Thomas Dolby brings his live show, Iconic 80's Recollections to Dublin, next week. He will play synth-pop classics and tell personal stories from a golden era of music and tech. We spoke to him about what was acceptable in the eighties
Thomas Dolby was the synth pop wunderkind of the 1980s. He was a Zelig-like presence in an often underrated and misunderstood musical decade, popping up everywhere like a jack in the box with his own hits Hyperactive! and She Blinded Me With Science, playing in Bowie’s band at Live Aid, producing albums by Prefab Sprout and Joni Mitchell, and playing live with Roger Waters and Stevie Wonder.
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He has also been heavily involved in music technology. In the 1990s, Dolby founded Beatnik, a Silicon Valley software company whose technology was used to play internet audio and later ringtones.
On the faculty at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University since 2014, he leads Peabody's Music for New Media program.
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The 67-year-old London-born musician and producer is taking his live show on the road again, accompanied by Martin McAloon of Prefab Sprout, Jakko Jakzyk (King Crimson) on guitar, Mat Hector (Iggy Pop, Thom Yorke) on drums, and Ana Pshokina on bass.
Has the eighties got a bad reputation and are they misunderstood?
"We tend to look back through rose-tinted spectacles and the current eighties music fad focuses on the pop stuff like Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and Walking on Sunshine, but if you were there, it was quite a dark decade. I was in England trying to make it in the music business and there was a lot of competition between the young bands - if you were on the same bill or the same TV show you tended not to hang out with the other act. We were living through Thatcher and the Miners Strike and the Falklands and the Royal Wedding and there was a sense that greed was good, as Gordon Gecko said. By today’s standards, things were relatively innocent but if you were young during that period it was quite a cold and lonely time."
Did you experience much of that rivalry between pop acts back then?
"I was most painfully aware of it when I did Top of The Pops at the BBC. It was filmed in a big building in White City in London and often I’d find myself wedged between Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran’s dressing rooms and heaven forbid you’d walk out of your dressing room when they did - you’d turn up your nose and walk in the other direction and then bump into them on the other side of the building. That was all fuelled by the attitude of music journalists at the time, which was very snooty. There was a lot of rejection of mainstream taste."
Tell us about the show you are bringing to Dublin on 29 May . . .
"I am teaching at university now and most of my students were born this century and from a musicological standpoint, they are fascinated with eighties music because it was so diverse, so many new styles, and people experimenting with new technology. Some of it was driven by the power of MTV and music videos. When I talk to my students about that they are curious about my experiences so I came up with the story of my personal journey through the eighties via the music that mattered the most to me at the time - not only my own songs but other songs as I was involved in as a keyboard player, as a co-writer. My own personal story in the eighties was an odd one really because I was always a bit of a wallflower, I was a teenager, and suddenly in the space of six months, I was thrust into the limelight and I had a public persona that caught on as the mad scientist synth boffin. That was people expected of me. People would see this MTV person. I got to meet so many of my heroes and it was such an honour to play alongside Stevie Wonder and David Bowie and Joni Mitchell. It was an amazing decade for me and I’m surprised I came though it relatively unscathed."
In Iconic 80's Recollections you reimagine or reference about 40 songs - your own work and other people’s work that you admired or influenced you . . .
"Eventually it’s going to be a symphonic show in front of a symphony orchestra and I am hoping that will happen next year. So on this show I’m trying out new ideas and what I’ve done is woven a lot of different songs and bands into orchestral melodies and there are all layered on top of each other. So, for example, I will talk about the eighties - I was sitting on my backside in the Paris Metro, strumming Dylan songs for tourists and I hear that Mick Jones is trying to get a hold of me. I thought, 'Yes! The Clash!’ But it was Mick Jones from Foreigner. He’d heard my demo tape and really liked the keyboards and he wanted to know would I be prepared to fly to New York and try out for their new album. I was like, ‘twist my arm’ - I was a busker in the Paris Metro. Foreigner worked during the day in Electric Lady Land studios and left me alone all night to fill up a certain number of tracks. I’d never been in a good studio before and they wanted a ‘dreamy’ intro to a track they were working on called Waiting For a Girl Like You . . ."
