Producer Chris Hughes On Helming Hit ‘80s Albums By Adam And The Ants, Tears For Fears

The early to mid 1980s was a golden age for British pop music that saw a good number of musicians scoring pop hits and making eye-catching videos for the MTV generation. Among those stars from that era were Adam and the Ants and Tears for Fears—two bands who could not have been more different from each other. Led by their charismatic lead singer Adam Ant, the Ants found success as a New Wave, swashbuckling group with such hits as “Ant Music,” “Dog Eat Dog” and “Stand and Deliver.” Meanwhile, Tears for Fears—the duo of Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith—fused state-of-the-art electronic sounds with thoughtful, mature lyrics. As a result, Tears for Fears also became a presence on the charts with the now-classics “Mad World,” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and “Shout.”

Aside from being British, the common thing those two acts shared was Chris Merrick Hughes, who produced both Adam and the Ants’ 1980 breakthrough album Kings of the Wild Frontier and Tears for Fears’ blockbuster 1985 record Songs From the Big Chair. This year, those two albums celebrated milestones this year as Kings of the Wild Frontier and Songs from the Big Chair turned 40 and 35 respectively. “It’s so weird because I’ve worked on those records,” says Hughes, who has also produced and collaborated with such artists as Robert Plant, Peter Gabriel, Howard Jones and Paul McCartney, “and you do your best. You commune with other people and you make the record as straightforward or as complex as it is. And then years and years later, people are still enjoying those records.”

In 1980, Hughes played a significant role in reviving Adam Ant’s career, which was flagging after British punk rock’s demise. Adding insult to injury, the three other members of the Ants —Matthew Ashman, Leigh Gorman and Dave Barbarossa — left him to form the band Bow Wow Wow. Undeterred, Adam formed a new group of Ants that included guitarist Marco Pirroni. Hughes began working with the newly reconfigured Adam and the Ants as producer for their single “Cartrouble.” “We were in Rockfield, which was a big studio in Wales,” says Hughes. “We were recording a couple of tracks, “Cartrouble” and “Kick,” the first things I did with Marco and Adam. The tracks were brought up to London. Adam got a publishing deal immediately on the strength of the fact that they were somewhat poppier.”

In addition to being Adam and the Ants’ producer, Hughes was recruited as one of the two drummers in the band along with Terry Lee Miall (bassist Kevin Mooney completed the new Ants lineup). Hughes’ and Miall’s dual drumming drew particularly from the Burundi beat. “I really hadn’t thought about [drumming] as an option,” says Hughes, “because I was interested in engineering or producing. So for the next two-and-a-half years, I was one of his drummers and also producing his records. It was a fantastic time.”

Hughes and the band worked on what would become the Kings of the Wild Frontier album during the summer of 1980. “They came out to my house in south London,” he recalls. “They had an idea of the track “Kings of the Wild Frontier” and it had a Burundi thing. The idea was ‘Let’s just make a demo and this Burundi thing.’ I understood the nature of the rhythms that [Adam] wanted and how the drums might work, so I had a fairly intuitive sense of how that would work.

“I didn’t know whether that was going to be like a huge hit,” he continues, “because I thought it was a little bit too extreme for pop radio. But I knew it was great, I knew it was a fantastic bit of work. But then things like “Ant Music”—when that turned up, I thought: ‘Oh my word, yeah.’ And “Dog Eat Dog”—‘yeah, this could be a big thing.’”

Aside from post-punk and New Wave, Kings of the Wild Frontier’s eclectic sound included hard rock, global music and even spaghetti western. More importantly, the record evoked a colorful swagger and energy that contrasted from punk’s grayness. “A lot of the aspects in that record are directly due to Adam’s and Marco’s sense of humor and taste,” Hughes says. “Sometimes it’s very subtle, sometimes it’s very vulgar, but it’s very clever and witty. I absolutely loved their sense of how they created things, or at least how they wanted it to be.”

By this time, the Ants got a deal with CBS Records and developed an enthusiastic fan following. Following an appearance on the British music TV show Top of the Pops, the Ants’ popularity skyrocketed. Between 1980 and 1981, ‘Antmania’ took Britain by storm, and the Kings of the Wild Frontier album and its follow-up Prince Charming (also produced by Hughes) topped the British charts. “It’s very exciting and chaotic,” Hughes recalls of ‘Antmania.’ “One minute, we were doing a TV show in Spain, and then we got a telegram saying that “Stand and Deliver” had gone to number one back in England. And so we flew back to do Top of the Pops, and then we flew off to somewhere else because we had a tour in the process. It was kind of a little bit of headless chicken at the time. But we loved it. It was really exciting.”

