Thomas Dolby Returns to Music After Blinding Silicon Valley With Science

Thomas Dolby's tour bus is currently towing a "Time Capsule" across North America. It's a small brass-and-chrome-plated trailer with all manner of steampunk-esque metres and gauges inside -- as well as hi-fi audio/visual equipment on which his fans are encouraged to record "messages for the future." Where other pop singers whose careers peaked in the '80s have been flocking to nostalgia tours, Dolby is winking at the past but looking far ahead.

His new studio album, A Map of the Floating City, is his first since 1992's Astronauts and Heretics. In the intervening years, he became the musical director of TED and founded the company Beatnik, which developed a ringtone synthesizer used in mobile phones. After moving back from L.A. to his native England in 2006, he built a solar-powered studio in a 1930s boat outside his house. There, he recorded the new album with help from friends such as Dire Straights' Mark Knopfler (guitar) and Regina Spektor (vocals).

Before his recent Toronto show, the former electronic music futurist climbed into his Time Capsule, incognito in a fedora and T-shirt, to speak to Spinner. Dolby talked about everything from his science nerd image and Silicon Valley detour to making an online role-playing game for his fanboys and fangirls -- and why he no longer wants to hit us with technology.

Throughout your career, you've been very much associated with the "synthesizer boffin" image familiar to everyone from the video for "She Blinded Me with Science." How did that image emerge?

In the early days, a lot of my contemporaries were conventional frontman heroes. Whether it was Simon Le Bon on the prow of a luxury yacht or Adam Ant as a highwayman or Sting as a romantic figure, I wasn't going to compete in the pin-up stakes. I thought it was much better to go back to the things that made me unique. I'm from a very academic background, and I was always a bit of a boffin, a bit of a tinkerer, so the video for "She Blinded Me with Science" was sort of a self-send-up.

There was pressure from the industry after that to try and distill the formula that made [the single] successful and trot it out a few more times, which I resisted, because I felt that that song was just one goalpost for me. The other was the more personal, intimate, atmospheric songs, which meant a lot more to me and affected my audience in a deeper way. But it was very hard to get the label behind it.

Did that frustration have a hand in why you eventually quit the music business?

Yeah, definitely. Astronauts and Heretics was a much more introspective album overall, and I managed to persuade them to get behind [the single] "I Love You Goodbye," which everybody liked, but was clearly not the sort of wacky boffin character. I'd met most of my heroes and worked with many of them; I was ready to take a step back and recharge my batteries. Whereas the music industry in the early '90s was in recession, Silicon Valley was starting to really boom, and they didn't have a clue how to use musical sound on their hardware and software, so I would consult with them. I wanted to create my own company and originate stuff on my own. I was thinking two years, three at the outside. [laughs] One thing led to another.

Although you were away from the music business for a couple decades, your fanbase remained active online. I understand this was part of the inspiration for your creating The Floating City, the multiplayer online role-playing game related to your new album?

Yeah, it was quite surprising to me that the fanbase had hung in there for all those years when I was putting out no music at all. The loyalty became more refined over time, but they were analyzing lyrics and notating chord sequences and making tribute records on my birthday, and they were also doing some fan fiction. I wanted to encourage more of that, and so the idea of the game came up as a framework that you could easily hang more of that off of.

Some of the songs from the album I wrote with the game in mind. People in the game started having spontaneous parties and chat rooms. My character in the game, the Aviator, started showing up to spin records, and I would throw in rough mixes that I was working on from songs from the new album, and people got very excited. That influenced the way that I went about writing the songs, so a song like "Spice Train," for example, is very much an anthem of the game.

You've been saying you're not thrilled with a lot of electronic-based music that's coming out these days

I've got nothing against it. I just feel it's not something that I want to jump back into the midst of. I've zero desire to spend weeks twiddling knobs in order to throw something more into the "electronica" melee. In the early days, I was working in a fresh medium, because there were relatively few people trying to make music with electronics, so we were all pioneers. But I definitely couldn't feel like a pioneer now. My urge as a musician is to sing songs and tell stories and come up with chord progressions and song structures and things like that -- I'm quite old-fashioned from that point of view.

At the same time, you're still manipulating sounds electronically.

No, I certainly do, but I see that as production, and I think that's a bit different from the guys that dig deep into the soft synths and really mess with the parameters -- life's too short for that really.

Do you harbour visions of more theatrical presentations of your work?

I'd like to collaborate with photographers or videographers or filmmakers and put on themed shows, but I'm having to work my way back up to that, because the bulk of my fanbase are a little older. They're set apart from the most active music fans who are going out every night. Most of those guys are too young to know about me, so it's like starting from scratch with them, with the disadvantage of being a middle-aged white guy. Some of them have found their way to me because they're interested in more contemporary electronic acts who would quote me as a reference. It wouldn't be surprising to hear Skrillex or Metronomy or Crystal Castles say, "Oh, yeah, Thomas Dolby, when I was a kid...," which would in turn make their fans go, "I'd like to find my way to the source."

Have you had younger artists contact you and say, "You really inspired me?"

It happens a little bit, and I'm hoping that some collaborations will come out of that. I don't want to jinx them by talking about them too early on. It's great to be able to get all the people who've got one of my records in their garage somewhere to come out of the woodwork, but it seems there's a sort of glass ceiling to showbiz these days. You break through when you get into reality shows. I'm not going to try and go be a judge just so I can play bigger concert venues. It's fine also to be a fairly obscure cult artist.

Has anything had the same kind of revolutionary impact on the music business as the advent of the portable synthesizer did when you were starting out?

They used to say that a third of North American households had a musical instrument, and they viewed that as a good figure. But I would think the number is much higher now because music apps are very popular on video games and handheld devices. They're tools that allow you to be having fun with music in the first few minutes, which I think is very worthwhile and valuable, but they also, like most games, have levels and layers. If you spend hours and days sharpening your skills, it's got to lead somewhere.

So you've got to assume that there's a certain amount of musical talent that will be stimulated by this that otherwise wouldn't if it was back in the days of guitars and pianos, because people didn't have the patience, or it was too expensive, or they didn't want to annoy the neighbours. All those barriers are gone, so I think it could be very exciting for music.

Watch Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science"