Roland Orzabal

Roland Orzabal wrote Everybody Wants to Rule the World, a song about power that sounds like a holiday, and has spent forty years in Tears for Fears making records that work the same trick.

He was born in Portsmouth on 22 August 1961 with the Sun on the very last degree of Leo. A Sun at the end of a sign tends to read as that sign used up and examined rather than simply inhabited, and Leo at the end of itself is performance with a view of performance. Five planets sit in earth against one in air, so the chart is practical and short of distance, and the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn are grouped together in Capricorn, which is the sign that wants the thing actually built. A songwriter rather than a frontman is what that distribution produces.

Mercury sits conjunct Pluto within three quarters of a degree, and his Moon makes an easy angle to the same planet eight minutes of arc from exact. Mercury is speech and Pluto is what refuses to be said politely; the Moon is feeling. Having both tied to Pluto describes a writer drawn to the uncomfortable thing underneath a pleasant surface, which is a fair technical account of a catalogue built on cheerful arrangements and bleak lyrics.

Venus makes a creative angle to Mars a tenth of a degree off, which is taste and drive in productive agreement, and the Sun sits awkwardly against Jupiter at the same distance. Wanting more than is quite sensible, with the ability to make it, is the combination that produces an album aiming at something enormous and getting there.

The songs have outlasted the decade that claimed them, which is the part no chart can promise and this one at least does not contradict: an earth-heavy chart builds things that stay, and a Leo Sun on its final degree was never going to be satisfied with having been of its moment.