#tff2013

Washington Post (1993): "Well, a lot of the songs were written while I was in a sense going through the divorce," Orzabal says. "Things like "Break It Down Again" refer to that to some degree, and "Fish Out of Water",  obviously.

Modern Rock Live Online (1995): Question: What is the song "Fish out of Water" about? T4FMRL: It is my "How Do You Sleep"? (The John Lennon song.)

Curt’s Radio Interview (1998?): Int.: Now you mentioned ‘Sun King’, so… CS: [chuckles nervously] Int.: We'll try to make it painless. So, I gather the subject matter is openly presented. CS: Yeah. Int.: I guess I gather at this point: you're still really not on good terms then. CS: Well, I don't… I don't think it's necessary that we're not on good terms. I mean, because how would we know? We haven't spoken to each other for years. But no, the… I mean, to straighten out the whole story behind ‘Sun King’ and, you know, people ask, and I said, ‘Well, yeah’, I mean, it's sort of a reply to ‘Fish Out of Water’, but you've got to put all these things in perspective because… a: when I first heard ‘Fish Out of Water’, it didn't piss me off. I found it quite amusing and… in a perverse way flattering, that someone would write a song about me, albeit in particularly unflattering terms. And then when I was writing ‘Sun King’, it was one of those songs that started literally with the chords, and… there's different ways I start songs. It may be like with a lyric idea, like ‘Jasmine's Taste’, or maybe with like the trumpet line on ‘What Are We Fighting For’, and that's the melody I remember. And with… with ‘Sun King’, it was a very discordant song, and it sounded musically very angry, so I wanted the lyrics to be angry. So then I go back thinking something I'm angry about, and so… this is the thought process I'm going through, and… but always in the back of my mind with a certain sort of tongue-in-cheek, you know, maturity about the whole thing that, you know, I really wasn't that pissed off, like I said, but it's an angry song, so how should I do this? And then like some, ‘Okay, I'm angry at Roland, right’ and… So how do I like translate that anger? Well, I think of ‘Fish Out Of Water’ at this point in time and I think, well, it's a very cerebral song and it's a very sort of roundabout way of dissing me, you know, and so I think, ‘Okay, how would one answer that?’ And I'm thinking of us as people, and we're different that way as people. He's very cerebral and he's into astrology, and, you know, and psychics, and all this kind of stuff, and I'm pretty straightforward and base, and that was the, you know, a lot of the time the reason why we work well together, strangely enough. And so I'm thinking of, ‘Okay, so I'm the bass one’. So, in more ways than one, forgive the musical pun. And so I'm thinking along the lines of, well, someone's like being very cerebral with you, and your answer would be what? And I'm like, okay, well, na-na-na-na-na, your mama's fat, kind of thing. You know, that's the way you want to deal with it. So that's ‘Sun King’. That's my version of that. ‘Sun King’ is just my way of being really straight ahead, like, ‘Go screw yourself’, basically, as opposed to being too like intellectual about it or anything. And the whole, I mean… I wasn't amusing myself while doing it, so it wasn't like it's all like really bass anger and it's a hundred percent men, you know? I… I find sort of half of it amusing in it's, because it's so based, and it's not the way I feel about him most of the time at all. But it's... it was just an answer to a song, and that's the way I wanted to make it, and, you know, I find it amusing, and hopefully he can take it the same way, but who knows?

LEXICON (summer 1997): CS: <...> I think a lot of these things get blown out of proportion by other people. It's also our fault as writers. You start a song off with a premise, which in the case of "Sun King" is "I'm going to answer 'Fish out of Water' ". And then the song just takes on a life of it's own. <…> the emotion in the song is what carries the song. That's not the way I feel about Roland every day of the week.

