They didn't release their first album, "The Hurting," until 1983. But they made three appearances for the BBC in 1982 while promoting singles released in advance of their album.

The first two songs are from a BBC studio session that was later released on the super deluxe edition of "The Hurting." The third song, "Mad World," is from a live appearance on the BBC TV show "The Oxford Road Show." This is unreleased. I used the MVSEP audio editing program to remove the crowd noise from it. The next four songs, tracks four through seven, are from a different BBC studio session. These also were released on the super deluxe edition of "The Hurting."

The next three songs, tracks eight through ten, are from a 1985 BBC studio session meant to promote the band's 1985 album "Songs from the Big Chair." These were eventually released on the super deluxe edition of that album.

After 1985, it seems Tears for Fears didn't perform for the BBC for a long, long time. The last four tracks here, tracks 11 through 14, aren't from the BBC at all. But I wanted to include them because they're from a TV show instead of conventional concert, and I thought they were interesting song versions. These all come from the French show "Taratata" in 1995. The band was essentially just Roland Orzabal at this point. He was on the show to promote the new album "Raoul and the Kings of Spain." He did the title song from that album, as well as two older songs, and a cover. The cover of the classic soul hit "Stand by Me" is a duet with Julian Lennon, son of John Lennon. So that's particularly interesting.

All of the songs from the French TV show were performed before a live audience. However, I used the MVSEP audio editing program to remove all the crowd noise again, in order to get the songs to better fit with the studio tracks making up the bulk of this album.

This album is an hour and three minutes long.

01 Suffer the Children (Tears for Fears)
02 Ideas as Opiates (Tears for Fears)
03 Mad World (Tears for Fears)
04 Memories Fade (Tears for Fears)
05 The Prisoner (Tears for Fears)
06 Start of the Breakdown (Tears for Fears)
07 The Hurting (Tears for Fears)
08 Head Over Heels (Tears for Fears)
09 The Working Hour (Tears for Fears)
10 Broken (Tears for Fears)
11 Sowing the Seeds of Love (Tears for Fears)
12 Woman in Chains (Tears for Fears with Oleta Adams)
13 Raoul and the Kings of Spain (Tears for Fears)
14 Stand by Me (Tears for Fears & Julian Lennon)

NOTE: The link has been removed due to a copyright issue.

I didn't find any really good pictures from 1983. So the cover is a promo photo taken in 1984.