Thomas Dolby joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute in 2014. For the last six years, he has headed the Baltimore college’s Music for New Media program, teaching Film and Video Game Scoring.
Prof. Dolby, born Thomas Robertson in London, holds multiple patents in the field of interactive audio. He founded the Silicon Valley software company Beatnik, which developed the earliest technology for internet music, and for cellphone ringtones. For 12 years, he was musical director of the TED Conference in California.
He’ll be in St. Petersburg Wednesday (Aug. 12) for an entirely different reason.
This is the same Thomas Dolby whose song “She Blinded Me With Science” was an MTV staple, and a Top Ten hit, in 1983. A pioneer in electronic pop music, Dolby – yes, he took the surname from the famous noise-reduction company – was at the vanguard of the wave of British synth-pop that briefly ruled the ‘waves.
His Wednesday performance is part of something called the Totally Tubular Festival. Starting at 7 p.m., at Ferg’s Pavilion, the touring event will also feature A Flock Seagulls, Men Without Hats, Tommy Tutone and other one-or-two-hit MTV stars from the 1980s.
Dolby is the headliner. He’ll perform, with the band the Lost Toy People, the 1988 cult-favorite album Aliens Ate My Buick in its entirety.
Well, almost. “We’re not doing ‘Budapest By Blimp,’ which is sort of a slow eight minutes,” he says. “But everything else we’re doing.” His best-known songs, including “She Blinded Me With Science,” come at the end of the set.
Find more info, and tickets, at this link.
St. Pete Catalyst: What occurs to me is that your music, if you take away the synthesizers, is really just cool songs. A lot of R&B feel under the electronics.
Thomas Dolby: A lot of my contemporaries, when synths and drums machines, and eventually samplers, and then computers, became accessible to the guy on the street as music instruments, they leaned into the inherent coldness and mechanism of those machines. Versus real players.
So you had people like Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, Human League, Soft Cell, Bowie when he recorded with Eno, leaning into that stuff. And that was great, for what it was. A new sound, very fresh, very different from the sort of balls to the wall, big hair/big snare ‘80s corporate rock sound.
Although I was excited by those new sounds, my heroes were songwriters. And I wanted to get that more personal, narrative, sort of cinematic vibe into electronic-based songs.
While Aliens Ate My Buick is a fan favorite, certainly, it wasn’t a commercial blockbuster like your first album. It’s cool because it has jazz and funk, different styles, but maybe it wasn’t as electronic as people expected. Why is it a favorite of yours? Why are you doing it?
Well, it’s kind of unique in the canon of my albums, of which there are only what, five or six? Because it’s extremely extroverted. Certainly songs before like “She Blinded Me With Science” or “Hyperactive!” have had a similar vibe to them, but it came about because when I first moved to the L.A. area in 1986, it was supposed to be for six months. But after a few months I met Kathleen [Beller, his wife of 38 years] and fell in love and stayed there a great deal longer.
At the time, it felt like I was on vacation. And I wanted to get out and play. I put an ad in The Recycler magazine, saying “Thomas Dolby wants musicians.” And I got a sackful of cassettes; I sifted through them and auditioned a hundred or so people. And from them I formed Lost Toy People. We went up and down the coast playing clubs and then went straight into the studio.
We were still fresh from the road, so most of what’s on that album is recorded direct-to-tape, with few overdubs. And that’s very different from most of my albums, which are sort of built sound by sound, from the ground up.
So as an outlier, so to speak, it has a special place in your heart?
Yeah. It’s very different, and it’s not one that I go back to often – in my solo shows, there’s not many from it that I do often. But then my solo shows are a lot more sort of introspective and moody.
The second Totally Tubular Festival that I’ve done, two summers ago, I did it solo. And they asked me to come back, but I thought I’d do something different. And so I thought hey, why not re-form Lost Toy People? And focus a little bit on that album?
It’s interesting because Totally Tubular has six or seven different bands, all of whom had big radio hits. So if you’re there you’re hearing a string of hits that you grew up with.
You get to the final act and you’re expecting to hear “She Blinded Me With Science,” “Europa” and “Hyperactive!” and things, and instead I’m playing songs that you may or may not know.
The hardcore Dolby fans definitely know them, but hardcore Dolby fans are a subset of Dolby fans, who are a subset of ‘80s music fans. So I have to really sell it!
When we did those songs originally, before we’d recorded them, I had to sell it because people had never heard them before. So there’s just a completely different method to it from anything else I’ve ever done.
The Lost Toy People, then, were L.A. area musicians. How many of them are still around?
Two of the original Lost Toy People are in this band. A couple are not really playing so much these days, for a number of reasons. And Terry Jackson, who was my bass player and close friend, died in a plane crash. Matt Hector, the drummer in this band, I’ve played on and off with for the last 20 years. And the others are new.
Together we make a very interesting band. And it’s very intuitive, very funky, real sort of party music. But it’s a little bit different for the Totally Tubular crowd, so instead of trotting out our pop hits electronically, we’re actually playing it live. And it’s different from night to night.
With all the success you’ve had in other fields, why come back to performing?
Well, I think if you’re able to do it at the age of 67, and still get paid for it, it can be a blast, you know? Touring is so much easier these days than it was back in the day. The back lounge of a tour bus is like heaven to me. It’s like this insulated bubble from the rest of the world. You can choose not to read the news. You can just switch it off.
And also, I’m teaching this year, so I spend eight months of the year working on that syllabus and dealing with students. It’s a great academic situation to be in, but to get out and play a show like this, in the summer, is really an antidote to academia.
It was a bit surprising for my students, many of whom didn’t know who I was or what I did.
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