What the song is about
The clearest statement of intent comes from the man singing it. Curt Smith described the themes as "quite serious — it's about everybody wanting power, about warfare and the misery it causes." That is not a reading, it is the brief.
What makes the song slippery is that Roland Orzabal wrote almost none of it as argument. There is no thesis line, no villain, no country named. Instead there is a series of imperatives and observations that each seem to be about something slightly different, which is why the song has been convincingly applied to about six separate subjects since 1985.
Pitchfork's Tal Rosenberg laid the range out neatly: the environment ("Turn your back on mother nature"), short-lived money ("Help me make the most of freedom and of pleasure / Nothing ever lasts forever"), authoritarian surveillance ("Even while we sleep / We will find you") and the Cold War itself ("Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down"). All four readings fit. None of them exhausts it.
The one clue to the original target is the line that got cut. Orzabal has said the final line of the chorus was written as "everybody wants to go to war", and that it was his own indifference to the track that led him to change it. The song that exists is the softened version of a blunter one, which is worth holding onto when it is described as vague: the vagueness was a late edit.
The song nobody wanted
One of the best-selling singles of the 1980s was a last-minute addition that its principal writer did not rate.
The Songs from the Big Chair sessions were essentially finished. Orzabal played producer Chris Hughes two chords on an acoustic guitar; on the strength of that, Hughes pushed for it. It was recorded in about two weeks and became the last track on the album. Hughes's own assessment, given years later to Mix magazine, is not the way people usually talk about their biggest hit: "as a piece of recording history, [the song is] bland as hell."
Orzabal was unenthusiastic throughout, and Hughes talked him into finishing it as a deliberate play for the American charts — which is exactly what it delivered. Their working method was to stop at six in the evening and spend an hour replaying the day's recordings, and it was in those sessions that Orzabal arrived at the guitar figure and changed the title.
The shuffle is the other thing he had to be talked round to. Tears for Fears did not write shuffles; Orzabal called the rhythm "alien" to how the band worked, "jolly rather than square and rigid in the manner of 'Shout'". He has credited the groove partly to Simple Minds' "Waterfront" and partly to Linx's 1981 single "Throw Away the Key". The vocals were pitched up in the mix because the band felt the melody was not moving fast enough.
Almost everything that makes the record distinctive, then, was a compromise its author was uneasy about.
Where the title came from
There is a good story attached to the title, told by Joe Strummer of the Clash in a 1988 interview. Strummer said he ran into Orzabal in a restaurant and told him "you owe me a fiver" — the title, he pointed out, is a straight lift of the first line of the middle eight of the Clash's "Charlie Don't Surf". By Strummer's account, Orzabal reached into his pocket and handed over a five-pound note.
Treat that as Strummer's anecdote rather than a settled fact of authorship; it has been told from one side only. But it is the sort of detail that explains why a synth-pop hit has a title that sounds like a slogan on a wall.
Everyone claims it
Because the lyric names nothing, it has been annexed by everybody, and watching people do it is a decent measure of how the song works.
The Economist called it "a Cold War anthem" with a "timeless message", writing that "the song's lyrics speak to the anxieties of every age". Marc Ambinder used three of its lines in The Atlantic to open a piece about US government secrecy and abuse of classification powers. Dominic Pino in National Review went the other way and called it "a conservative pop song", reading the tension between personal ambition and the good uses of ambition as an echo of James Madison in the Federalist Papers.
Curt Smith publicly disputed that last one. It is the only interpretation on record that a member of the band has pushed back on, which tells you something about where they think the song sits.
Asked in 2017 whether the themes still applied, the band said they were "just as poignant" as when written, and updated the reference themselves: they had been writing about the United States and Russia, and the concern now was the United States and North Korea.
The music video
Directed by Nigel Dick and filmed across Los Angeles, Desert Hot Springs, Palm Springs and Cabazon in California — the Cabazon Dinosaurs, the roadside attraction off Interstate 10, appear briefly.
Smith drives a vintage Austin-Healey 3000 through the desert while the band is intercut performing in a studio; he stops at the Wheel Inn diner, makes a call from a phone booth, and is eventually surrounded by riders on dirt bikes and three-wheeled ATVs coming up behind him through the sand. It is, as HuffPost's Daryl Deino put it in ranking it third-best video of 1985, "pure Americana as it was in 1985" — made by two Englishmen singing about the will to power.
Smith has since said the shoot was "a disaster" and that Dick was "in tears" on the second night. He also described a serious accident during the off-road sequence, in which a child was thrown from a vehicle and knocked unconscious.
MTV put it into heavy rotation, and that rotation is the main reason the band broke America.
Directed by Nigel Dick, 1985 — the official video on the band's channel.
The Gulf War ban, and after
The song went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and in Canada and New Zealand, and to number two in the UK, Ireland and Australia. It won Best Single at the 1986 Brit Awards. Orzabal argued, not quietly, that it also deserved the Ivor Novello International Hit of the Year, which went to Paul Hardcastle's "19" — a record he dismissed as not a song at all but "a dialogue collage".
The clearest evidence that the political content is real rather than projected is what the BBC did with it. The corporation pulled the song from broadcast for the entire duration of the first Gulf War, from 2 August 1990 to 28 February 1991, on the grounds of its themes. Whatever the lyric leaves unnamed, a broadcaster in wartime had no difficulty working out what it was about.
Since then it has settled into the odd double life of a song that is both ubiquitous and unresolved. Rolling Stone placed it at 319 in its 2021 revision of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time; Pitchfork put it 82nd among songs of the 1980s, crediting its "vague message" with reaching a generation "fed up with political greed". In 2015 it was honoured at the BMI Awards in London for six million radio plays. Lorde's cover for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire in 2013 introduced it to an audience that heard the menace first and the shuffle second — arguably the reading Orzabal started with, before he changed the line.