You produced the albums Steve McQueen (1985) and Jordan: The Comeback (1990) with Prefab Sprout. For the Dublin show, you are joined by Martin McAloon of the band and he will be performing their songs. What are your memories of working with them?
"Paddy (McAloon) writes quite complicated songs. He was very influenced by Gershwin, Brian Wilson, Steely Dan . . . he’s a self-taught musician. He loved those complicated chord sequences but he felt he didn’t really know what he was doing in the studio. They felt that their debut album, Swoon, was a good record but it wasn’t very accessible, it was a bit didactic. In my opinion it was too complicated. So before I even began working with them, I took the songs into the studio and whittled them down so that each part of the song had its own space and texture. I made everything a bit more symmetrical and I think the key to arranging and production is if the parts are great and they complement each other then it minimises the work you need to do in the studio. I think what I brought to the band was keyboards - Wendy’s voice is quite ethereal and the keyboards were the glue between her and Paddy’s voice."
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If we are to believe the stories and rumours, Paddy now lives in the rarefied realms of a recluse . . .
"Ahhh. He has issues with his sight and hearing and that makes working difficult for him. He’s a guy who needs to write a song every couple of days, he has a biological need to do that, he’s really driven to do that - whether it’s going to end up on an album or not, he just starts working. One of his issues is with his hearing and it’s been hard for him to keep working. On top of that, even more than me, because he is from a small town in the northeast of England, he had such adulation in his neighbourhood that I think he withdrew into himself somewhat and leads a hermit-like existence. People who come to my gigs in the States are very aware of Prefab Sprout."
You attended Westminster School in London with Shane MacGowan in the 1970s . . .
"He was an absolute encyclopaedia of music and we used to hang out in cafes after school and smoke and drink tea and talk about the latest Yes triple album gatefold sleeve. Most of my friends were into prog rock and I clearly remember one day Shane walked in and said, ‘It’s all crap - they’re a bunch of dinosaurs, they deserve to die.’ You can imagine him saying that, spitting out between his teeth. So we said, ‘Shane, what should we be listening to?’ He was our music guru and he listed off bands we’d never heard of – The New York Dolls, MC5, Johnny Thunders, Iggy Pop and The Ramones. And of course, Shane was right."
Did you have any inkling back then of what a fine lyricist he would become?
"He was an amazing guy. He put no effort into schoolwork but he was extremely well read and had an incredible vocabulary. I remember one day we were reading Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë and me and Shane would sit at the back of the class mumbling and someone was reading out a passage and the teacher asked me, ‘And what figure of speech is this?’ and I hadn’t been paying attention and Shane jabbed me in the ribs and whispered. ‘It’s an onanism’ and I stood up and said, ‘It’s an onanism, sir.’ The teacher told me to come to the top of the class and read what onanism meant from the dictionary."
You have lived in the US for nearly forty years. is there a climate of fear in Trump’s America?
"Oh, yeah. Yeah. Having said that, because it is incremental, very day there are fresh outages, it sort of creeps up on you. There is a constant barrage. There hasn’t been one inciting thing that has really got people active and out on the streets. I’ve been to a couple of the No Kings marches and it’s mainly people over forty and I’m like, ‘Where are the young people?’ When things have changed in the past, like with the Vietnam War, it’s been the young people getting angry that made the difference. Now there seems to be a lethargy and resignment among young people to the fact that these dictators are taking over the planet at the expense of nature and the possible future of mankind. Yes, there’s a climate of fear and it has not been this divided since the Civil War. I long ago gave up on the concept of trying to reason with a Trump supporter. They’re so brainwashed and so mistrustful of all politicians but they don’t see him as a politician - they see him as their saviour. The hope here is that the pendulum will swing back and he will mess up so badly that we can rip it up and start again. I think it will take decades to undone the damage he has done."
Thomas Dolby with Martin McAloon (performing the songs of Prefab Sprout) play The Academy, Dublin on 29 May