After the Ants broke up and Adam went solo in 1982, Hughes began producing a then-relatively unknown musical duo from Bath, England called Tears for Fears—a tremendously fruitful collaboration that yielded their 1983 debut album, the tense and moody The Hurting. That record took advantage of Hughes’ interest in electronic music, particularly involving synthesizers. “I thought they would be stars on some level,” he says of first working with Orzabal and Smith, “because they were interesting and talented and had opinions. They weren’t quite the norm. So I thought: ‘Yeah, this is somewhat eccentric, but very intelligent.’”

In contrast to the The Hurting, Tears’ for Fears’ next record, 1985’s Songs From the Big Chair, sounded more extroverted and approachable. In the liner notes to the 2005 reissue of the album, Smith credited Hughes for bringing a more mainstream rock influence to the duo’s sound, from the likes of Bryan Adams and Bruce Springsteen. “I had been traveling to America, and played drums for Alex Chilton,” says Hughes. “I had a great understanding of American music and what was starting to be huge and impressive. I remember saying things like on the song “Mother’s Talk”: ‘Yeah, let’s get some power guitar.’”

“Roland didn’t need much persuading,” Hughes says of the new direction. “It’s not like he was just a synth-head and the guitar was an anathema. It wasn’t hard to convince him it was worth trying. He’s a phenomenal guitar player and a great keyboard player. It was just a re-emphasis: “Let’s bring guitars into the focus.’”

Hughes co-wrote with Orzabal the classic hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” which has since been Tears for Fears’ signature song. “That was clearly aimed at a kind of drive-time, Americana, easy-listening, feel-good, ‘let’s just do our commute type’ track,” Hughes says, who recalls Orzabal working with two chords led to the song’s underlying yet recognizable hook.

“Every now again, he would have an acoustic guitar and he’d just go (sings the two chords). I said, ‘What is that?’ ‘It’s just two chords.’ I plotted it out and programmed a little box and a little synth. And every now and again in the studio, I’d just play this thing trying to seek the idea of these two chords and a shuffle beat.

”[Roland] didn’t really want to write it,” Hughes adds. “Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But he wasn’t going: “Okay, let’s do something. Let’s go.” He was kind of hovering around, and nothing had really fermented. One day I said: ‘Look, that track with the two chords. Come on, let’s do something.’ I think maybe he had to think about it over the weekend. And he had some version in his head and he went: ‘Yeah, that could be a tune (sings some notes). I just remember saying: ‘Stop everything. Let’s get this on the board and start building this.’ Myself, Roland and Ian [Stanley] basically sat in the studio until we finished it.”

On the other hand, the creation of the album’s other biggest song, “Shout,” was more of an involved process. “Shout had taken months,” says Hughes, who provided the powerful drumming for the track. “We kept extending bits and changing bits. I mean, talk about guitars—I remember saying to Roland: ‘We need a guitar solo here on “Shout.”’ He said: ‘No, no, we don’t.’

“I put some drums on there, and there was a moment where a guitar solo could happen. (laughs) In a slightly humorous and rebellious mode, Roland plays a theme, “I’ll take the high road, you take the low road,” which is like a Scottish bagpipe theme. It’s very emotional, it’s a very British piece of music. That became the guitar theme in “Shout.” He was doing it in a slightly flippant way, because I was saying: ‘Let’s have something uplifting and have a top-of-the-mountain time.’”

In America, Songs from the Big Chair went to number one on the Billboard charts along with its singles “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and “Shout.” “When you work on anything,” says Hughes, “you try and hold an even keel about whether something’s going to be regarded as appalling or amazing. Part of the job is you do your best and you try to make it good. Quite frankly, the more records you make, the more you’ve got your armor on (laughs), and you’re prepared for the phone call that goes ‘This is dead in the water’ or ‘Hey, we just made the silver disc.’ You kind of get used to the notion of that.”

In the present, Hughes has concentrated more on creating his own music. In 1994, he released an avant garde album Shift, which was inspired by work of the American minimalist composer Steve Reich (Shift was later reissued in 2008). “When I was young, my father took me to see Steve Reich for the first performance of “Drumming” in London in 1972. I was absolutely blown away. [Years later] when I had the chance, I thought, ‘I’m between albums, I’ll just put some ideas together,’ and the ideas became Shift.”

Three years ago, Hughes put out another album, Eirenic Life, which married piano-dominated compositions with electronic sounds. Currently, he’s working on a follow-up record and also hinted at collaborating with singer Lloyd Cole. “Lloyd’s a fantastic musician and songwriter, and we speak quite a lot and talk about electronic music and graphics and all sorts of ideas and humor,” says Hughes. “So I think there’s probably some collaboration probably in the next year if we come out of [the pandemic].”

“I’m looking forward to how the next [record] turns out,” he says. “I will be doing more and more composition and more and more collaboration. In a lot of ways, there are so many new people doing new things in new ways, which is wonderful. But I think I’m more inclined to move into composition more than production.”