The 1970s masterpiece Thomas Dolby calls the “classic album of the era”
On the surface, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that fans of music will never be as cool as the people making them. As someone who writes about music for a living, I know this only too well. However, everyone who makes music starts out as a fan. The closer you get to your favourite artists, the more you realize that half the time, they’re just as nerdy about this stuff as you are, unless your favourite artist happens to be Thomas Dolby. A man who made being a total dork into a fine art.
That’s said with love, by the way. You never want your favourite artists to be fake and Dolby was thrillingly himself. You can’t fake the level of sheer nerdiness on offer when not only is his defining hit called ‘She Blinded Me With Science’, but it features guest vocals from writer and TV personality Magnus Pyke, basically the Bill Nye of his day. The question is, what sort of music inspires this level of defiant anti-cool? Besides several Doctor Who marathons, obviously.
The answer is, like it was for many people, punk! Not in the way one would expect however. It’s true, while Dolby grew up on the likes of Elton John, Joni Mitchell and jazz music, he came of age in the late 1970s, while the likes of The Sex Pistols and The Clash were some of the most notorious people in the country. At the time though, Dolby viewed the whole thing as a bit of fun, but not quite to his taste.
Not in the way that the likes of David Bowie and particularly Iggy Pop were. In fact, when collating a list of the ten albums that changed his life for Goldmine Magazine, two of the most important are the former’s Low and the latter’s Lust For Life. Of Iggy’s masterpiece, he has this to say: “This album showcases Iggy’s raw power combined with Bowie’s songwriting prowess. Add to that their excellence in conducting a rocking band and turning chaos into order and back again, and you’ve got a classic album of the era.”
Unlike most people listening to the record at the time, Dolby had a serious understanding of both music theory and technology. In fact, the stage name Dolby came from a school nickname for how often he was found with his head in some Dolby keyboards. This gave him a deeoper understanding of the record than most, saying “Against a backdrop of the London punk scene of the late ’70s — which was fun as hell but had not a lot of musical merit to it — I loved this album above all others.”
There, we have the power of listening to music when you’re uncool. Dolby wasn’t listening to Iggy Pop because he was a mate of Bowie’s, or because he cut himself open on stage from time to time. By truly understanding the music, it inspired him to make his own. Considering he secured one of the first MTV hits and one of the most beloved songs of the early 1980s, I’d say that worked out pretty well for him, cool or not.
