Interview with Thomas Dolby
Words: Michael Rabinowitz
Photos: Mark Owens

He is best known for “She’s Blinding Me With Science.”  Along with Herbie Hancock, Gary Numan and Kraftwerk, Thomas Dolby is a godfather of electronic music.  If MTV had a Mount Rushmore, he’d be next to Duran Duran and the dude with the funky bangs from Flock of Seagulls.  He is back touring after a 25-plus year lay-off, now opening for BT, yet it’s as if he never left the social conscious.  In fact, if you want to hear his influence, just wait for the next cell phone to deliver its musical ringtone.  Having founded Beatnik, Inc. in 1993, the company that created the audio format for polyphonic ringtones, Dolby is just as ubiquitous as he was during the early ‘80’s.  Before his much-anticipated performances around Florida, Dolby took time with REAX to wax about the genre and his place in music video lore.

REAX:  Your sound would be referred to as “traditional” electronic with lyrics, pure synth, and no progressive beats hammering onto the listener’s head.  Do you consider yourself a traditionalist or is this just a style of the genre that you prefer?
Thomas Dolby:  Yeah, I think I’m fairly traditional.  I think one thing that is fairly unique is that the songs come first.  These are songs that I could sit on the piano and play and sing, if I had to.  So, it’s not like the beats or the sequences come first.  But, having said that... when I started doing this it was a time when people were very resistant to electronic music in general and didn’t really believe real music or real songs could be made with synthesizers.  So, that was a concern and I was very careful to not have machines sound like machines.  When electronica really hit, as a genre with its own name, it kind sounded like somebody had gone through my trash and they had taken all of the bleeps and blips that I threw out, and made entire records with them laughs.  So, I don’t really know how I fit into this family tree of the genre. 

REAX:  Where you ever influenced by punk and post punk acts who applied synth to their music, like Joy Division or Echo & The Bunnymen?
TD:  Oh yeah, absolutely.  No question.  That was a seminal moment for me, the mid ’70’s.  I was still in school at the time and the kids I looked up to who are the tastemakers… one of them was Shane MacGowan singer and creator of The Pogues, who I went to school with.  I remember he and another kid were the harbingers of good taste.  I remember them coming into the café where we were used to go to smoke one day and sort of saying, “The Beatles and The Stones is all crap!” laughs And, we were taken aback like, “How could you say such a thing!” laughs.  Socially, it was a huge influence on me.  And certainly getting up one misty morning and traveling an hour to find the one little indie record store that stocks God Save The Queen and playing it on high volume to annoy my neighbors every morning for two weeks afterwards… it was a huge influence.

REAX:  You get hit over the head a lot with “She Blinded Me With Science” but, can you describe how it feels to be associated with the cementation of MTV in pop culture?
TD:  If you ask me the same question in like 1985, it would’ve been quite a different answer.  I think that it’s largely a generational thing.  I mean yes, I am still there on VH1.  But, what music videos playing on VH1 don’t have the depth of meaning for today’s teenagers and twenty-somethings that MTV had for my generation back then?   Some people write about it and talk about it like it was my albatross or something.  But, I don’t really see that actually because my default as a musician is that I am a fairly marginal musician.  I’m definitely an acquired taste and I don’t really make any compromises to the pop mainstream. 

REAX:  You formed Beatnik, Inc., the company that developed the polyphonic ring tone for cell phones.  Did you ever realize it would get this big?
TD:  Frankly, it was already a phenomenon when Beatnik got involved with it.  I was just amazed at the youth society in Europe that revolves around the cell phone.  I was seeing this, having come from the Web world where for five years I was struggling to get anyone to pay for anything.  It was pretty astonishing to me that they were paying a couple of bucks for essentially a whistle version of a pop song.  By the time Beatnik got involved in it, I felt we could enhance it a lot with polyphonic tones and true tones because our technology was capable of doing that.  I was very surprised because Beatnik was heading down that same wormhole as the dot-com crash, were it not for the Nokia deal. 

REAX:  Your new show seems very avant-garde in appearance.  Do you consider your show as much as performance art as it is live music?
TD:  I had a choice in terms of which era of my music I represent most strongly.  I deliberately went for the cold and alienated atmospherics of the beginning.  I think one thing that is quite unique about my show is that I’m very hands on.  I give people a peek under the tent because several of the songs I build up from scratch.  People can see what I’m doing, projected behind me, through this headband camera. I felt a very strong need to recapture those early years and reevaluate them for the 21st century.  It’s like drawing a line in the sand before moving on to the next chapter.