‘She Blinded Me With Science,’ His New Novel And The Music Industry

Those in the U.S. who attended this summer’s Totally Tubular Festival, which celebrated ‘80s pop music, most likely caught one of the package tour’s acts, the British synthpop musician Thomas Dolby. Best known for his hits “She Blinded Me With Science” and “Hyperactive, The veteran artist shared the same stage with his peers from over 40 years ago, including the Thompson Twins’ Tom Bailey, Modern English, Wang Chung, Men Without Hats and Tommy Tutone.

“There’s a sort of upsurge in enthusiasm for 1980s music,” Dolby says about his participation in the festival, which recently wrapped up. “I think these things come and go in spurts, but it seems to be especially strong right now. It was nice to be asked to join a package of some of my contemporaries. A couple of them I’ve known for years. Tom Bailey is an old friend. And I’ve shared stages with a couple of the other bands over the years. I haven’t toured regularly myself in a long time. It was very nice to be out there.”

Dolby will be forever associated with the legendary “She’s Blinded Me With Science,” his breakthrough U.S. hit whose unforgettable quirky video became an MTV staple. But his eclectic career has been more than that one song. In addition to being a musician, Dolby (born Thomas Morgan Robertson) is a tech entrepreneur, an educator and most recently a novelist. Currently, Dolby is headlining his tour in the U.K., with Prefab Sprout musician Martin McAloon as the opening act.

“On the Totally Tubular Tour, I was doing my best-known songs,” says Dolby in a recent conversation ahead of the British dates, “songs that people will have certainly heard on the radio, even if they didn’t buy them at the time. [For my tour,] I’m adding deeper cuts, songs like “I Love You Goodbye” and “Budapest by Blimp” and some favorite album cuts that don’t get the same kind of exposure as things like “She Blinded Me With Science” and “Hyperactive.””

The U.K. tour comes amid a milestone in Dolby’s career: 45 years ago, before he found success on his own, Dolby appeared as a keyboard player on the album English Garden by Bruce Woolley (one of the co-writers of the Buggles’ hit “Video Killed the Radio Star”) and the Camera Club. Dolby’s fascination with synthesizers occurred during his teenage years in the 1970s, including building one himself.

“I had an electric piano, a Wurlitzer,” he recalls, “ but I was very keen to try a synth. And I found the innards of a synthesizer in a dumpster in South London. I managed to get that working, but it had no keyboards. So all I could do was twiddle knobs and hit buttons. It made some quite amusing bleeps and blips. And between that and a cheap portable drum machine, I made my first set of demos. That’s what really got me into songwriting.”

His foray into electronic music happened around the time punk, New Wave and the New Romantic movements infiltrated the U.K. by the late 1970s. With Dolby as one of its figureheads, synthpop would flourish during the first half of the 1980s. “I needed something a bit more than three or four chords,” he says. “And so when there was really a new underground grew up in the wake of David Bowie and Brian Eno, [there were] people like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire and The Normal and so on. Later, Gary Numan brought that sound to Top of the Pops. And then you had people like Soft Cell and Human League. It was clear there was a sort of alternative movement to punk and New Wave. That was very exciting.”

Dolby became a session musician who played on albums by the Thompson Twins (Set) and Foreigner (4); he would later appear on Def Leppard’s Pyromania and Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven on Earth. In May 1982, he released his solo debut, the electronic The Golden Age of Wireless. Later that year, he unveiled the smash synth-funk single “She Blinded Me With Science,” whose creation was unusual: Dolby conceived its video first before even writing the actual song.

“I’d already put my album out, and it had been acclaimed but not done particularly well commercially,” he says. “I was convinced that music videos were the way forward, not least because I always fancied myself as a filmmaker. I was particularly fond of the silent movie era. The heroes of the silent movies were the underdogs: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. I identified with them: the heroic little guy who beats the bully and wins the girl.

“I felt that a music video was sort of a silent movie with a soundtrack,” he continues. “I made a couple of videos with other directors, but I wanted to have a go myself. So I went to my record label EMI and I showed them the storyboard for the “She Blinded Me With Science” video. And they thought it was very appealing. They said, ‘But when can we hear the song?’ I said, ‘Oh, well, I’ll bring it on Monday morning.’ Then I went home and wrote the song. So it was definitely spurred by the enticing idea of writing and directing my own video.”

