The actual line is: "Halargian world." (Not "illogical world", "raunchy young world"(!), "enlarging your world", or a number of other interesting if not amusing guesses.) The real story: Halarge was an imaginary planet invented by either Chris Hughes or Ross Cullum during the recording of The Hurting. With Mad World's again-resurgent popularity, I'm getting asked more frequently about the last line on the album version from The Hurting, a line which I occasionally also sing in concert. Smith clarified the actual lyric in 2010: Ĭurt Smith's ad lib in the song's final chorus resulted in a mondegreen. We had no idea that it would become a hit. The intention was to gain attention from it and we'd hopefully build up a little following. "Mad World" was the first single off the finished album. Not that Bath is very mad – I should have called it "Bourgeois World"! That came when I lived above a pizza restaurant in Bath and I could look out onto the centre of the city. The band instead decided it may be something people would like to hear on the radio and held back its release, waiting to issue the song as a single in its own right after re-recording it with Chris Hughes, a former drummer with Adam and the Ants. "Mad World" began life as the intended B-side for Tears for Fears' second single " Pale Shelter (You Don't Give Me Love)". 8.5 Chart positions for Adam Lambert's version.8 Michael Andrews and Gary Jules version.6.5 Chart positions for Adam Lambert's version.6 Michael Andrews and Gary Jules version.Cause it really is a Mad World, and it's mostly sad, and only occasionally funny. They’ll continue running in scumscrabbling circles of indescribable averageness. And, Lord, sweet lord, wannabes and nevergonnabes all over the world would do well to listen, and learn.īut they won’t. Essential listening, in truth, for any fuckhead who decides they can write songs because they get a guitar for Christmas, or have cool hair, or sharp cheekbones, or sweet crotchtrix, or three-chord, coked-up dickthrob dreams.Īndrews’ magnificent arrangement encapsulates the original track’s confused resignation and enhances it to its logical ethereal fullness without once resorting to obvious, depressingly hamfisted chart/chord-trickery. This is one of the most important singles of the year, and despite the scrawny talons of the hype around it crushing the world's ears, it's incredible. And yadda, yadda, yadda, all the other bullshit that surrounds a record that in reality is an intense masterclass in intelligence, performance and expression. And don’t forget the usual undignified scrabbling for the defiled and demeaned UK Christmas Number One. That and a massive marketing budget for Donnie Darko. It all makes for an instantly-involving, everyman-ermine what the fuck is it all about three-minute tenderfoot empassioned plea for understanding.Īnd that’s why so many people have bought into it. Taking, of course, Tears For Fears’ 1983 student-synth slice of introspection as a template, the dulled piano figure is subtly joined by the legato, solemn cello and everso slight vocal reverb. In contrast to the aforementioned lipless, pointless, moose-and-Di-fucker though, Gary Jules delivers ‘Mad World’ with grace and understated musicality that, despite sounding exactly like Michael Stipe circa 1994, is up there with the most beautifully emotive and heartbiting, softshanking vocal performances.Īctually, Jules’ stroke of luck – and ours – is that film composer Michael Andrews is a masterful, striking arranger. Not since Bryan Sodding Adams has there been a track from a popular film that has both captured the entire nation’s imagination and also enjoyed wide appreciation from all ages of regular radiowhores and rednecks. If you haven’t heard this record by now, then you’re either deaf or dead.