In popular culture, the term “renaissance man” can often be overused or even misused, but in the case of Thomas Dolby, the term has a lot more validity than the casual fan could ever imagine. His new memoir, Speed of Sound: Breaking the Barriers Between Music and Technology, goes a long way in making a case for Dolby to adopt this title.
In the early ‘80s, Dolby was an inescapable fixture of MTV’s playlists, with his novelty techno-pop hit “She Blinded Me With Science” ruling the video airwaves and pop charts. Despite a modest follow-up hit a few years later with the frenetic, funky “Hyperactive”, Dolby has been largely dismissed as a one-hit wonder, but as this autobiography proves, there’s much more to this rich story than a simple freak pop hit.
The book is cleanly divided into two sections, underlining the “music” and “technology” aspects described in the title. Sure, he’s a singer, songwriter and musician; but he’s also an avid pursuer of computer technology, and his professional life has managed to serve both of these avocations satisfactorily. Dolby stresses, however, that both pursuits did not come without their share of disappointment and disenchantment.
The book begins with Dolby’s late teen years working in a London fruit and vegetable shop by day and frequenting the city’s burgeoning punk and new wave music scene by night. He witnessed early gigs by everyone from the Clash to Elvis Costello to XTC, and these experiences planted a seed, as did the discovery of a beat-up synth module in a dumpster by a music store, which he took to his rooming house and successfully hooked up to his Wurlitzer keyboard. Ta-da! “Science”, indeed.
Dolby recounts in great detail his first real music-related job, working a variety of sound mixing gigs at local clubs. This eventually led to a keyboard-playing gig with a somewhat established singer/songwriter named Bruce Woolley, whose Dolby-fueled backing band eventually became The Camera Club. At the time, Woolley co-wrote “Video Killed the Radio Star” with his friends Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes of the Buggles, and while the Buggles’ version became the smash hit, Camera Club’s version stalled at the lower rungs of the charts. Still, it was a substantial moment for the ambitious Dolby. “I now had the sensation of being tantalizingly close to a bona fide hit record,” he writes.
The Camera Club gig led to a higher-profile gig with Lene Lovich, session work with Foreigner (he played keyboards on their hugely successful 4 album under the pseudonym Booker T. Boffin), solo demo recordings, character-building busking stints in Paris, and eventually, the out-of-nowhere success of “She Blinded Me With Science” (as well as his debut full-length album, The Golden Age of Wireless). Dolby does a great job of recounting the ups and downs of these early days with a refreshing mix of pride and humility, and comes off as a sort of ‘80s pop culture Zelig, dropped into the zeitgeist with a bit of a deer-in-the-headlights attitude.
Before long, he’s meeting and working with everyone from Herbie Hancock to George Clinton (a deep-sea fishing buddy of Dolby’s) to Joni Mitchell to Michael Jackson. David Bowie handpicked Dolby to be the keyboard player for his Live Aid band — an event Dolby looks back on quite fondly in the book and is particularly poignant, given Bowie’s recent death. (“I didn’t have to worry about forgetting the parts,” Dolby recalls when talking about the set-closing Heroes, “because my teenage fanboy self took over and the keys seemed to play themselves.”)
Michael Jackson’s frequent run-ins with Dolby provide some of the more colorful context to this section of the book. A lengthy meeting with the King of Pop in his California mansion gave Dolby a taste of Jackson’s humanity, talent and innate idiosyncrasies, and Dolby’s “Hyperactive” was written specifically for Jackson (who eventually turned it down). Later, while helping Eddie Van Halen solve some thorny technical issues with the guitar legend’s home studio, he was privy to cartoonish rock star behavior that was both off-putting and unintentionally comical, “Every hour of his day was a scene from Spinal Tap,” Dolby says of Van Halen. At the same time, the legal grey areas of the music business were a painful reality check for Dolby (he talks of witnessing payola firsthand) and while he attempted to earnestly follow his muse with his second, third, and fourth albums (The Flat Earth, Aliens Ate My Buick, Astronauts & Heretics), the albums — while critically acclaimed — were financial busts. It was time to clear the decks.
The book’s second part, while lacking a lot of the rock star flash of the section that preceded it, shows how easily it can be for someone with the limber intellect and perseverance of Dolby to slide so seamlessly from music to technology. Realizing the overlap between the two, he seized the opportunity to take his musical know-how and apply it to the information superhighway, still in its relative infancy. Rather tellingly, the book’s prologue recounts an episode in 1984 where Dolby, while riding his tour bus through the Nevada desert, is forced to pull over and use a gas station phone booth as a primitive modem for uploading demo files to Michael Jackson. If that’s not a massively symbolic story that basically describes Dolby in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.
Dolby’s time in the technology field was fraught with ups and downs. Sure, there was plenty of success (his computer software company Headspace, later Beatnik, helped developed cellphone ringtone technology and even created the infamous Nokia default ringtone you probably know by heart), but there were also devastating blows, mostly in the form of financial backing pitfalls and the fiercely competitive nature of Silicon Valley. Dolby was also in the somewhat disadvantageous position of diving headfirst into the world of computer technology with little to no business training (when handing his business card to a potential financial backer, Dolby was asked “what’s your business model”, to which Dolby asked in all sincerity, “What’s a business model?”). But in technology, as in the music industry, Dolby had the great fortune to be on the ground floor of a great deal of the internet’s more successful ventures. Besides the ringtone windfalls, he was also an early participant in the now-ubiquitous TED conferences. While he may not have a doctorate from MIT, Dolby’s former life as a rock star — not to mention his easygoing, charismatic demeanor ––helped him a great deal whenever it came time for him to demo his latest technological endeavor to a large audience.
“When a record is a hit, you pop the champagne and never stop to analyze what went right,” Dolby writes. “When it flops you pick over the bones for weeks or months.” Fortunately, Dolby has come out on top with a great deal to be proud of. In addition to his current role as professor of music and film at Johns Hopkins University, he’s also been happily married for nearly 30 years and is the father of three. The years leading up to now are told in this memoir in a fascinating manner that manages to straddle the line between entertaining name-dropping rock star bio and a sober, cautionary tale of the difficulties of being an artist and renaissance man in these times.