When your breakthrough single is Mad World from an album entitled The Hurting – a form of trauma-based psychotherapy - you get the impression a gig at a cricket ground wasn’t what the youthful 80s Tears for Fears had envisaged.

In those days they were producing moody and mysterious synth pop, laced with lyrics about pale shelter or the dreams in which they were dying being the best they ever had.

Times change. Sunday night at the Spitfire Ground in Canterbury is where you find the 2019 Tears for Fears. Older and definitely battle-hardened after a career which has had the plethora of ups and downs, break-ups and reunions (though probably not as many as Love Island witnesses) which seem to epitomise the life of a rock star.

Throughout those 36 years from the time of initial chart success what has never been in doubt has been the ability of Tears for Fears to write meaningful and anthemic pop songs.

And they gave witness to that in front of the thousands in the audience at Kent cricket club’s headquarters.

For years Tears for Fears didn’t play gigs in the UK, feeling undervalued compared to the huge success they enjoyed in America and around the world. The smile on Roland’s face suggests you sense their opinion may now have changed if the love shown to them on a cool but dry Sunday evening in Kent is anything to go by.

With the duo having the confidence to open their set with arguably their biggest hit, Everybody Wants to Rule The World, the audience knew Curt and Roland were going to take them on a full tour of their greatest hits repertoire. It may be less 80s synth and more 21st Century rock nowadays, nevertheless the duo clearly aimed to please with their set list and they didn’t disappoint.

And the 90-minute set reminded the audience that it is the different characters the pair bring to their music that has made them such a success more than 35 years on from their early chart success.

While you sense Roland is more than happy pontificating on the politician’s greed in his performance of Sowing The Seeds of Love, birthday boy Curt was more happily sharing a bit of family life as he told the massed ranks in front of him of how he had spent the day trying to educate his American daughter on who the Archbishop of Canterbury is.

But by and large the chat was kept to a minimum as the music did the talking with their many hits, including Head Over Heels, Change, Woman In Chains and Pale Shelter, interwoven with album tracks to keep the diehard Tears fans happy – and along with Roland’s version of Radiohead’s Creep.

All rounded off with an encore of only one song, Shout.

Typical Tears for Fears, always happy to do things that little bit differently.

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