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| The sensibility was always complicated. |
Pretty sure this one never fully checked out of the Western zeitgeist, but you tell me.
The Hit
For whatever reason the aside, “Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto, you’re beautiful” remains one of my main memories of Thomas Dolby’s, “She Blinded Me with Science.” As people of a certain age know, that song was all over the place in the early 1980s (circa 1982), so I always thought of Dolby as a big star. He did better in the UK – and wasn’t too shabby on U.S. album sales at his peak – but that single was his only U.S. hit. It topped out a No. 5...but, swear to God, MTV had that on whatever’s denser than heavy rotation for a solid year.
Here's where I admit I didn’t mind it. It’s nicely busy, the tones perky, the rhythm bouncy and kind of fun; better, the whole thing feels a bit campy. And, if you ever thought Dolby came up with the video/concept before the song...ding, ding ding!
“Yeah, I came up with a storyboard for a video. I'd recently seen a Japanese magazine awarding a Young Scientist of the Year in 1981. I took that as kind of amusing. If I was going to be a scientist, I'd need a hot Japanese lab assistant and I'd need a cool vintage motorcycle hat, kind of an homage to deranged scientists. I phoned up this famous TV scientist for the BBC, Dr. Magnus Pike [to appear in the video]."
"The record execs liked the idea of the video, but said, ‘Where's the song?’ I said, ‘Oh, how about I bring it in on Monday morning?’ and went home over the weekend and did the first bit of the song.”
Fuck it. It’s fun. Moreover, it prefaced things to come in Thomas Dolby’s career.
The Rest of the Story
“I'm not a very proficient keyboard player, so the computer became my musical instrument ... None of the equipment is essential, though. In a way, I was happier when I just had one monophonic synthesizer and a two-track tape deck.”
- Wikipedia
I wrestled with which quote best sums up Thomas Dolby’s career, but landed on that one for the way it gets to the essence/entirety of his career. For all his talent with creating and arranging pop music, and however much it mattered, the more I read about him (full disclosure: it wasn’t much; sources below), the more his music felt like just one corner of his story.
Thomas Morgan Robertson was born October 14, 1958 and into a world of some prestige and, presumably, wealth. His father, Marlin Robertson, was “an internationally distinguished professor of classical Greek art and archaeology at the University of London, Oxford University, and Trinity College, Cambridge,” – i.e., people, and the fact his wife’s name was (Theodosia) Cecil, nee Spring Rice finishes the thought nicely. The family moved around quite a bit, exposing young Thomas to more of the world along the way.
Thomas Robertson gravitated toward music, and without formal instruction, starting with the guitar, passing through the piano before settling on in his own words, “kit-built synthesizers.” Here’s a little more on his informal education:
“I sang in a choir when I was 10 or 11, and learned to sightread single lines, but other than that I don't have a formal education. I picked up the guitar initially, playing folk tunes—Dylan—then I graduated to piano when I got interested in jazz, listening to people like Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, and so on. The first electronic instruments started to become accessible in the mid-70s, and I got my hands on a kit-built synthesizer and never looked back.”
No source I read filled in the gap between Dolby’s digital epiphany and the explosive release of his debut album, 1982’s The Golden Age of Wireless – i.e., no record of prior band, no striving backstory – but “She Blinded Me with Science” didn’t make the first release. Songs like “Europa and the Pirate Twins” (my jam) and “Radio Silence” carried Dolby’s album until “She Blinded Me,” (etc.) came out on a five-song EP and catapulted him into international super-stardom. There are some good stories around that – e.g., chance handed him Michael Jackson’s phone number and he used it to get out of a post-hit junket in Los Angeles – and Thomas Dolby has worked with a genuinely impressive and mildly surprising collection of artists – among them, Robyn Hitchcock, Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir (“The Beauty of a Dream”), Eddie Van Halen (“Close but No Cigar”), George Clinton (“Hot Sauce”), Lea Thompson (soundtrack, Howard the Duck), and he tanked Joni Mitchell’s 1985 release, Blue (note: being facetious...but it did tank) – but his life story is a guy doing a bunch of honestly remarkable stuff and with a remarkable lack of (apparent) friction. Oh, hold on. There was the thing about Dolby Labs taking him to court for the use of his stage-name, but he won that...likely due to the fact that no one’s gonna confuse a dude making electronic R&B with an audio lab, or as a promotional arm of said audio lab, and so on. And to think they gave the side-eye to all that free publicity because Dolby adopted his stage-name to avoid confusion with a popular singer of the day named Tom Robinson...
