At The Vaults

Formed in 1981 by Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal in Bath, England, Tears For Fears achieved mainstream success in the U.K. with their debut album The Hurting (1983), which featured the three hit singles ‘Mad World’, ‘Change’, and ‘Pale Shelter’. Whilst the album gained some popularity globally, it wasn’t until the band’s follow-up album Songs From The Big Chair (1985) that Tears For Fears hit global stardom. The album peaked at number two in the U.K. and at number one in the U.S. and would go on to achieve 5-times platinum status in the U.S. with over 5 million sales.
Tears For Fears’ global success led to them becoming synonymous with the ‘Second British Invasion’, characterised by the synth-pop stylings of U.K. acts that were beginning to dominate global charts in the early 80s. Singles ‘Shout’ and ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World’ enjoyed enormous success worldwide, bolstered by the rising popularity of M.T.V. and the increasing prevalence of the music video (an already developed concept in British music programming).
Despite rising personal tensions between Smith and Orzabal, the band released The Seeds of Love in 1989 for a reported recording cost of over £1 million. Bigger in scope than their prior releases and drawing on a greater pool of influences that included Jazz and Soul, The Seeds Of Love was another critical and commercial success for Tears For Fears. A worldwide tour followed in 1990, with the group taking pianist/vocalist Oleta Adams with them in a bid to highlight her talents
after Orzabal and Smith discovered her playing in a hotel lounge in 1985. The tour began on the 6th of January in Dublin and encompassed South America, North
America and Europe before drawing to a close at an all-day event at Knebworth, England, on the 30th of June.

One of the finest shows of the tour was undoubtedly the group’s standout performance at the Santa Barbara Bowl in California on the 26th of May, where Tears For Fears played a mammoth set in front of an American audience still enraptured by the Second British Invasion.
The show was also broadcast by KROQ-FM on local Los Angeles radio as part of the KROQ Concert Vaults series, offering listeners a chance to hear the majestic set live and in full. The entire dynamic show that Tears For Fears put on that evening is now available for all to hear on this new CD, offering fans a chance to relive the band in all their glory at the peak of their fame, just a few short months before breaking up.