This reminds me of an article in The Guardian I read towards the end of last year regarding a new album by Tears for Fears. This part is what is relevant to Alice.
"But the upturn in the band’s career coincided with difficulties for Orzabal. In the summer of 2017, his wife Caroline – his partner since they were teenagers – died. He talks about her with a kind of tender openness that seems quite at odds with a newspaper interview. In 2007, he says, Caroline hit menopause. “And then the wheels came off, and she went from being extremely feisty and spirited and up, and so charismatic, to hitting depression. And menopause was probably a smokescreen.”
Caroline was prescribed medication, the kind you are not meant to drink while taking. She continued to do so anyway, entering a cycle of increased mental anguish and suicidal ideation. Orzabal laments the treatment of depression with pills. “There should be real strict controls on what people are dealing with.”
Plus, he says, his wife was adept at hiding the truth of her condition. “Caroline was a little bit lax and naughty when she would see doctors. She wouldn’t be 100% honest, she would talk about menopause: she would talk about empty nest syndrome – that became the next one, and it wasn’t that at all. It was a number of things. And it was her liver, cirrhosis, and that was a long time coming.”
Caroline never stopped drinking. “Which is partly my fault because I’m a drinker, too. If I’d known that was the reason …” He trails off. “But I didn’t. I don’t know how commonly known it is that alcohol is far more dangerous for a woman than it is for a man, and the problem was Caroline used to match me. But again, that’s my own ignorance and stupidity at what was going on, because at that point in time there should have been no alcohol anywhere, that’s a fact.”
She developed alcohol-related dementia. “So it was five years of hell where I became her carer,” says Orzabal. “I had a care company as well to take the weight off me, and there we were in our big country house in the West Country with an increasingly shrinking circle of friends and it was pretty harrowing.” He lets out a long breath, and the three of us sit, wet-eyed around the boardroom table.
It was while Caroline was ill that Orzabal began to write several of the songs that appear on The Tipping Point. “I needed some respite from the constant illness, the constant dysfunction, and as per usual, as I’ve always done all my life, they went into lyrics and songs,” he says.
The song Please Be Happy was “inspired by watching someone you love sitting in a chair all day, not doing anything, not moving, and when she does, she goes up the stairs with a glass of wine, and [the glass] crashes on the stairs”. The title track recalls sitting in Caroline’s hospital room, “looking at someone and waiting for the point when they are more dead than alive”.
The year that followed Caroline’s death, Orzabal suffered his own health issues, spent time in rehab and postponed the band’s world tour. “I was going through hell,” he says. Smith, fearing he might exacerbate his bandmate’s problems, kept his distance."
Caroline Orzabal died at age 55.
