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Thursday, March 29th, 2012

7:30pm

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21+

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Thomas Dolby was an indelible part of the electronic music landscape on both sides of the Atlantic in the 80s. The Zelig of synthpop, he was seemingly there or thereabouts at all points of that crucial decade. He enjoyed huge solo success with the singles She Blinded Me With Science and Hyperactive!, composed and performed on hits for everyone from AOR giants Foreigner to none-more-quirky new wave girl Lene Lovich, produced three superlative albums for Prefab Sprout, and even co-wrote the much-sampled early rap classic Magics Wand by Whodini.

With his mad professor image of specs and lab-coat, the Oxford-educated boy (he went to Abingdon, the school later attended by Radiohead) was a sort of Brit version of Kraftwerks men-machines, a techno wiz whose music and productions proved influential on the development of homegrown electro-pop.

And, like so many of the Class of 81-2, he was encouraged to make his mark by punk, although in truth he was less moved by the three-chord garage-band thrash of the Clash et al. than he was by the DIY proto-electronica of the Normal, David Bowie and Brian Enos collaborations in Berlin, and the experiments of certain Germans.

Punk hit big in 77-8, but there was also a counter-culture of krautrock, Kraftwerk and Bowie-Enos albums [Low and Heroes], he recalls. That had a big effect on me.

Seeing Gary Numan perform Are Friends Electric? on Top of the Pops in 1979 was empowering to say the least. There was the sense that anyone could do it, he says. That with a few synths and a drum machine you could make a record on your own in your back room. I was one of those people.

In 1981, Thomas was a songwriter-for-hire and session keyboard player, notably, adding those famous synth textures to Foreigners Waiting For a Girl Like You, when he realized he could apply all of his new skills to create his own music.

It became apparent that you could do complete records at home, he says. It was very exciting. It also dawned that, without a band to fund, it was more economically viable to operate as a one-man unit. You could sell a few thousand records and make a bit of a profit without racking up huge debts to a record company.

The Abingdon boy then impacted on the Brooklyn hip-hop scene when he co-wrote Magics Wand for pioneering hip-hop trio Whodini; it became the first platinum-selling rap 12-inch. It was like a game of Monopoly, he says of this period, when he was seizing every opportunity he could. Every square you landed on, you bought into. It was exciting to be put into all these different situations.

Perhaps most exciting of all was to find himself at No. 5 in the States in 1982 with She Blinded Me With Science, which, with its video featuring celebrity zany scientist Dr. Magnus Pike, propelled Thomas to international stardom and fixed him in the public imagination as an exponent of eccentric electro-pop.

Im naturally a fairly introverted person with a thin but virulent exhibitionist streak that comes out every so often, he laughs. Actually, in that video [for Science] I assumed the persona of the underdog because I was a big fan of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. I wasnt a pin-up like Sting, Adam Ant or Simon Le Bon, I couldnt compete on that level. So I created this contrarian image and it caught on in a big way. I headed to the States and made hay while the sun shone.