Tears For Fears: how we made Mad World

Roland Orzabal, songwriter

Mad World hasn't dated because it's expressive of a period I call the teenage menopause, where your hormones are going crazy as you're leaving childhood. Your fingers are on the cliff and you're about to drop off, but somehow you cling on.

I wrote it when I was 19, on the dole in Bath. We're known as a synthesiser group, but back then I just had an acoustic guitar. I've not told many people this, but I was listening to Radio 1 on this tinny radio and Duran Duran's Girls on Film came on. I just thought: "I'm going to have a crack at something like that." I did and ended up with Mad World. It sounded pretty awful on guitar, though, with just me singing. However, we were fortunate enough to be given an opportunity by a guy called Ian Stanley to go to his very big house and muck about on his synthesiser. Ian became our keyboard player and he had a drum machine, too. All we needed was someone who knew how to work it. Eventually, we made the first demo of Mad World still with me singing. But I didn't like it. So I said to Curt [Smith]: "Look, you sing it." And suddenly it sounded fabulous.

Just before that, we'd been in this mod band called Graduate, but Gary Numan had shocked us out of all that. He was getting No 1s wearing black eyeliner, and there we were doing knees-ups to Madness. So we split from the band. I got an asymmetrical hairstyle, Curt got plaits, and we started listening to synthesiser music.

There was a group around called Dalek I Love You. One of their lyrics went something like "I believe the world's gone mad" which summed up my feelings of alienation from the rat race. I had suffered from depression in my childhood. My dad had been in the second world war, had electric shock treatment, suffered from anxiety and was abusive to my mum. I kept a lid on my feelings at school but, when I was 18, dropped out of everything and couldn't even be bothered to get out of bed. I poured all this into the song.

A guitar teacher we knew introduced us to Arthur Janov's psychology book The Primal Scream. Mad World's chorus – "The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had" – is from Janov's idea that nightmares can be good because they release tension.

The song was intended as a B-side but Polygram said it was too good, so it became our third single. I'd come up with this dance for it and used to do it a lot in the studio, so the record company told me I had to do it in the video, since Curt was singing and there was nothing else for me to do. So there I was, stuck by this lake doing my flying wombat impersonation, but it worked.

Two decades later, Gary Jules sang Mad World for the film Donnie Darko and got the Christmas No 1 in 2003. That was probably the proudest moment of my career. I was in my 40s and had forgotten how I felt when I wrote all those Tears for Fears songs. I thought: "Thank God for the 19-year-old Roland Orzabal. Thank God he got depressed."

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Curt Smith, singer

Mad World was easy for me to sing because I could relate to Roland's lyrics. We were both the middle of three sons and had been brought up by single mothers with absent fathers. My father always worked away, and died when I was 17, but I hated him by that point. It hit me later in life, but back then I was teenage and angry. The song was the perfect platform. It worked better with my voice because it's more melancholic, darker.

We'd been listening to Remain in Light by Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel's eponymous third album and Scary Monsters by David Bowie. These were amazingly produced, very rhythmic records that made us want to try something similar. Access to synthesisers gave us the chance to experiment. Mad World's distinctive percussion intro was played on a Roland CR-78 drum machine. We first recorded it at twice the speed, but it sounded great slowed down.

We released Mad World as a single because we felt the music press would like it. But it was also supposed to just give us a foothold for the next two singles, which were more commercial. We didn't expect it to become a hit. All sorts of people have covered itGary Jules sang "enlarging your world" at one bit, but the correct lyric is actually "Halargian world". Producer Chris Hughes had a running joke in the studio about this made-up planet and a catchphrase: "Oh, that's so Halargian." I put it in the song, and it sounded right.

It is a dark song but it brings back happy memories. When we made the video in a country estate on the cheap, we bussed all our friends and family up from Bath and had a fun day. The woman who's having the birthday party in the video is my mum.