Jeff is BLINDED with SCIENCE by Thomas Dolby

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
I'm Jeff Stevens. It's my eightiesshow podcast and my first time ever to
get to talk to the legendary ThomasDolby. Hello Jeff for you, then,
Hey, Thomas, how you doing. I'm doing very well. Thank
you, excellent. Well, niceto chat with you. This is exciting
promoting the new EP called Halloween ThomasDolby Creation, which is out now everywhere.

(00:20):
It'll beyond Apple and other digital services. Very cool. So I see
that I do see a familiar titleon there. So tell us is this
kind of a greatest hits? What'ssort of the theme throughout this? Yeah?
So, I mean, it's fortyyears since she blinded me with science.
If you can believe that, Ican't really believe it myself, But
astonishingly this song is still around,still getting played on the radio, and

(00:43):
the video is still you know,shows up on TV every now and then
and let's get sampled by rappers.It makes its way into video games and
ring tones on shows like Breaking Badand The Big Bang Theory and so on.
So, you know, I myselfcan't really believe it's had this longevity,
but it has. So I meanto commemorate at fourtieth anniversary, we

(01:06):
thought we'd put an EP together withyou know, a sort of mixture of
some of the deeper cuts from myalbums and some of the collaborations I've done
with other artists. And yeah,so this this EP will be coming out
in time for Halloween, and it'sgoing to be called Halloween at Thomas Dolby
Creation. I love it. Ilove it, and you know, it's
so it is mind boggling that it'sbeen forty years, and I'm sure it's

(01:30):
even more mind boggling for you takeus back to eighty three for a second.
So when that, of course thevideo, this was one of those
situations where I think the video helpedget the exposure out there and then everybody
said, oh, we got toplay this on the radio too. Do
you feel like it was a radiohit first or a video hit first,
or a little bit of both.I wasn't really getting any radio play.
I was getting some play in theclubs, but not enough to influence the

(01:53):
charts. And MTV was just takingoff, you know, it just got
into major cities in the USA,and I thought, well, if I
could have a hit video on MTV, then maybe radio would started to play
me as well. So I've alwaysbeen a keen filmmaker and sort of fancier
of silent movie stars, people likeHarold Lloyd and Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin

(02:15):
and so on. Yeah, andso I sort of created this sort of
underdog geek image. And I wrotethe storyboard for the song and took it
to my record company to see ifthey would greenlight the budget. And they
said, yeah, well we lovethe storyboard, but when do we get
to hear the song? And Isaid, well, I'll bring it in
on Monday morning. And so Igave myself basically the weekend to write the

(02:37):
music for the video, and youknow, sure enough, you know,
it got on MTV and radio followed, and you know the rest is history.
Wow. So you essentially wrote thevideo before the song. Absolutely wow,
Now that is this may be thismay be something I've never heard before.
That is so amazing that you didthat. I went as far as

(03:00):
hiring a mad scientist from the BigVe called Dr Magnus Pike. And you
know, he was sort of theBill Nigh of his day in England when
I was growing up, and hewas the real thing. It sort of
made me look cool by comparison,because you know, most of the frontmen
of the day were sort of pinup guys, you know, finding the

(03:20):
Bond and Adam man Sting and soon, and we were a bit worried
that the scientific image might be abit hard for people's stomach. But if
I hired a bona fide a BBCscientist, then it would make me look
pretty hip by comparison with my motorcycleand sidecar and Trent coat and you know,
hot Japanese lab assistant and so on. That is that is phenomenal that

(03:44):
I'm so glad you just told methat story. I've never heard that before,
and and you're right. Of course, my next question was going to
be tell us about the scientists.So he was, like you said,
the Bill Nye of that era.Huh yeah. I mean he would go
on on the BBC and he wouldanswer kids questions about the universe and sort
of wave his arms around and say, well, the moon's Jupiter, you
know. So he was this sortof you know, one of those English

(04:06):
eccentrics. And we had him fora few hours and he was a bit
of a diva, quite frankly really, But I'll tell you tell you a
funny story. It's like years laterI saw him and I asked him how
he was, and he said,bad Dolby. I said, why,
so, I've just been to theUSA, I said, oh, you
don't like America. I said,well, every time I've walked down the

(04:26):
street, someone would come up behindme and yell science. Because it seems
that it seems that your damned MTVvideo was more successful over there than my
body of scientific. Yeah. Ibet that was a hard one to swallow.
That is amazing. Well, Iwas going to ask you, so
how many takes on him going science, you know, and how many various
takes did that take to get toget the right ones? Oh? You

(04:49):
know, I was just running thetape at random, and I was I
tried to rev him up a bit. So at first he went to science
and then I said, you know, take it up at geary. I
went science and I said, no, I like mad, like a wild
animal. Okay, now say sheblinded me with science? And he went,
she blinded me with science? AndI said, no, Pike is

(05:11):
not really a question, it's sortof more of a statement. And he
said, yes, but there's knownsciences to be a bit surprising if the
girl blinded me with science, andI thought, right, that is going
on the record, right because hevery he very much says she blinded me
with science. So funny, whata great story. Well, congratulations on

(05:33):
a great forty year career. Weloved the song. Then I was addicted
to MTV, so I saw itprobably one billion times, and it does.
I still play it on the radiotoday, and I have a National
eighty show that airs on seventy fivestations every weekend and we play it a
lot. So it's really cool tohave you on here talking about that and

(05:54):
talking about your new Halloween a ThomasDolby creation. I do also a couple
other amazing tidbits about you that Ilove reading the liner notes inside of albums
and CDs back in the day.And you had a major hand in the
Foreigner four album. Well it was, yeah, I mean I was in
demand as a synth player before Ihad my sort of career breakthrough as a

