Tears For Fears' classic second album, Songs From The Big Chair, was going to be re-released whether the band liked it or not.

"So we thought we might as well get involved," says Roland Orzabal.

He and Curt Smith formed the duo in 1981, after their previous band Graduate failed to take off. Songs From The Big Chair was released in 1985 and built on the success of their platinum-selling debut The Hurting.

"There's an arm at every record label devoted to this kind of thing," Orzabal, 53, continues. "You know, a department that puts together old products in new and exciting ways, with or without the artists' permission.

"Seeing as this is the king of all re-releases, we wanted to part of it."

He's not kidding on that front. The album, which spent six months in the Top 10 of the UK album chart and five weeks at No 1 in America, is now available in five different formats, including a six-disc set that features 5.1 surround sound mixes of the album, remastered by engineer Steven Wilson.

"The hardest part for us was finding all the original tapes," says Orzabal, who now divides his time between Los Angeles and the UK, although Smith, also 53, lives on the US West Coast permanently.

"It was a real trip down memory lane. Apart from the few songs off the album we play live, I haven't listened to it in 15 years or more."

The songs they play live, of course, are Shout, Head Over Heels and Everybody Wants To Rule The World, all gigantic hits, still played by radio stations around the world.

"Those songs have been rammed down people's throats since they were recorded. And thank God for that," Ozabal adds, referring to the airplay royalty cheques that presumably drop through his letterbox each year.

What took him aback was how he felt hearing The Working Hour for the first time in so long.

"It has a lot of power and emotion in it, and it surprised me. It got me thinking about the circumstances in which it was written."

Orzabal and Smith were 22 when they wrote Songs From The Big Chair, described by Melody Maker magazine upon release as 'one of the finest statements of the 1980s'.

"My eldest son is turning 23 soon," says Orzabal, "and that got me thinking. We were so young, just 19 when we signed to Polygram. I celebrated my 21st birthday in Abbey Road Studios' cafe, two months before we were on Top Of The Pops for the first time."

He describes recording their debut, The Hurting, as being "in a prison", both founding members and adopted players Ian Stanley and Manny Elias in a studio in London away from their families and loved ones back in Bath.

"We were away for weeks at a time, working round the clock, seven days a week," he says.

When it came time to do the follow-up, they had few, if any, songs written, but knew they didn't want a repeat of the sessions for The Hurting.

Orzabal bought a recording desk and installed it in Stanley's house, effectively turning his living room into a studio.

"I don't know if it was a happier time," he says. "I don't know if happiness is a necessary ingredient in making a great album. It was much more enjoyable, I know that much, and it was much more of a laugh. And we'd exorcised our philosophical demon during making The Hurting. We said everything we needed to say. That was Tears For Fears as inspired by Arthur Janov's Primal Therapy and all of his books."

American psychotherapist Janov gained huge notoriety in 1970, after publishing The Primal Scream when John Lennon and Yoko Ono became patients of his. The name Tears For Fears was taken from a phrase used in his therapy, which involved patients addressing long-repressed pain from their childhood. Orzabal and Smith in fact met Janov at the height of their fame, but later expressed disappointment that he'd "gone Hollywood" and wanted them to write him a musical.

"When we were writing Songs From The Big Chair, we were starting to grow up really," says Orzabal. "We were looking to the outer world, not the inner world as we had before."

The album is a complex sounding one; sophisticated, avant garde, even, by chart pop standards of the day. It's since been criticised for being overblown or overproduced, but it's hard not to be taken along by the sheer quality of it all.

"We were listening to Peter Gabriel's third album, David Bowie's Scary Monsters and other high-end rock music," says Orzabal. "We weren't sure if we were really the age to achieve that sort of thing ourselves, but we did go somewhere between standard pop and that complex music we loved.

"Chris Hughes, the producer of our first two albums, would always play us loads of Frank Zappa, and Pink Floyd and all of that classic rock, so we were constantly hearing new things. There were a lot of things that we drew from."

Initially, things didn't go too well with the album, with the label intervening after hearing two songs, The Way You Are and then Mothers Talk, and demanding the band write and record something more palatable. "We were teen mag fodder, too, so we needed to have hits," says Orzabal.

After a little more work, they had Head Over Heels and The Working Hour, but it was the chorus of Shout that made their record label realise what potential they had on their hands.

"Shout was released rather riskily around Christmas in 1983, stacked up against Paul McCartney's The Frog Chorus and Wham!'s Last Christmas, so it was an odd time and we stuck out like a sore thumb. Then Everybody Wants To Rule The World came out."

"I was comfortable with the bombastic nature of Shout, but Everybody Wants To Rule The World was an anomaly of everything we'd done before. It was bright and really bloody simple, not dark and complex like Mad World or Pale Shelters, and it was sarcastic, so it didn't sit well with anyone.

"But once we'd recorded it, we listened back and realised it just took care of itself."

While the band has never folded, Orzabal and Smith did go their separate ways in 1991, after the release of third album Seeds Of Love. Orzabal carried on the name on his own, releasing two albums, Elemental and Raoul And The Kings Of Spain in 1993 and 1995 respectively.

They reunited in 2000, with the resulting album Everybody Loves A Happy Ending released in 2005. The famously unprolific pair are currently working on what will be their seventh album, although Orzabal has reservations.

"It's happening, but it changes every day. We have a few songs amassed but I still think we need one or two more songs that will define what the record will be. It was easy with the last one, because the whole point is that we were back together. Now we've been back together for a long time and we need to find something else to say.

"At no point, in my opinion, is there a point to putting out an album without it meaning something, although I said that about Songs From The Big Chair and look where we are."

:: A reissued version of Songs From The Big Chair by Tears For Fears is available now. Visit www.tearsforfears.com