The Hit
For whatever reason the aside, “Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto, you’re beautiful” remains one of my main memories of Thomas Dolby’s, “She Blinded Me with Science.” As people of a certain age know, that song was all over the place in the early 1980s (circa 1982), so I always thought of Dolby as a big star. He did better in the UK – and wasn’t too shabby on U.S. album sales at his peak – but that single was his only U.S. hit. It topped out a No. 5...but, swear to God, MTV had that on whatever’s denser than heavy rotation for a solid year.
Here's where I admit I didn’t mind it. It’s nicely busy, the tones perky, the rhythm bouncy and kind of fun; better, the whole thing feels a bit campy. And, if you ever thought Dolby came up with the video/concept before the song...ding, ding ding!
“Yeah, I came up with a storyboard for a video. I'd recently seen a Japanese magazine awarding a Young Scientist of the Year in 1981. I took that as kind of amusing. If I was going to be a scientist, I'd need a hot Japanese lab assistant and I'd need a cool vintage motorcycle hat, kind of an homage to deranged scientists. I phoned up this famous TV scientist for the BBC, Dr. Magnus Pike [to appear in the video]."
"The record execs liked the idea of the video, but said, ‘Where's the song?’ I said, ‘Oh, how about I bring it in on Monday morning?’ and went home over the weekend and did the first bit of the song.”
Fuck it. It’s fun. Moreover, it prefaced things to come in Thomas Dolby’s career.
The Rest of the Story
“I'm not a very proficient keyboard player, so the computer became my musical instrument ... None of the equipment is essential, though. In a way, I was happier when I just had one monophonic synthesizer and a two-track tape deck.”
- Wikipedia
I wrestled with which quote best sums up Thomas Dolby’s career, but landed on that one for the way it gets to the essence/entirety of his career. For all his talent with creating and arranging pop music, and however much it mattered, the more I read about him (full disclosure: it wasn’t much; sources below), the more his music felt like just one corner of his story.
Thomas Morgan Robertson was born October 14, 1958 and into a world of some prestige and, presumably, wealth. His father, Marlin Robertson, was “an internationally distinguished professor of classical Greek art and archaeology at the University of London, Oxford University, and Trinity College, Cambridge,” – i.e., people, and the fact his wife’s name was (Theodosia) Cecil, nee Spring Rice finishes the thought nicely. The family moved around quite a bit, exposing young Thomas to more of the world along the way.
Thomas Robertson gravitated toward music, and without formal instruction, starting with the guitar, passing through the piano before settling on in his own words, “kit-built synthesizers.” Here’s a little more on his informal education:
“I sang in a choir when I was 10 or 11, and learned to sightread single lines, but other than that I don't have a formal education. I picked up the guitar initially, playing folk tunes—Dylan—then I graduated to piano when I got interested in jazz, listening to people like Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, and so on. The first electronic instruments started to become accessible in the mid-70s, and I got my hands on a kit-built synthesizer and never looked back.”
No source I read filled in the gap between Dolby’s digital epiphany and the explosive release of his debut album, 1982’s The Golden Age of Wireless – i.e., no record of prior band, no striving backstory – but “She Blinded Me with Science” didn’t make the first release. Songs like “Europa and the Pirate Twins” (my jam) and “Radio Silence” carried Dolby’s album until “She Blinded Me,” (etc.) came out on a five-song EP and catapulted him into international super-stardom. There are some good stories around that – e.g., chance handed him Michael Jackson’s phone number and he used it to get out of a post-hit junket in Los Angeles – and Thomas Dolby has worked with a genuinely impressive and mildly surprising collection of artists – among them, Robyn Hitchcock, Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir (“The Beauty of a Dream”), Eddie Van Halen (“Close but No Cigar”), George Clinton (“Hot Sauce”), Lea Thompson (soundtrack, Howard the Duck), and he tanked Joni Mitchell’s 1985 release, Blue (note: being facetious...but it did tank) – but his life story is a guy doing a bunch of honestly remarkable stuff and with a remarkable lack of (apparent) friction. Oh, hold on. There was the thing about Dolby Labs taking him to court for the use of his stage-name, but he won that...likely due to the fact that no one’s gonna confuse a dude making electronic R&B with an audio lab, or as a promotional arm of said audio lab, and so on. And to think they gave the side-eye to all that free publicity because Dolby adopted his stage-name to avoid confusion with a popular singer of the day named Tom Robinson...
