Thomas Dolby: Future World

By Jon Armstrong

I knew that whatever music I would be attracted to and ultimately attempt to make myself would be changed after I heard Thomas Dolby’s first hit, “She Blinded Me With Science” in 1982. I didn’t know it then, but Dolby played on some of the biggest songs of the early 1980s, lending his talent and sound to Def Leppard’s Pyromania, synthesizer work on Foreigner’s mega-smash, 4, (can anyone who was alive and young during that album’s run forget the synth line to “Waiting for a Girl Like You”?) and as David Bowie’s keyboardist for Bowie’s band at Live Aid in 1985, contributing to the goosebump inducing rendition of Hereos.

Aside from helping to define the synthpop era, Dolby is a real renaissance man. His work as a producer, technologist and entrepreneur hasn’t stopped for over 25 years. Like most of the keyboardists from his era, Dolby is linked to technology and music deeply.

Dolby also produced one of my favorite albums of the 1980s, Prefab Sprout’s Steve McQueen (also referred to in the U.S. as Two Wheels Good). When that album came out, I was living in England and the sounds of those songs forever remind me of rain, great chords, peculiar melodies and coming of age.
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