Graduate – Acting My Age (1980)

Graduate – Acting My Age (1980)

A fun album for Tears For Fears fans. I even own the ‘Acting my Age+9’ CD, meaning that the 9 songs from the second unreleased CD are also on it. Non-TFF fans won’t be thrilled with this album, however, unless they’re Ska fans, because they do it really well!

Surprisingly funny songs!
That’s right, it was Destiny: who would have thought that two of the boys pictured on the cover would rule the world in the 80s as Tears For Fears? This re-released debut album surprises with songs I didn’t expect from the young Orzabal. A must-have for TFF fans.

In any case, for me, it’s an hour and sixteen minutes of pure bliss.
19 songs I don’t want to live without, and which I’d really like to have never heard.

I’m already a huge fan of the band, but as a Graduate, they were already great. Just like Kajagoogoo were as Art Nouveau. You’d never guess that members of the brilliant Split Enz created Crowded House either. And who’s heard of Tubeway Army, Gary Newman’s band? Or Soft Cell, Marc Almond’s band?
So many underrated or little-known bands!
Let’s add the Housemartins and Beautiful South to the list of bands that have a great link between them, just because it makes me ultra happy.

Here’s a little history of the band: Before their large-scale success with Tears for Fears, Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith had joined a ska band called Graduate in the late 1970s (when they were not yet eighteen), a reference to the film The Graduate (starring Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross), whose band often played one of the soundtrack’s key songs, Mrs. Robinson by Simon and Garfunkel, on stage. Robinson, composed by Simon and Garfunkel.

The group, signed to the famous British label Pye Records, produced the album, including the single Elvis Should Play Ska (a reference to Elvis Costello), which just missed the Top 100 in the UK (No. 106), but did better in Spain, the Netherlands and Germany, giving Roland – the group’s lead singer – and Curt the opportunity to tour several countries and appear on various television programmes, thereby gaining a certain amount of notoriety.
But after differences of opinion, the two friends left the band…
Too bad for Graduate, so much the better for Tears for Fears!

My Rating