 |
| Of course steam-punk was involved. |
His music career tracks the same way. After Golden Age of Wireless, he released The Flat Earth in 1984, which did slightly less well, and after that he released the disarmingly campy (there’s that word again) Aliens Ate My Buick (1988), followed by Astronauts & Heretics in 1992, a live collection called The Sole Inhabitant in 2006 (which I whistled past due to my hang-up with live albums), and, finally, A Map of the Floating City in 2010. The scope of its ambition makes the latter standout: not only was it a three-part epic – “a travelogue across three imaginary continents,” laced with intensely personal themes -and released in as many EPs, it also spawned a video game by the same name. The video game was “set against a dystopian vision of the 1940s that might have existed had WWII turned out a lot differently,” which asked players of the multiplayer online game to “struggle to unravel the enigma that is the Floating City.” Even more remarkably, the whole thing was a one-off, played only once (to this author’s actual knowledge), i.e., it started and it ended. And that wasn’t even it’s most charming feature:
“I deliberately wanted the story to be open-ended enough for the participants could affect its outcome. So, they made up some of their own rules. The guy who I intended to be the villain turned out to have such a big fan club, it was rather hard to give him his comeuppance without causing a total riot. But that’s fine, it was supposed to be democratic from the outset — and sure enough, the reaction from the players really did change the upshot of the game.”
The entire community went all-in. If you’ve got time for the PopMatters interview, you get some great material on the game; the stuff around “the missing page of the Book of History” is pretty damn awesome. And that’s a good segue to this...
Thomas Dolby was an early colonist in Silicon Valley’s dot.com boom. Wikipedia did a better job of covering his time heading a succession of tech start-ups – first Headspace (1993), then bringing audio to WebTV, then changing Headspace to Beatnik, then on to ringtones for Nokias – and I suspect that’s a fun playground for the right person, but this series focuses on the art side of things...though, in fairness, can you talk about Thomas Dolby’s art without talking about the tools he used to make it?
In 2017, Dolby was named (I believe) the first Homewood Professor of the Arts at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University and I assume that’s what he still does. Some stray something in one of the sources told me he’d stopped touring a while ago, but that seems justified after all that life. If you read any of the sources, you’ll read the story and words of a man who comes off as not just intelligent, but also reflective and creative. I’ve slipped into sarcasm here and there up above, but it comes from a place of admiration at seeing someone do something so easily - better, something interesting, something novel and original. It turns out Thomas Dolby is a specific kind of one-hit wonder: the kind that does it once, but then moves on to the next thing.
Sources
Wikipedia – Thomas Dolby
Washington Independent Review of Books (2017; the best read)
Musictech.com Interview (2017; the most technical...duh)
PopMatters Interview (2011; likable, because it's most in the moment)
About the Sampler
I linked to about one-third of the Thomas Dolby sampler up above – as well as slipping in some “bonus tracks” (mostly because I don’t like them as much) – but that still leaves a healthy balance of good, and fairly unpredictable material. Something else about it, it’s all a bit high-brow, even the stuff that claims it isn't. I think that's inevitable based on this elaboration on the themes for The Golden Age of Wireless:
“It juxtaposed themes of radio technology, aircraft, and naval submarines with those of relationships and nostalgia.”
