THE GOLDEN AGE OF THOMAS DOLBY

In L.A., Thomas Dolby was tied up. With Michael Jackson. Jackson had seen a video of Dolby’s U.S. hit, “She Blinded Me With Science”—which Dolby had directed—been impressed and had invited Dolby by for a chat.

Michael Jackson had not, however, invited me. So I Sat in a hotel room drinking beer with a bunch of people I had never met before. These people were • Dolby’s manager, several people associated with, his record label, and several people associated with either the manager or the people associated with the record label.

Dolby is one of those synth-pop whiz kids who use synthesizers to make sounds that have never been heard before. A creator of “modern music.” Has an album called The Golden Age Of Wireless. Has a hit called “She Blinded Me With Science.” Has another one called “One Of Our Submarines.” On his record covers you see him bending over complex pieces of scientific equipment. A man of the future, get the pipture?

When Thomas Dolby walked into the hotel room, he looked very dapper and very proper. He wore a tan, pin-striped suit that was quite stylish in a European sort of way. His short hair was light brown, his face clean shaven and he wasn’t wearing those glasses he’s seen peering throflgh on his album cover. He looked about 10 times better than he does in any of the photographs circulating. He reminded me of a book I read as a kid, Tom Swift And The City Of Gold.

Thomas Dolby had been sick recently, He sat down and his manager and the people from his record company asked him about his health. He grimaced.

Then everybody got up and went down to the garage and loaded into three cars and drove a few blocks tb the restaurant to eat dinner.

. At the restaurant, Thomas Dolby stood at the bar, looking a bit like a young David Bowie, drinking Perrier. He told me that he was not at all surprised by the success in America of his song, “She Blinded Me With Science.” In a very understated British voice he said, “When you are in the recording studio, you make decisions about what you’re writing and recording based on what appeals to you. You have to assume that what appeals to you will appeal to the public. And so for that reason, when I finished ‘She Blinded Me With Science’ in the studio, I was very pleased with it and so, no, I’m not surprised that it’s doing well.it surprised me more that my first album did badly than that ‘Science’ is doing well. Put it that way, I mean obviously it’s a well known fact that the American music market is a tough nut to crack. But at the same time, I feel that I’m not totally devoid of the sort of qualities required to make somebody very popular in the United States.”

Some of the qualities would appear to be:

•Dolby is a songwriter (“You can wrap up a song in any sort of new style that you fancy to choose, whether it be an R&B style or a rock ’n’ roll style,” he said. “But you can’t disguise a good song.”), and he writes good songs.

•Dolby’s songs, though performed with

There's one like him in every doss.

synthesizers and drum machines (along with traditional instruments), are melodic with quite a bit of the old human being evident. Thus they should appeal to Americans who don’t care for abrasive English groups like Cabaret Voltaire or the Fall.

•Dolby has an appealing, wistful,voice, young and earnest and vulnerable; Johnny Rotten he isn’t.

•Dolby is quite handsome; he’s got the look of a pop star.

•Dolby is very smart, very aware of the kinds of records that are now becoming popular and is quite keen on making records that millions of people will like and buy.

•Dolby directs the videos for each of his songs and these videos get played on MTV and people see them and go out and buy his records.

I asked him if popular success in the United States was a top priority. After all, he was in the midst of a promotional tour that was taking him through L.A., Toronto and New York and a zillion interviews with every type of media the publicists could line up. He gave a quiet laugh. “Well, let me put it this way, I don’t really care if I makeloads of money as long as I can lead an exotic lifestyle and have everything I want.” He paused, then laughed again.

“No,” he said, getting serious, getting earnest. “I mean not America as a priority over any place in the world. I think the priority has to be the country that you live in. This is very hard to talk about. It’s very often misconstrued when artists talk about wanting to be successful. A lot of people sort of say, ‘Oh, he wants* all the trappings of success. He wants to have an exotic lifestyle and everything.’ At the end of the day, you can only sustain yourself for so long on people coming backstage and saying ‘That was a great gig’ or ‘I really like your new record.’ ’Cause they will say that anyway, whatever stage of the business you are in. And the higher you go, the less honest firsthand acclaim you get from people, the more bullshit there is and the more suspicious you become of the things people tell you. So at the end of the day, the only real acclaim you can judge anything by is commercial success. Because commercial success represents people wanting your records enough to go out and spend money on them. A platinum album is wonderful withjn the business and looks great on your wall and everything, but that actually represents a million people who have wanted that album and have played that album in their own living room and that is very important.”

Of course, according to a booklet I have called Questions Rock Journalists Should Ask Rock Stars, this type of answer leads to Question #32: Can you maintain your artistic integrity while trying for commercial success?

“If you give me a choice between selling loads and loads of records, or making great records, I’d much rather make great records,”1 said Dolby, who may or may not have been quoting from a booklet called How To Deal With Nosy Rock Journalists. “In a way,” he continued, “a lot of my true heroes are .cult heroes, they’re not popular heroes at all.”

Question #33: Cult heroes? Like who? “Well if you ask me if I would rather be Captain Beefheart or Stevie Wonder, both of whom I really admire, I’d rather be Captain Beefheart. Because Captain Beefheart actually means something very special to a lot of people. Although he might not show up very high on the charts, there are a lot of people to whom he is just a good reason for being alive. Whereas an awful lot of people who buy a Stevie Wonder record buy it because this week they’ve got so much money over in their paycheck and what’s around? The new Stevie Wonder record. They’ll go buy it and play it a few times.