The eccentric clip introduced viewers to Dolby’s nerdy, professorial persona that contrasted with the dashing New Romantic looks of Adam Ant and Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon. Both the song and the video featured British scientist Magnus Pyke who famously exclaims “She blinded me with science!” and “Science!” Dolby knew that the song would become a hit but added: “I’ve had the same feeling with several songs since then (chuckles) that managed not to attain the same dizzy heights. I think when you have a hit record, you don’t often do a post-mortem and figure out what all went right. But certainly, when you have a record that’s a disappointment, and that happened with a couple of the sequels like “Hyperactive,” you tend to pick it to pieces and figure out all the things that tripped you up. Because I felt that in terms of catchiness and playability, “Hyperactive” deserved to be a top-five single as well.”

An example of Dolby’s experience with the fickle world of pop came with his next album The Flat Earth, released in 1984. Musically, it was a more diverse-sounding album than the electropop heard on The Golden Age of Wireless. In addition to the aforementioned “Hyperactive,” The Flat Earth contained a jazzy cover of Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks’ “I Scare Myself,” which was not quite in the synthpop mode.

“I experienced some pressure from the industry to capitalize on the commercial success of “She Blinded Me With Science,”” says Dolby. “But I wasn’t going to kowtow to it. And it was more important to me to explore and expand my horizons musically than to cookie-cutter a bunch more radio hits…When I started out, [the record companies] were mainly populated with music fans who believed that artists should be nurtured. And I think by the end of the ’80s, that era was really over. “

Dolby continued to make more albums and had a second career as a record producer for other artists such as Joni Mitchell and most notably the British quartet Prefab Sprout. During Dolby’s hiatus from releasing new music, his career has taken him in other directions. In the 1990s, he started Beatnik, a company that devised the polyphonic ringtone software for Nokia phones. He served as the music director for TED conferences and is currently a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University.

Last month, Dolby released his first novel Prevailing Wind. Set in 1913 during the Progressive Era, the book focuses on two brothers from a poverty-stricken Maine fishing community who look to improve their fortunes amid the world of New York City luxury yacht racing.

“All my life, I’ve been fascinated with classic wooden sailboat racing,” Dolby, who previously wrote his memoir The Speed of Sound, says. “And I wanted to share that enthusiasm. It was a period that I was really fascinated by. The New York Yacht Club with its membership that included the Vanderbilts, Astors, Carnegies and Morgans probably collectively had more wealth and power than the U.S. government in that period. And there was a lot of friction with the workforce, with events like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and the Ludlow Massacre.

“[The rich’s] favorite sport was racing these giant yachts in Newport and New York Harbor. And the pinnacle of the sailing season was the America’s Cup against the Brits. And ever since 1851, the Brits have been challenging to win back this cup and failing miserably every time. I love the sailing and the racing aspects of it. But I was also fascinated with the personalities and the fact that these yachts required upwards of 35 men to sail them.”

More than 40 years after “She Blinded Me With Science,” the landscape has been significantly altered within the music industry, yielding mixed results from Dolby’s point of view. “Now, pretty much anybody can make an album in the back room and get it distributed,” he says. “And all the music in the world is available as if on a spigot on the streaming services. As with the water tap, you don’t stop and think about the cost of each glass of water you draw. Music has sort of become that.

“There are pluses and minuses to that. The pluses are that kids today have a much more eclectic and varied music collection and playlists than they would have done back in the day when it was a lot more tribal and siloed. But I think the downside is that because the preciousness of music is now gone, it’s taken away the commitment that music fans used to have to a band or an artist. It feels very mercurial now versus the way it was in the old days where regardless of the size of your audience, you felt this strong attachment to your base. I feel that’s sort of pretty much diluted.”

In 2011, Dolby returned to music with A Map of the Floating City, his first new album in almost 20 years. As he is currently on his headlining U.K. tour, he says he doesn’t plan to release new music at the moment due to his full-time teaching commitments at Johns Hopkins. “In the last few years, it’s been the novel and occasional tours like this,” says Dolby. “There may be more music in the future. I don’t know. I may be done. I think that the quality of your legacy is more important than the quantity.

“I’m very proud of the catalog, and there’s very little I would want to change about it. So I don’t feel an obligation to make more music. But I’m pretty much motivated by whatever is the most exciting, stimulating path for me to follow. And it’s not inconceivable that I’ll start making music again and working on a new album.”