Tears For Fears feel that they have passed through their experimental sampling period and are now using the most current hard-tech equipment to produce a more natural sound. First let's talk about drinking...

Is primal therapy a viable alternative to heavy drinking?

"Do you seriously want me to answer that? It's a healthy alternative to drinking. You don't know much about this do you? I've read nearly all of Janov's books and it's not all about lying on the floor screaming."

Fine. Tell me something very technical, Roland.

"Okay. I'm glad that the chips on the Linn 9000 are 8K instead of 4K. Not only that, our producer blew us a Drumulator snare chip for our Linn 2 which is not only technical it's illegal."

Roland Orzabal chuckles smugly and reclines on the sofa. He's playing pass the piss-take with International Musician and he's just won a round on points. He sniggers again and embraces his knees triumphantly. Roland likes a laugh. Mainly his own.

"Do you mime?", enunciates a meek boy with a Birmingham accent.

Curt Smith guffaws on the other end of the phone.

"Yeah, but we always mime in tune."

The boy laughs nervously on cue.

Tell me something very technical, Curt.

"Bleepableepasleebeebabeep. Actually that's a computer programme that I learnt off by heart."

Laugh? He certainly did.

You can't hold Tears For Fears' arrogance against them. They're young, talented and self-actualising at a frightening rate. They've got a startingly good debut LP and an excellent clutch of singles under their belts. They own a large part of a 24 track studio in Bath with an Otari tape machine and a Soundcraft desk. They also own an Emulator II and a Linn 9000. They have "a very good knowledge of how to make music," and they have "all the toys" with which to do just that. Now they have a second LP and they want press. Fortunately I want quotes. Unfortunately I haven't heard the new meisterwerk. Roland isn't happy.

"Well that's fucking stupid isn't it? Bloody doing the interview without bloody hearing the bloody album. Typical!"

It allows for objectivity. You have to tell me about it.

"Oh, it's brill, it's great. Will that do?"

Curt quotes.

"It's more of a progression than a departure. It's more of a Rock'n' Roll album. Not Rock so much, more Rock 'n' Roll. There's less layered synths and a lot more guitar. There's a lot of playing on it."

Less sampling?

"No," says Roland, "how could there be? There wasn't any sampling on The Hurting — that was done on a JP8 and a Prophet. But we used a Synclavier on Mother's Talk though. We've just got an Emulator II but they didn't send us the bloody booklet with it, so we don't know how to multi-sample or anything. But it's a good machine and it'll be better when we learn how to use it properly. The sounds are better than the I, which we've sold. We didn't bother copying the samples because most of our samples are either taken off tape or defunct so we'll probably take them off tape again with the II."

Technocrats and laymen alike have been amazed by the capabilities of the Linn 9000. Roland finds it a letdown.

"I was very disappointed with the sounds. They're all just stock Linn Drum sounds. I think you have to go and search through the chips before you find the best sounds. We did that with the Linn 2 and got much better sounds. Obviously the 9000 is more than just a drum machine but initially I was disappointed."

Don't you find it similar in essence to Page R on the Fairlight?

"No, because you can't see what you programme. We didn't use that one on the album anyway — we used the Fairlight and various synthesizers like the Prophet T8, the Emulator and the Wave 2.2. We hired in a 2.3 as well for the sequencer because that's MIDI. We used bits of Prophet 5 and DX7. We used three different drummers too, real live ones!"

Are Tears For Fears advocates of the FM sound?

"We're advocates of Advocaat," smirks Roland. "Well, I had a quick go on the DX1 up at Syco and it's okay. It's better than the DX7. DX7s work well as an addition, as a sort of mixer. For instance we recently used the grand piano sound on the Emulator II mixed with one of the electric piano sounds on the DX7 and that sounded beautiful because what the Emulator was lacking was brightness, which the DX7 had. The scope between the real sampled sounds mixed with the FM stuff is great."

"You can get wrapped up in the intricacies of sampling and forget that music is a form of communication"

That's like an upmarket version of the old analogue complementing digital idea?

"Yeah, I suppose you're right," concedes Roland.

Curt licks his finger and draws a downward stroke in the air.

Are guitars more communicative instruments than synthesizers or random juxtapositions of sampled sounds?

"No," disagrees Curt, "not necessarily. But you can get wrapped up in the intricacies of sampling and forget that music is a form of communication."

"We're communicating through writing songs now," adds Roland, "what we've concentrated on is writing simpler songs as opposed to making up clever sounds. It's more important.

"Also, if you're a guitarist you can emote better through a guitar than you can a keyboard simply because that's the instrument you've learnt to play. You can probably get more emotive sounds out of a keyboard but it hasn't got that physicality. The playing itself is emotive."

"Aren't you going to ask us what we're doing playing guitars and basses when we're a synth duo?" sneers Curt sardonically.

Tell me something very hard tech about your bass, Curt.

"It's a Status. They're just about the best basses you can get. I've got a Steinberger too but the Steinberger only has one 'Steinberger' sound whereas the Status has thousands in comparison. I use a fairly straight sound on it and DI it in the studio. It sounds best when it's on. Its 'plugged in' sound is probably its best." Curt flashes the wind up grin and winds up. Roland picks up.