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“But I mean he’s not exactly the kind of artist whose records are bound to get worn out on people’s turntables every time. Whereas I know loads of people who are on their third copy of Trout Mask Replica, because they’ve just literally gone through it. And that’s really something. But it’s not something you can consciously contrive. All I can do is try to make the best record I’m capable of with an open ear to the kind of people who are going to be exposed to if and what they’ve been conditioned to like. There’s no point making music in a vacuum. No reason to make music that is going to be totally inaccessible to the people who are going to hear it, no matter how brilliant it

is. However brilliant a record might be, if it doesn’t relate to the people who are going to hear it, then it’s wasted.”

Which leads us to “She Blinded Me With Science,” a record that, as Dolby explains

it, was made with the American record consumer in mind. “I think it’s the most meaningless song I’ve written,” he said. “It’s about a sort of fuddyduddy old scientist who gets obsessed with his lab assistant. When I made that song, it was with the thought in my head that perhaps I was taking myself too seriously and that people were finding my music too demanding and that maybe I should just let loose for a little while and be a bit more extroverted and make -a record that was basically nonsense like everything else in the charts, instead of trying to pull off this sacred quest of writing meaningful lyrics. And it’s just a sad reflection on the state of things that it was that successful.”

He laughed. “It hasn’t been that successful

in England. Which says something about the difference between our country and yours.”

Thomas Dolby, who popped out of his mom and into the world in the exotic environs of Cairo in 1958, was not born with his little fingers on a synthesizer keyboard, mugging for a video. He spent his early years flitting from country to country with his dad, who is an archeologist, teaching himself to play normal instruments like the piano and the guitar and listening to a lot of jazz and folk music. Constantly being on the move did not sit well with young Tom, especially when he reached the mating age.

“I was never able to keep friends for very long ’cause I was always moving,” he said. “That was fine for a while until I discc^/ered girls. And then that became very painful because you fall in love and then somebody disappears off to another country and it’s all very heartbreaking.” (I could hear the synthesized violins come in.)

Luckily, such painful experiences did not go to waste. Dolby draws on them for songs like “Europa And The Pirate Twins,” which is based on just such a tragic love affair, and alsQ happens to be the best song he’s recorded to date. “I met this girl who was the daughter of a diplomat and she was very wonderful, but then her father moved to a different .country. I never saw her again, but I kind of fantasized that because she was so charismatic, she would end up a him star or a pop star or something like that and I would run into her again by way of a cover of a magazine or a film or newspaper clip.”

Dolby has managed to capture the faded, sentimental memories that most of us have of young love in “Europa And The Pirate Twins.” Says he: “The Portuguese have a very good word for it. It roughly translates as ‘nostalgia.’ But it actually means that kind of faint memory of the past that’s very difficult to put your finger on. Sometimes you smell a smell when you walk into a strange room that instantly takes you back to some point in your past. It was that kind of very insecure feeling of timelessness that I was trying to evoke. And I suppose it has a kind of pathetic ending because she comes back to London in a flurry of publicity and I go to meet her at the hoverport and I’m trying to push my way through the crowd to say hello to her, make myself known to her. And I’m just dragged away by her bodyguards and she drives away into the sunset. So it’s just like an illusion shattered. A twist. A cool twist. But that part of the song is fantasy, which is sparked by an initial experience. Which is something I often do. I’m not protective about reality. I have a very vivid imagination and I let it run rampant when it comes to writing songs.”

At about this point in our conversation, I made some, mention of Dolby’s “synthesizer oriented music.” Big mistake. It was as if I had made a negative comment about his mother.

“Well, for a start, I don’t believe that my music is synthesizer oriented,” he announced. “I think that’s the wrong tag to apply to it. ’Cause I don’t think it’s the sound of synthesizers.”

The Sound of Synthesizers. What a great title for one of those superstar jam albums like A1 Kooper and Michael Bloomfield used to make in the ’60s. I can see it now: we’ll get Gary Numan and UltraVox and Depeche Mode and Soft Cell and the Human League and Thomas Dolby and lock them in a room and...

Ahh, but I’m sidestepping the problem at hand: Does Thomas Dolby make “synthesizer oriented music”?

Sorry Tom, but you do. I must reveal to / all readers of CREEM that Thomas Dolby’s music has “synthesizer” stamped all over it. All kinds of weird squiggles of sound worm their way through his songs and those squiggles don’t have anything in common with sounds made by guitars, flutes, saxophones, grand pianos or even Jerry Garcia. Those sounds bring to mind only one thing: SYNTHESIZERS.

Thomas Dolby makes ’80s mood music and ht uses the tools of the ’80s to make it. The shadows of those little computer chips fall across his records. Which is just fine by me, but which seems to bother Tom, who doesn’t want to have anything to do with those other synth-pop sensations like Depeche Mode and Soft Cell and A Flock Of Seagulls and lots more that we don’t have time to list here.

Dolby on the defense: “Unfortunately, because the competition is so strong. in America [to get a record played on the radio], a lot of people will first hear about an artist through the hype that is thrust at them and the first thing involved is choosing a category to stick your artist in, which is sad but it’s a fact of life. That’s the way it goes. And-obviously the tag that’s been applied to me, not entirely according to my wishes, which is an easy one to do since my main instrument is a synthesizer, is to say, ‘Well this is techno-pop. This is syrtth oriented music.’ And that’s how this has come about.”

Thank you. Next issue: Jerry Garcia on how the Grateful Dead aren’t hippies.