Cover Magazine (11.1997): Q: They say the song "Sun King" might be a swipe at Roland. CS: That would be because it is. Q: Any bitterness there? CS: I don't think there is — no, not on my part. The thing you have to remember about "Sun King" is that it's so tongue-in-cheek. I was amusing myself really. He wrote this song called "Fish Out of Water" which was about me in very unflattering terms. But it was in his normal cerebral sense that he does everything... overthinking and overintellectualizing whatever he does. It's an incredibly intelligent way of dissing me. I try to think about the best way to respond to this. I can't do it on his terms because it's not in my nature. I used to do it and we'd get into these arguments about what's right. There is no right and wrong — it's just one of those endless arguments that go on and on. That's what happens when you get in a fight with Roland. You can never win. The best you could do is not lose. "Sun King" is my response to someone intellectually dissing me. It's so blunt and to the point. I was always a lot more direct.

Tears for Fears' Curt Smith launches Mayfield (12.1998): "I’ve never consciously wanted to go out of my way to tear Roland apart because I think the reason it didn’t work was both our faults. And I think the more you labour on it the more it eats away at you." <...> "I’ve only heard Fish Out of Water once and it didn’t piss me off at all. At one level I was kind of flattered that someone would write a song about me. "Sun King is supposed to be amusing - I’m laughing while I’m writing it because I find it funny. Something that’s so blatantly over the top, I’m kind of laughing while I’m writing it, because I really don’t harbour those kinds of grudges."

Q Magazine (05.2004): Q: Roland, is Fish Out Of Water (from Elemental, his first ‘solo’ Tears For Fears album) about Curt? If so, those are some pretty cutting lyrics... RO: Yes, it is, and it contains some of my favourite lyrics. “We used to sit and talk about primal scream/To exorcise our past was our adolescent dream/But now its sink or swim since your memory fails/Now in Neptune's kitchen you will be food for killer whales.” Fantastic, no? Pure vitriol. CS: I couldn't give a fuck, quite frankly. It's a compliment, in some ways. RO: Absolutely. It means I cared deeply for him. [Laughs] That’s one way of interpreting it, anyway… <...> Q: After the fallout in 1990, was Roland pleased to see Curt’s career flop? RO: I didn't like his first solo album at all, but then nor did he. I felt it was going in the wrong direction. But his second, Mayfield, was really good. I thought to myself, ‘Why didn't he do this when we were together? I wouldn't have let him?’ Well, that’s probably true. I did view Tears For Fears very much as my band, I suppose.

Metro Silicon Valley (08.07.2009): "I thought it was quite amusing," Smith says of the song today. "That was a song obviously written out of anger. I'd left the band, he was pissed off, and fair enough." (Smith recorded a response, "The Sun King," on his next solo album.) <…> As for the vindictive songs they once wrote for each other? Water under the bridge, says Smith — even though he still feels he got in a humorous last word. "The 'Fish Out of Water' thing was a little obtuse," he says. "And my song was like, 'Yeah, but you're fat.'"

Curt's twitter (07.09.2013):

Curt's twitter (12.12.2013):

Curt's twitter (16.04.2014):

Curt's twitter (19.03.2020): [1; 2]

The Quietus (20.09.2013):