"Shall I tell you about my guitar collection and be really boring?"

Please, but only if it's peppered with one-liners.

"I've got a Fender which is called The Strat. It's cleaner than a normal Strat and it's got a better bottom end so it's better for chords. For the album we whacked that through a JC 120 and we had it in a small, bright room with a close mike and an ambient compressed mike. For the solo stuff like the solo on Shout I used a Gordon Smith which is shaped like a Yamaha guitar and sounds like a Les Paul. Very much a Raark guitar. I've got a little Tokai Strat copy which has got this really good thin sound and it's also a very light guitar to play, and there's the Firebird which I haven't used too much lately apart from some publicity shots."

Did you play any actual keyboards on the LP.

"Some tracks we did, yeah," affirms Roland, "but a lot of it is sequenced stuff. Ian Stanley played some. He's a classically trained pianist but because of my lack of technical ability on a piano I can pick out very simple but memorable lines rather than farting about. I actually intend to do a solo album of piano pieces under the name of Leonard Apple. I'm going to play for a week and then edit together all the best bits like Stockhausen. You'll be very surprised, just wait."

Do Tears For Fears recognise guitar heroes?

"David Byrne is a great guitarist," enthuses Roland. "I tried to copy that sound he gets when we did The Hurting. That really short sound where he picks against the neck of the guitar. I actually pull the strings away from the fret board with the plectrum and let them slap against the neck. So instead of the note going duurr it goes dung. I prefer dung to duurr."

Suddenly Roland comes on a bit wacky and leaps to his feet pointing at Curt's T-shirt. "He's got a Fred Perry on," he shrieks with mock indignation, "he's a mod! It's a pink Fred Perry. He's a gay mod!" Not wishing to be Curt I pretend to be a sofa cover. Luckily the soliloquy draws to a close. "Not that there's anything wrong with gay mods. Some of my best friends have spoken to them." Roland chokes with laughter and sits down again.

"We're now unashamedly embracing real instruments and the playing of real instruments"

Have Curt and Roland now realised that machines have their place in music?

"Machines are harmless," opines Roland. "Where machines were once a trend, and electronic music was a trend, they now have been absorbed by music in general and they play their part within that structure. Because you use electronic instruments now that doesn't automatically make you an electronic band."

Will they use machines live?

"We'll use the Linn 2, a lot of the percussion we use will be Linn 2 percussion and the 9000 we'll probably use for the drum sounds with sequences as well."

"But it will be a seven-piece band," asserts Roland, "another guitar, two keyboard players the lot. I think we are actually better live than we are in the studio."

Could you play on a Country & Western session?

"Yep," declares Curt, "we'd probably take it over. Tell everybody what to do and how to do it."

Roland and Curt have something of a discrepancy in the volumes of their voices. Roland has a very loud voice, and sings Just One Cornetto in a noisy operatic fashion to prove this point, whereas Curt's voice is quiet but confident.

"It's actually quite a problem," confides Curt, "especially live. I couldn't sing loud enough and Roland used to break the microphones. So I went to Tona de Brett to improve my breathing so that I could sing a little bit louder but without actually shouting and damaging my voice. If we have to sing harmonies into the same mike in the studio Roland has to stand about 20 yards away and I have to stand on top of it."

Will you admit to stealing samples from records? Trevor Horn has stolen from John Bonham, Depeche Mode used a Frankie drum beat...

"Well I'll tell you this," states Roland almost didactically, "we weren't asked to play on the Band Aid record but they stole the first tom off The Hurting and used it way upfront in the mix. That's dead true; Midge told us in Munich recently. But if you listen to the B-side of Mother's Talk, that's all made up of other people's records. We just sampled them with the Emulator I and because that changed the sounds slightly they were virtually unrecognisable so we could use them and mix them together. I've nothing against that, it's not really piracy or bootlegging, it's creative use of other people's ideas. Like advanced plagiarism."

How do you feel about the imminent modular revolution? Roland again.

"It'll do what everyone has been trying to do all along in that it gets as many different sounds from as small a unit as possible. The idea is similar to the idea of MIDI in that it's very obvious and will lead to much easier, freer use of all the various makes of equipment, and of course it'll make things cheaper."

Have you outgrown the urban landscape that Depeche Mode appear to be trapped in?

"I think as a piece of work The Way You Are was the pinnacle of our industrial type effected metallic sampled sound. We've got more into a natural feel, less regimented," decides Curt.

"We're much more into the picnic scene now," grins Roland, "cucumber sandwiches without the crusts, a flask of Earl Grey, a peeled orange, babbling brooks and a bloody big skip right in the middle that we could hit with our anvils. No, it's just that we've passed through that stage. Don't forget when we started Rock 'n' Roll was a dirty word. Now we're unashamedly embracing real instruments and the playing of real instruments and simple melodies. I mean we even made a mistake on this album... and left it on!

This inspires Curt to launch into an impression of A Young One during which he refers to himself as "pretty bloody crazy guy" and snorts a lot.

Roland chortles and joins his partner impersonating the self-same Young One.

The sofa blushes.