Thomas Dolby on his favourite Talking Heads album: “A thoughtfulness and compositional flair”
For one, brief, shining moment, the geek inherited the earth. One might say that the prevalence of superhero movies at the multiplex for the past two decades shows that we’ve always had it, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. However, those movies are still being made by people comfortably cooler and more socially adept than 80 per cent of their intended audience. No, the period of time I’m talking about is the early 1980s, when Thomas Dolby was one of the biggest stars on MTV.
Dolby, Devo, The Buggles, and PhD had all the charisma and cool factor of the autograph queue at a Star Trek convention. This is said with all the love in the world for them, by the way; kindred spirits will always recognise each other. While it can never be stated enough how much the reasoning for this came from MTV’s initial reluctance to play videos by non-white artists, in the early days of MTV, there was also something of a supply issue.
American artists didn’t often make music videos as there wasn’t a dedicated program for them the way there were in other countries. So when MTV launched, the most available videos were from post-punk weirdos who were most switched on to new trends of the time. Folks like Thomas Dolby, whose stage name was a nickname he picked up as a teenager for how he could always be found hidden in a pile of keyboards and tape players, the most attainable of which were made by Dolby at the time.
After tooling around in a few bands in the late 1970s, Dolby retreated behind the mixing desk briefly, becoming a producer and songwriter for other artists. However, he then took the skills he was learning for other bands and began applying them to a solo career of his own. His brand of technical (and technological) wizardry and spectacular nerdiness leading to a global hit in 1982 with ‘She Blinded Me With Science’.
A list of his favourite records compiled for Goldmine magazine confirms what anyone with a passing interest in alternative rock can see from space, that this was a man who’d listened to a shit-ton of Talking Heads. While David Byrne’s group would get their time in the spotlight at around the same time as Dolby, they’d been active a lot longer. Their debut album, Talking Heads ’77 was released in, er, 1977, and it’s the last, but certainly not least, of all the records Dolby talks about.
After talking about the cues he took from the London punk scene, Dolby says “What a relief, when, at the end of the ’70s, a new breed of music emerged that had the manic energy of the three-chord, spike-haired brigade, but also had a thoughtfulness and compositional flair that appealed to my delicate music sensibilities.”
He goes on to say “The Heads seemed otherworldly, with David Byrne’s neurological contortions set against a rocking rhythm section. I dutifully headed to New York, to CBGBs and The Mudd Club, to soak it all in.” In a way, all Dolby was doing was taking the same intelligence and awkwardness that the Heads were putting to record and adding more whimsy and zaniness than Byrne’s lot ever would. Dolby himself puts it best when he signs off with “During that era, I was quietly cooking up my own contribution to the rapidly morphing world of ’80s music. What a strange melting pot we all dove into!”
