Graduate - Graduate (1980/1991)

Graduate was the ska youth group of Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, who from 1982 would star in an important musical stage at the helm of Tears For Fears. Graduate were formed in bath in 1979 and took their name from the fact that they used to open their gigs with a cover version of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Mrs Robinson’ as featured in the sublime film ‘The Graduate’. The group consisted of John Baker, guitar and vocals; Steve Buck, keyboards and flautist; Andy Marsden, drums; Roland Orzabal, guitar and keyboards; Curt Smith, bass and synthesizers. It would appear that Curt was not an original member of the band. Roland, John and Andy were gigging around before the name Graduate was taken on.

The band were regarded as one of the many ska influenced groups active during the mod-revival of the 1970’s. Andy disagrees with this analogy. “We happened to be around at the end of the 70’s along with a number of ska influenced groups such as Selector, Bad Manners, Madness etc but we were not two tone (as ska was called then). Roland had heard an interview given by Elvis Costello where he said that all ska groups at that time were simply “one hit wonders” trying to cash-in on the mod revival. Rol felt that his comments were sour grapes because a lot of the songs in the charts at that time were doing better than Elvis Costello’s songs. Because of this, Rol wrote ‘Elvis Should Play Ska’. In other words – stop moaning and write a ska song yourself. It was basically a mickey-take, but because it was written in a ska fashion, the record company latched onto the ‘ska’ thing. No other Graduate songs were similar, but Pye Records decided to package the band with that image, and even took us down the kings road in Chelsea to choose zoot suits. We had to wear these dark green suits at all our gigs (they were like the suits the beatles wore in the 60’s) and we were photographed wearing them on the cover of the ‘Acting My Age’ album, as well as in some other photo shoots. Because of this, a lot of people thought we were a ska band, which was of course not the case.”