(06:16):
solo artist. And yeah, wellI think I was nineteen years old and
I flew to New York to ElectricLadies studios to play with Foreigner. And
you know, at the time,they were still viewed as a sort of
hard rock band, right. Butthey had this ballad waiting for a Girl
like You, and they said,you know, would you add a synth
part and an intro to it?And they left me all night in the

(06:36):
studio and they came in in themorning. I played it, and you
know, they weren't quite sure atfirst. I think the bass player said
it, well, sounds a bitlike massage music in it. But you
know, to my astonishment, youknow, within a year or so,
you know, I'd be in ahotel or like in a rental car,
you know, in Chicago, andon the radio would come my massage music

(06:58):
on mainstream AOAR radio. So Ithought that was quite a coup. Oh
that's a big coup. And I'mtelling you that is one of the most
melodic and beautiful I never thought ofit as a you know, massage music,
but the melodic and beautiful and powerfulballads of all time. And to
know that that foreigner cut you looseall night and said here, just come

(07:20):
up with the intro. The keyboardsin that song are brilliant. Well,
thank you. It's very much thecredit of Mick Jones and Mutt Langer,
the producer, because they gave me, you know, the Lee way to
try that. And hell, Iwas nineteen, you know, I'd never
really been in a real studio before, so I went crazy. Oh my
gosh, that is amazing. That'seven more amazing knowing you were just nineteen.

(07:42):
And by the way, self taughtmusician, vocalist, songwriter, computer
programmer. I mean, that's inand of itself is kind of mind blowing
as well. I'm what you mightcall an auto didact, and I'm now
professor of music at John Hopkins University. And kids today, of course,
have you know endless possibilities. Youknow, a few key strokes on their

(08:03):
computer or their phone, they canget the answer to anything. You know,
a YouTube tutorial or you know,huge libraries of fans, endless memory.
In my day, you know,it's kind of tricky to work with
very limited resources, and so Itry and encourage my students to think outside
the box. You know. Itell them to turn off their computers and
their phones and they just have touse the materials that are in front of

(08:24):
them and they have to sort offind a way to magui for their way
out of a problem. That's agreat way to say it. That's really
cool. Let's talk about your Ascendthrough Music, which tell everybody about that
this is for inner city Baltimore kids, right, yes, I mean you
know Baltimore. I've been living herefor eight years, and I love the
city. And like most American cities, it's got, you know, two

(08:46):
sides to it, the haves andthe have nots. And I'm very fortunate
that, you know, I'm ina top us university with you know,
somewhat privileged kids, but in thatinner cities there's almost no access to music
at all. When when you andI were kids, there was always that
basket of tambourines or the recorders orwhatever. Yeah, most of that has
been cut. I think something liketen percent of Baltimore public school kids have

(09:09):
access to any music at all.Wow, And often then it's like band
music or whatever. So we setup this after school program called Ascend through
Music, which enables kids to youknow, pick up an instrument, whether
it be drums and guitars or keyboardsor whatever. But also we teach them
how to use their own phones orlaptops to make beats and to get them

(09:31):
up on you know, SoundCloud orYouTube or whatever. And so we're trying
to bring music back into Baltimore publicschools, and so if you go to
Ascend through music dot org you canread about it. And we're hoping that
it will spread to other American cities. That's such a great idea. What
a great idea. And you areas you kind of glossed over a little

(09:52):
bit, but you're on the facultyat the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins leading
the Peabody's Music Program for New Mediaprogram, which is which is so impressive
and cool to think that you couldbe their teacher, are a professor?
Are they ever just sitting there kindof looking at you, maybe looking at
their phone, going wait a minute, that's the guy. Well, actually
their parents do you know? Mycolleagues on the faculty. But you know,

(10:16):
I mean, the students figure itout before long, and sometimes they're
sort of in awe of that,but you know, they're already more educated
than I was. I left schoolat sixteen to pursue my music habit,
and so I've sort of comf fullcircle because I'm from a family of teachers.
My dad and his dad and hisdad were all of stood in Cambridge
professors. So it's kind of like, after all these years, I've finally

(10:37):
joined the family firm. Oh mygoodness, that is fantastic, Thomas,
will you be going out? Doyou do some of those like the like
the eighties? I love the eightiestours and different things like that. Will
you be going out on tour atall next summer or anything? Well,
there's so many of those these days. Yeah, I mean I get all

(10:58):
sorts of offers to do that.I think in with the grains, I
mean, there're lots of fun.But at a certain level, you know,
it sort of seems to say,well, nothing I do these days
will be of much interest to you, So let's just walk down memory lane
together. You know, people loveto hear the old songs and that's great.
But you know, if I sortof suddenly announced that here's a song
from my upcoming album, that's wheneverybody goes to the bar. So it's

(11:20):
like, it's lovely to play infront of twenty thousand people because maybe a
thousand of them will come and seemy solo show when I'm next coming through
town. So I think that's that'svery worthwhile. I've always used, you
know, commercial success as a springboardto get people into my more sort of
deeper cuts really, and if youlisten to a lot of my album songs,

(11:41):
they're atmospheric, they're moody, they'reemotional, and so there's a whole
other side for me to discover.So some of those cuts are on the
EP. So if you check outthe EP Halloween and Thomas Dolby Creation,
you'll hear a lot of those deeperalbum cuts as well as the hits.
Okay, very good, well,Thomas, thank you for spending so much
time. Thomas Dolby an absolute delightto talk to and congratulations on all your

(12:03):
success and it was just a realthrill to talk to you. Thomas,
Thank you so much. Great tobe here. Thanks