“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,” (PopMatters).”His (2016) 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.” Setting the scene for his later career, the UK native saw early gigs by “everyone from the Clash to Elvis Costello to XTC” as a teen. He later played keyboards with the Camera Club, Lene Lovich, Herbie Hancock, and George Clinton; co-wrote and produced the first platinum 12” hip hop single, “Magic’s Wand” by Whodini; was chosen by David Bowie as the keyboardist at the UK half of Live Aid; created original music for feature films produced by George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Ken Russell; and his keyboard work was a central feature of Foreigner’s smash hit album IV (most notably the single ‘Waiting for a Girl Like You’).
Illustrating Dolby’s bleeding-edge vantage point in terms of 1980s tech, “while riding his tour bus through the Nevada desert, (he was) forced to pull over and use a gas station phone booth as a primitive modem for uploading demo files to Michael Jackson.” Dolby was “an ‘80s pop culture Zelig, dropped into the zeitgeist with a bit of a deer-in-the-headlights attitude.” After retiring from the pop music business, he founded a company which was pivotal in the early days of the development of cell phone ringtones; served as the Music Director for TED Talks for over a decade; and is now a professor of Music for New Media at Johns Hopkins University.
“Radio Silence,” a track from The Golden Age of Wireless (1982), pivots around in terms of its tonality throughout. Meanwhile, the video treats us to a neighborhood tour of decades-old radios as we hear synthesis that was state-of-the-art for its time: retrofuturism sets Dolby’s stage here as usual. The harmonic shifts are perhaps the clearest during the outro, when the panoply of shiny synth textures has settled down a bit. 2:59 is in F# mixolydian, shifting at 3:12 to D mixolydian; the two keys alternate as the track fades.
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