RO: I had a guitar teacher, and she introduced me to a book called 'The Primal Scream' (by Arthur Janov). And I read it, and it became my Bible. The theory is called The Tabula Rasa theory, or the ‘Blank Slate’ theory. A child is born a blank slate, and then all the terrible things that happen to it – the childhood trauma and the rejection, not enough love – become suppressed and then turn up as neuroses in later life. The therapist would try to lead you to recall something that happened to you, and your way of mourning – and it’s a deep way of mourning – is that you actually cry. Not as an adult, but actually in a sense you’re going really, really deep. CS: It’s not a novel idea. I just think Janov explained it in better terms than most people. RO: I converted Curt, you might say. I suppose both of us were believing we were victims, so we would quite often try and convince other people of the validity of Janov’s ideas, but no one would… I suppose we were the only two. You know what it’s like when people have a specific belief and they don’t have any room for anyone else’s beliefs: it’s a turn off. And I was definitely one of those… <...> RO: The Hurting was one thing: pure Janov. CS: What changed that for me was actually meeting Arthur Janov. RO: We broke it really big with Songs From The Big Chair, both in England and America, and then he became hyper-aware of who we were. So we were doing four nights at Hammersmith Odeon, and he came to one of them. We met in the dressing room afterwards. I spoke to him a couple of times on the phone, and we all met up for lunch – me, Curt and our partners – in some fancy restaurant in Chelsea. CS: He proceeded to ask us whether we might be interested in writing a musical about primal theory. At that point I lost the plot. RO: It was one of those situations. CS: Basically it was as if God had come down and said that he wanted you to find ways to make him money. It would be like God taking sponsorship. RO: The words to the musical were just literally… CS: I don’t think lyrics were his strong point! You know, there are some words you don’t put in songs, and long psychological explanations are really not things that songs are written about! I was destroyed after meeting Arthur Janov. RO: I ended up doing primal therapy after Big Chair and during Seeds Of Love, and then I realised so much of you is your character, and you’re born like it. I think that definitely any trauma – whether it’s childhood or later in life – affects you negatively, especially when it’s suppressed, but there’s so much of us which is already in place. I believe that primal theory – which has been absorbed into modern psychotherapy practices – is very, very valid, but a good therapist is a good therapist. He doesn’t have to be a primal therapist. CS: When he actually came to the show, I was talking to him for a while, and he said "I don’t think you need therapy", which was fantastic for me to hear. After that lunch, I didn’t feel like it anymore.

Super Deluxe Edition (22.02.2022):

I ask Roland and Curt if either of them still practice Primal Therapy, Arthur Janov’s trauma-based therapy that informed so much of the songwriting on their 1983 debut 'The Hurting'. RO: Well, no… [but] maybe I should? I did it in the ’80s for five years, very regularly, two or three times a week and it was amazing. It was really about my childhood. And, strangely enough, when my first son was born, Raoul, something happened psychologically, because I saw him come out, and it was like my childhood was over. I don’t know why, but I was no longer focused on the child within, I was focused on the child ‘without’. So then you become a parent and part of what you do is very structural. We weren’t too big on discipline, but enough, and your inner child gets kind of shooed away for many, many, many years, and I stopped using any of the therapeutic techniques from Primal Therapy. And I got older, I sort of got into addiction problems, and I actually lost the ability to express myself emotionally. I’ll give you an example: My father died when we were doing 'The Seeds of Love'. And I was like, ‘fuck him’, you know. That day I had therapy, and as I was walking from England’s Lane, where we were making the record, to therapy, I went from denial to a wave of absolute grief. And before I even got there, I was crying like I’ve never cried, because of the reality. Now, when it came to Caroline dying, I couldn’t do it. I’d lost completely, through all the pills and booze, I’d lost the ability to get that wave of grief that comes up from a very deep part of you, and to let it go. I couldn’t do it. And it wrecked me. That inability wrecked me. So no, I had to do therapy to deal with the grief, but I actually found a woman in LA who was a Freudian therapist – Freudian! – crazy, but it was an amazing relationship. Through that, plus the love of a good woman in Emily –  that really got me back on track. CS: I never felt the need. I think it was knocked out of me by meeting Arthur Janov. I think that I kind of lost faith in Primal Therapy because it was coming from a man who I thought was a bit of a charlatan, after meeting him. My therapy happened in later years, some in New York or in Los Angeles. The relationship with the therapist is always a very personal one – you’ve got to find a therapist that works with you. And it’s not even necessarily a method, I think it’s actually a relationship you have with them. Mine happened to be a 70-year-old hippie that had taken all sorts of things when she was younger, and she was fantastic. But no, Roland’s correct, when children come along it really changes the picture, a lot. And weirdly, that put me off Primal Therapy theory a bit more because a lot of what Janov was writing about back then was very much about children being this ‘blank slate’ being fucked up by parents and you see your kids come out and you watch them grow up and it’s like, that was never a fucking blank slate, it just wasn’t. There’s DNA there. The way they look, the way they behave…

Rock & Roll High School with Pete Ganbarg podcast, se4ep10 (10.2024):