It'll end in Tears

Imagine you are a golden goose. You can lay bullion eggs anytime you like, seemingly; they just dribble out of your butt and sparkle up the barnyard.

Then imagine that you decide to lay, not golden eggs for the gleaming masses, but bronze cubes. Or balut.

That’s kind of how it felt, watching Tears for Fears in their sold-out appearance at Araneta Coliseum last Sunday. Parking was impossible, the arena was jammed to the rafters, and the fans’ humming of TFF tunes had grown to a deafening din by the time the band made its entrance onstage. It was fitting to have Curt Smith — the estranged Tears for Fears partner of writer Roland Orzabal, now back in the fold — warble out the opening chords of Mad World. Especially a few days from elections here in the Philippines. The orchestrated opening promised a cavalcade of hits from the band whose ‘80s catalogue continues to tug at most Pinoy and Pinay heartstrings.

But Orzabal, perversely, curtailed his golden egg dispensing for the night. A few early hits — including a crowd-pleasing Everybody Wants to Rule the World — led to a string of non-hits, mostly lifted from “Raoul and the Kings of Spain” and “Everybody Loves a Happy Ending,” two later TFF albums decidedly not from the golden era of the band.

What gives? Was Roland tired of being a human jukebox, rolling out his biggest hits every night? Back on tour (and reportedly working on new material with Smith), Orzabal seemed genuinely thrilled to be toting his red Gibson before a gushing throng (before that, it was Singapore; soon after, they hit Hong Kong). Portlier but no less shaggy (suggesting a pleased-with-himself Oscar Wilde), he shared stage with a white-haired, close-cropped Curt Smith, and the magic remained on harmonies and tunes that seemed, well, effortless back in the day. But after warmly embracing the audience, Orzabal seemed determined to give them… what Orzabal wanted.

Like Pacquiao dancing around the ring instead of jabbing.

Like Picasso tossing his portfolio in the Seine and fingerpainting rainbows instead.

To say that the unfamiliar material went over like a less-than-soaring balloon is not being uncharitable. It’s just reportage. Orzabal, knowing polite applause when he hears it, announced yet another new song: “This one we’ve just recorded… I hope you’ll be jumping up and down along with it… I know I will be.” Sure enough, by the middle, he was the only one jumping up and down.

Not to be unkind, or to cause any unnecessary tears, but when you are a band visiting Manila for the first time in 25 years, it is probably good practice to bring along your hits. Even Engelbert Humperdinck knows this.

To be fair, with its Summer of Love vibe, the material from “Everybody Loves a Happy Ending” is quite catchy — tunes like Secret World and The Closest Thing to Heaven fit in nicely with the ‘60s sweetness of Sowing the Seeds of Love. And ultimately TFF did sprinkle in a clutch of their biggest tunes — two versions of Mad World, Woman in Chains, Head Over Heels, Pale Shelter, Memories Fade and the rousing Shout. But again, this is a band that has plenty of gold in its coffers; it could have kept the audience on its feet, eating out of its hand for the entire 90-minute set.

You have to conclude that Orzabal wanted to push TFF’s more recent catalogue — a dubious strategy, considering that Filipinos have a peculiar preference for the ‘80s, despite martial law. Those people on their feet, Roland? They wanted the old hits. Tears for Fears was — is still — comfort music for them.

A few weeks before the show, my wife had devised her own Tears for Fears top 10 video countdown on Facebook. I think she heard only five of those songs at Araneta. Where was Change? Mothers Talk? Advice for the Young at Heart? I Believe? Working Hour? “Bitin” was a frequent comment posted post-concert.

But here’s the good news: Tears for Fears actually sounded great, especially singing their hits. The love from the audience could have been bottled, marked up, sold off, packaged as a renewable energy source. Whenever the first few notes of a big hit pierced the air, the immediate reaction from the throng was a sonic boom. A love bomb. And perhaps TFF were more interested in showing they can still play even their dodgier material live, and play it well. Roland replicated his joyous guitar solo from Everybody Wants to Rule the World with evident glee, while the epic I Am the Walrus pastiche, Sowing the Seeds of Love, could have gone on for half an hour and still sound heaven-sent.

A brief solo section bisected the show: Curt did a song from one of his own albums that sounded, to my wife’s ears, a bit like Michael Jackson’s Human Nature; not so surprising, then, that Roland next accompanied himself on a solo version of Billie Jean, lending it a country feel. It was that kind of night. Orzabal has long been fond of quoting other people’s music in his songs: one unfamiliar tune borrowed the opening of Elvis Costello’s Green Shirt. In truth, a lot of Orzabal’s music post-“Songs from the Big Chair” wears its influences openly, and it’s clear that “Sgt. Pepper”-era music has left a huge mark on the songwriter. And while Curt’s voice was not quite at peak form, Roland’s made up for it in expansiveness. One onstage spiel ran: “We’ve been all around the world quite a few times… across America, into the plains of Siberia, the deserts of Scandinavia, and I don’t know why it has taken us so long to come to Manila…” (Huge applause.) “This is amazing. Thank you.” Smith, for his part, remarked that he’d never received so many Twitter messages than when he touched down in Manila (the tweet brigade had earlier posted details of the band’s hotel arrangements and check-in aliases).

Perhaps the biggest roar of applause came during Head Over Heels, with its soaring falsetto harmonies. It was a testament to how pop music can actually carve its way into people’s memories and lives. The Araneta lights went up briefly, and you could see about 10,000 people simultaneously swaying, singing, gushing their approval, oblivious to the passage of time, the dubious honor of soon electing yet another leader, the fluctuations of fate and the economy. You could see them forgetting it all, whenever Orzabal and Smith chose to serve up yet another nugget of gold.