As it happens, I was a sucker for Dolby’s two most “high concept” albums. The songs from Aliens Ate My Buick – “Hot Sauce,” “Pulp Culture,” a smooth number called “The Ability to Swing” and, instant-camp classic, “The Key to Her Ferrari” – and A Map of the Floating City – “Spice Train,” “A Jealous Thing Called Love,” “Road to Reno,” and, a collaboration I hadn’t mentioned yet, “17 Hills” (ft. Mark Knopfler, which you can hear). I’ve only dipped my toe into both of those and I’d still ask anyone to give them a real chance. And they’re totally different things.
The rest of the songs on the sampler – from The Flat Earth, “I Scare Myself” and, one of his bigger UK hits, “Hyperactive!”, from Astronauts & Heretics, the zydeco-graced mini-memoir, “I Love You Goodbye” and “Silk Pyjamas,” and, to round out The Golden Age of Wireless, the single “Weightless.”
Most of those sound like Thomas Dolby, while somehow sounding nothing like one another. He’s pretty fun.
“I deliberately wanted the story to be open-ended enough for the participants could affect its outcome. So, they made up some of their own rules. The guy who I intended to be the villain turned out to have such a big fan club, it was rather hard to give him his comeuppance without causing a total riot. But that’s fine, it was supposed to be democratic from the outset — and sure enough, the reaction from the players really did change the upshot of the game.”
The entire community went all-in. If you’ve got time for the PopMatters interview, you get some great material on the game; the stuff around “the missing page of the Book of History” is pretty damn awesome. And that’s a good segue to this...
Thomas Dolby was an early colonist in Silicon Valley’s dot.com boom. Wikipedia did a better job of covering his time heading a succession of tech start-ups – first Headspace (1993), then bringing audio to WebTV, then changing Headspace to Beatnik, then on to ringtones for Nokias – and I suspect that’s a fun playground for the right person, but this series focuses on the art side of things...though, in fairness, can you talk about Thomas Dolby’s art without talking about the tools he used to make it?
In 2017, Dolby was named (I believe) the first Homewood Professor of the Arts at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University and I assume that’s what he still does. Some stray something in one of the sources told me he’d stopped touring a while ago, but that seems justified after all that life. If you read any of the sources, you’ll read the story and words of a man who comes off as not just intelligent, but also reflective and creative. I’ve slipped into sarcasm here and there up above, but it comes from a place of admiration at seeing someone do something so easily - better, something interesting, something novel and original. It turns out Thomas Dolby is a specific kind of one-hit wonder: the kind that does it once, but then moves on to the next thing.
Sources
Wikipedia – Thomas Dolby
Washington Independent Review of Books (2017; the best read)
Musictech.com Interview (2017; the most technical...duh)
PopMatters Interview (2011; likable, because it's most in the moment)
About the Sampler
I linked to about one-third of the Thomas Dolby sampler up above – as well as slipping in some “bonus tracks” (mostly because I don’t like them as much) – but that still leaves a healthy balance of good, and fairly unpredictable material. Something else about it, it’s all a bit high-brow, even the stuff that claims it isn't. I think that's inevitable based on this elaboration on the themes for The Golden Age of Wireless:
“It juxtaposed themes of radio technology, aircraft, and naval submarines with those of relationships and nostalgia.”
As it happens, I was a sucker for Dolby’s two most “high concept” albums. The songs from Aliens Ate My Buick – “Hot Sauce,” “Pulp Culture,” a smooth number called “The Ability to Swing” and, instant-camp classic, “The Key to Her Ferrari” – and A Map of the Floating City – “Spice Train,” “A Jealous Thing Called Love,” “Road to Reno,” and, a collaboration I hadn’t mentioned yet, “17 Hills” (ft. Mark Knopfler, which you can hear). I’ve only dipped my toe into both of those and I’d still ask anyone to give them a real chance. And they’re totally different things.
The rest of the songs on the sampler – from The Flat Earth, “I Scare Myself” and, one of his bigger UK hits, “Hyperactive!”, from Astronauts & Heretics, the zydeco-graced mini-memoir, “I Love You Goodbye” and “Silk Pyjamas,” and, to round out The Golden Age of Wireless, the single “Weightless.”
Most of those sound like Thomas Dolby, while somehow sounding nothing like one another. He’s pretty fun.
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