LIFE IN THE AGE OF WIRELESS

Perhaps in another century, Thomas Morgan Dolby Robertson would have been an explorer of science. I imagine him in an antique laboratory like another Thomas— Edison, endlessly devising, improvising, extending the limits of communication. His would be no mere dusty research, but instead a quest to discover some new way to make human connection and then make it palatable to a world of cynics, doubters and escapists.

As Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, the photograph, and the principles behind movies and tape recording, so Thomas Dolby, a hundred years later, applies light, sound and visible motion to an album neatly disguised as the latest electronic pop music. Thomas Dolby, an intently serious, pale young man who is dresed in an immaculate tan suit on a hot summer day, is providing new dimensions in response to the onslaught of synthesizer-based dance music that may seem pleasant, but can neither shill or thrill. The Golden Age Of Wireless, in a delicate, thoughtful manner, does both.

"The hardware, the technology, is coincidental to -me," says Dolby in a refined accent, sipping orange juice to keep his voice alive at the end of a long day of interviews. "The reason I chose that instrument is because there was a lot of uncharted territory. And having chosen it, I don't want to say to everybody, 'hey look at me, kids, I'm playing a synthesizer,' and reminding people, a la Gary Numan, how frightened they are of technology, and therefore I'm up here, you're down there. It's not about that at all—it's about the music, the atmosphere, and the textures.

I like being detached from any strict mold of what sort of young man I ought to be.

"I don't conceptualize about how I'm making my music. If a part will sound better played on a flute or a sax or a harmonica or done with vocals or guitar or real drums instead of a drum machine, then I'll do it. It's just that my own personal form of expression happens to come via a synthesizer. It's just a means to an end. If I'd been born in a different era, then maybe I'd still be playing jazz piano like I did when I was 14.

"I have a minimum of technique now, which I need to get the ideas over. Occasionally, it frustrates me; late at night when I can't get my fingers to work on something that's apparently fairly simple and I have to leave it for morning. So from that point of view, I slightly regret that I wasn't more disciplined at practicing, but I think the fact that I never did take lessons jn anything I did is what gives me a kind of freedom from any preconceptions about how a keyboard ought to sound or a part ought to be played."

Dolby's dislike of prescribed roles is a trait that is probably an inheritance of his rather unique childhood. Born 24 years ago in Cairo, Egypt, he spent most of his youth traveling throughout Europe with his father, an archeologist. In and out of boarding schools, playing piano, operating a ham radio and tinkering with electronics, film and meteorology became the constants of his life, and he found ease in establishing his own musical systems. Constantly shifting location, Dolby had no choice but to seek his foundation within himself, and early on vowed that he saw no point in recording, performing or indulging in any kind of creative activity that was subject to outside influences.

"That's something I've found frustrating, working with other people. That even in the initial stages I would record a keyboard part tht I thought sounded really good and then some producer would mix it down or put in the wrong perspective on the track. An then maybe someone would design a record cover that would make me not so keen to be associated with it, and some record company would market it to the wrong audience. And suddenly all of the energy is taken out of what you did. How far you can reach, to me, is very important to how satisfying and complete the creation is.

"So what I did when I established my own label (Venice in Peril) and where I said, right, I'm now going to make an album under the name of Thomas Dolby, I'm going to write the songs, record them, produce them, design the album cover, make the videos, go out and tour. The fewer middle men the better. And every new thing that J learn, learning to make a video for example, was an attempt to not be dependent on specialists to do the job. Not because I don't value the contributions you can get and the feedback you receive, because they are always open to me. But I've got the ability to keep it personal, because I can turn my hand to any of those things. I think it's of value to make a personal statement—it's not collective. For that reason, I need to be in as much control as possible." "XTC, who are quite good friends of mine, have grown up in Swindon and still live there, and the kids they went to school with are now executives with cars and wives and nice little detached houses on the outskirts of town. So there are XTC with their girlfriends and mums who are saying,' 'ere Colin, when are you gonna get a proper job?' This sort of thing. And that's really stifling. I like being detached from any strict mold of what sort of young man I ought to be.

Obviously, we are not talking about such a single-minded obsession resulting in instant orignial sound. In order to make his own music his own way, Dolby after leaving school around the age of 16, did everything from play acoustic guitar and sing for pennies in the Paris Metro to operate sound systems for touring British groups such as the Members, U.K. Subs and the Fall, to playing synthesizer on Foreigner's "Urgent" and "Waiting For A Girl Like You" (they called him), to touring America in 1980 as a member of Bruce Woolley's Camera Club and Lene Lovich's band. And though he adamantly disagrees with my opinion, Dolby's composition of "New Toy" expressly for Lene Lovich will probably have brought him more commercial—if not aesthetic—attention than his own album, The Golden Age Of Wireless. At the point where many thickheads were about to dismiss the lovely Lene as a onejoke wonder, along came Dolby's tune, leaping out of her EP and sparking national dance floors. Lene Lovich and Les Chappell have since become close friends with Dolby and play several roles on his album. Lene's lifelong insistence on individuality draws great admiration from Dolby, and he illustrates her case to urge his audiences to break through their own perimeters.

