| HAVE AN EXHIBITIONIST STREAK, BUT | DON'T NEED THE APPLAUASE
IN THE 80s HE WAS THE MAD PROFESSOR OF SYNTH, NOW TURNED ACTUAL PROFESSOR. AS THOMAS DOLBY TAKES A BREAK FROM ACADEMIA FOR A SERIES OF LIVE DATES IN HIS NATIVE UK, WE TALK AI, MUSICAL RESURRECTIONS AND, ER, SAILING NOVELS WITH ONE OF POP’S MOST CEREBRAL ARTISTS...
STEVE O’BRIEN
Pop star, record producer, film composer, tech entrepreneur, author, academic, filmmaker... few people embody the phrase ‘renaissance man’ more than Thomas Dolby. In the last 10 years alone, he has put out a best-selling memoir (2016’s The Speed Of Sound: Breaking The Barriers Between Music And Technology), joined the famed Johns Hopkins University as lecturer and written his first novel, of which more later. And now, if that wasn’t diary-busting enough, Dolby is about to go on the road for a series of dates around North America as part of the Totally Tubular tour (alongside the likes of Tom Bailey, Modern English, Bow Wow Wow and others), and six headline shows in his native UK. A rarity indeed.
“I don’t play live very much these days,” Dolby tells Classic Pop from his home in Baltimore. “I’ve just really enjoyed teaching these past few years. I left school at 16 but I’m from a long line of Oxford and Cambridge professors. Only the other day someone said to me I’d finally joined the family firm!”
DOWN TO A SCIENCE
So what, we ask, does the composer of She Blinded Me With Science and Hyperactive! put as his profession on official forms these days? For a committed polymath like Dolby, it could be anything.
“Well, if you put ‘musician’ the premium will go up,” he laughs. “Whereas with ‘teacher’ or ‘educator’ you might get a discount, so I tend to do that these days. But not all pull-down menus have ‘Professor’ in them, which is very annoying when you’re trying to get a good table at a restaurant.”
That the pop maverick known as Thomas Dolby (real name: Thomas Morgan Robertson) ended up in academia isn’t such a great surprise, as there was always something quite scholarly about him. Whereas many of his chart peers were circling themselves with leggy supermodels in their videos, there Dolby was – in the She Blinded Me With Science promo – sharing screen time with TV egghead Dr Magnus Pyke. Even the singer’s short-lived alias – Booker T Boffin – nodded towards his own slightly bookish air.
“I do a lot of things, but I don’t purport
