| One-Man Band
An '80s icon talks about trailblazing on the cutting edge.
By Matthew Robinson
Berklee.edu Correspondent
November 2, 2006
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| Thomas Dolby offers glimpses into old stories and new technologies. |
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| Photo by Phil Farnsworth |
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In his sweater and jeans, he looked like pretty much anyone. But then he put the headset on. It was fitted with both a microphone and a camera clipped to the left ear cuff that allowed the audience to see things from his point of view as transmitted onto a giant screen. Suddenly, he looked very much like electronic music innovator Thomas Dolby.
Dolby, on hand for a clinic at the Berklee Performance Center, took his place amidst a bevy of mainframes, keyboards, sequencers, condensers, and other technological paraphernalia, all of which had been collected and invented over the course of a career that had taken him from MTV to the Muppets.
"That is what my career had been reduced to," Dolby said of the puppet rendition of his ’80s hit "She Blinded Me with Science," which he showed as part of a musical retrospective of career.
That he had gone from the Top of the Pops (the popular television show in his native Britain) to kiddie shows troubled Dolby so much that, for a time, he stepped away from performing music altogether. During this sabbatical, Dolby developed the polyphonic ringtone technology that now dominates the cell phone industry.
"I love to tinker," he said, explaining how he came to put together both his performance rig and the cell phone sounds. "I am not good to have in the factory, as I tend to get in the way."
Dolby has always been known for his inventiveness, and it was easy to see why when he recreated some of his more popular tunes live on the BPC stage.
To rebuild the 1984 track "The Flat Earth," Dolby called up a 25-year-old rhythm loop on one machine, then added a hand-tapped percussion sequence and various underlying tracks on others. Then he took to the keys and offered a video-washed perspective on the way of the world that included his own lyrics interspersed with speech samples from Martin Luther King, Jr. Dolby later offered a live rearrangement of the club tune "I Live in a Suitcase," a musical tribute to the woman who convinced the Brit expat to stay in the States.
"I came to visit," he recalled, "and I never left."
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A camera mounted on his headphones allows students to see everything Dolby is seeing.
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Photo by Phil Farnsworth
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Fortunately for his fans, Dolby was more willing to return to his musical roots after enjoying his achievements as an inventor. Though the ringtones brought him much success, Dolby missed his audiences. In fact, he wanted to get even closer to them than he ever had before.
"My fans are people," he observed, "not units."
The result of this new intimate and independent approach has been a series of one-man shows such as the one that he would be putting on later in the day at Berklee.
"Now I can write a song and put it out," he said. "The loop is smaller and I now know who my audience [is]."
As his audience consists of both music fans and technophiles, Dolby shared both the music itself and also the tools with which he makes and remakes it. From vintage compressors with gigantic knobs that, he admits, are "fun to twiddle," to the latest in microtechnology (e.g., the Macintosh mainframe that runs the whole setup), Dolby explained each and every piece of equipment that he had brought with him.
"Back [when I started], I had a boatload of equipment and it often went wrong," he mused. "Today, I have a boatload of equipment and…."
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Dolby recorded his Berklee concert, a few hours after the clinic, for a DVD. |
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Photo by Phil Farnsworth |
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When explaining how he came to be a performer in the first place, Dolby recalled passing fancies with jazz and other forms, but said that his real inspiration came not from a genre or band, but from a single performer who did not seem to be doing much at all.
"I saw Brian Eno on TV in 1972," Dolby said, recalling the man in leather "armlets" who stood proudly in the back of the legendary group Roxy Music occasionally twiddling a knob or two. "I thought that if all I had to do was stand there looking good, that was the career for me!"
But since that early revelation, Dolby has actually been in constant motion, which is what has allowed him to remain relevant and revolutionary for so long. Whether helping to launch the music video or the cellular phone, he has always been at the forefront of music and music-related technology. So it may have come as no surprise that, when asked by entrepreneurship professor Kevin McCluskey about how he created his business model and what he would recommend to other independent artists who want to make it on their own, Dolby replied, "You need to multitask."
And from a man who’s built his career on versatility, that’s advice worth having.
Matthew Robinson has written for Billboard, the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and more than 90 other outlets.
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