"Imagine if she'd stayed in Detroit—do you think she would have had the same kind of insight, the same objectivity, the same disassociation from any fashion or trends? She wouldn't have done that because a kid who grows up in Detroit and stays there and slumps in front of the TV every night watching a second-hand experience that's being spoon-fed by some sort of unimaginative programmer has the edge taken off the desire to go out there and really experience it for yourself. It's just so passive standing in a club staring at the biggest video screen in town. There's no interaction, and I don't think you really experience things unless you're playing a part in them.

"I talk about Detroit because I was just there and I've got a friend there who confesses that she's got a chaotic nature, and yet she chooses to stay because she's frightened of anything different. And she talks about how wonderful it must be that I've gone out and seen the world, yet she chooses to stay on until the end. This is something that really angers me, something I've got more to say about than unemployment or El Salvador or any of those trendy social-political issues, which are very admirably documented by people like the Clash or Tom Robinson. That really is an underlying theme on the album, to resist the pressure to become a stereotype."

The Golden Age Of Wireless is a remarkably subtle document released into a very obvious world. Although Dolby declares his individuality in musical language, giving his keyboards an emotional framework that takes them miles away from the bubble-and-squeak Human League followers school, his lyrics are rarely as forthright as "Urges," a saddening glance at the mating dance of club life. Dolby's vision has him press fragments of memory side by side with lush fantasy, crashing into twitchy reality. One of his most charismatic songs, "Radio Silence," skilfully interweaves images of England's fondly-remembered pirate radio station, Radio Caroline, with a real girl faced with modern problems. It yearns to be placed inside a golden frame and exhibited at some fourth-dimensional holographic museum.

"OK, sound paintings," Dolby partially agrees with my assessment, "but expressionist sound paintings rather than realist. If I was a painter, which I'm not, I would paint the light around an object itself, create an impression of it that way. I think probably a lot of artists are in the process of recreating some kind of thrill for themselves which is somehow gone from their lives, whether it be an Elvis Costello, who is so in love with all those '60s hits, or a Dead Kennedy, who is a bit sorry that he's grown up and isn't part of the gang anymore. That's being unfair to both of them. But you know what I mean about recreating that thrill, which you do, on living out a personal fantasy. I do that as well.

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"Radio Caroline personified as Lene Lovich is the fairest way to describe 'Radio Silence.' It's kind of anthem, I suppose, to free radio, to free enterprise. But rather than say, 'this is a song about Radio Caroline' and do it graphically, I've chosen to create this little scenario. It's allegorical."

Dolby insists on transcending boundaries of space and time. Though he has yet to see the land of his birth as an adult, by year's end he expects to travel through China. It is probably with genuine regret that Dolby, has not yet mastered a facility for dispersing himself throughout real time as easily as he relocates his music. Simply by using the nostalgic word "wireless" in his album title, Thomas Dolby has broken away from the "age of plastic" which dominated the current landscape. But Dolby refuses to accept someone else's judgement of what his vista ought to look upon.

"I guess the reason I identify with the idea of wireless is that the role of a ham radio operator is about communication. For example, the Falkland Islands and Poland—the heroism of one anonymous who's boradcasting to the outside world and getting through the people around him who are trying to supress it. I've got this amazing Second World War map of all the Allied Inteligence broadcasters around Europe, with names like Carrot-Face and Elephant-Two. I can't imagine the guy who invented the wireless (Marconi, actually) knew what it was going to mean by 1982.

"Also the reason I chose the title was it semed timeless in a way, lost in time. It bridged a lot of gaps and that's something I'm always trying to find ways of doing, is removing myself from any strict terms of reference on a time scale, on a musicalscale, or any other. The plastic age is very much here and now, whereas my-golden age is forever. It's not really fair to make a comparison. But I'm not really interested in talking about the here and now unless it's in reference to other points in time. The same thing with geographical locations. It's not purely a nostalgic album. It's nostalgia in the future as well as the past, and it's only that nostalgia which relates to today as well."

To achieve balance, Thomas Dolby mixes an ancient harmonica blues way played by XTC's Andy Partridge with Lene Lovich chanting "try to think of nothing" over and over like a mantra, then slides in artificial sound he generated himself on a battery of computers. Unlike the radio star who was killed by video, Thomas Dolby figures to secure his own longevity by befriending the newest machinery as it emerges.

"Computers were the only way in which I could do a stage show that was actually happening live and would give me the most flexibility. So I taught myself how to use them and see what aspects I could adapt to suit my own purposes.

"It is frightening that kids don't have to know arithmetic anymore—they're allowed to use calculators in exams. Architects are designing buildings on microcomputers. The only problem with the architectural software is that it's one group's preconception about what a building ought to look like. You could use a word processor to write articles now, and call up a front page out of a memory bank. But if that goes hand in hand with suppressive government, I can foresee a situation in which the only creativity that is allowed is to be done within the limitations of government software. And that is a very dangerous thing. But my answer to that isn't 'so it's scary, so I'm going to reject it and live in the country. Mine is to learn how to use it but make it work for me. When I'm 50 I don't know if I'll be keeping up with all those changes, but certainly I'd like to." When Thonias Dolby turns 50, we will have crossed the border into the 21st century, that same technology may well have forced us to choose to use it, abuse it, or lose it, and a very different age will comejo pass. ^