TALKING TOTALLY TUBULAR FESTIVAL & MORE WITH THOMAS DOLBY

© Felipe Gonçalves, Refocus Portrait Studio

Holy Flashback Friday Batman! The Totally Tubular Festival was announced several months ago and it’s packed full of 80’s new wave feel artists! Thomas Dolby, Thompson Twins’ Tom Bailey, Modern English, Men Without Hats, The Tubes (6/25-7/14 dates), Wang Chung (7/16-7/28 dates), Bow Wow Wow, Tommy Tutone (select dates) and The Plimsouls. It’s going to be a fun filled evening of great memories and classic 80’s tunes.

Closing out each show is Thomas Dolby and to many he’s the guy who gave them “She Blinded Me With Science.” In his 40+ year career, he’s given us much more than just that. The guy wears many hats including film maker, author, professor at John Hopkins University and maybe a few more hats that I apologetically left off. The kick-off date for the festival is June 25 and that’s the day that the hardback and e-book versions of his first novel “Prevailing Wind’ go on sale. It’s currently available in paperback on Amazon. If I went back and told the 16 year old me jamming The Golden Age of Wireless on cassette in my boombox that I’d be chatting with Thomas in 2024, my head would have exploded! Well, after composing myself after fanboying out for a moment, Thomas and I sat down for a really cool chat. We talked about the tour, his new novel, how Mutt Lang found him and where Mutt got Thomas’ nickname at.

Good afternoon Thomas! What a tour lineup! Over your lengthy career, have you crossed paths with most of these artists?

Thomas Dolby: Tom Bailey is an old friend of mine. We used to rub shoulders back in the day when the Thompson Twins was a nine piece band. My friend Matthew was their bass player. He used to share a squat in Brixton with some friends of mine. I played on an album with them. I played on “In The Name Of Love” and stuff like that. We’ve always wanted to do a tour together so this is a great opportunity. It’s a really cool line up. I’m delighted to have The Tubes come onboard. Before I really knew what punk was, I remember seeing them on The Old Grey Whistle Test and thinking I guess that’s what punk is. Modern English I’ve known a little bit over the years. Annabella (Lwin), I still think of her as a 15 year old but I guess she’s a lovely middle-aged lady now. So, it’s going to be fun.

You were presented the idea of the tour about a year ago?

Yeah, it was around Christmas. They’re looking at it to hopefully be an on-going thing. We’ll be doing the rapid fire thing, the hits. It’s not exclusively my crowd so a lot of them probably don’t own a Thomas Dolby record but they will be aware of some songs like “Europa and the Pirate Twins,” “Hyperactive,” “She Blinded Me with Science” and stuff like that. So, I’ll be focused on the hits and less the album cuts.

Are you and Tom alternating closing the shows?

I’m closing The Totally Tubular Tour shows but Tom and I are doing some dates ourselves where it will give us more time to do some of the deeper cuts. That’s going to be fun as well.

How do you feel when you look out at the audience and now see multiple generations singing along?

A couple of things really; I think I’m honored to have written songs 40 years ago that people still remember. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then. There were a lot of songs that were more successful at the time that are now long forgotten. I count myself very lucky that I’ve written a few evergreen hits and that people still remember them. Not all of my fans are dead or in jail, so I hope that they’ll haul themselves out to a show and see it. It’s great to sort of walk down memory lane with them. I think my fans have learned how to roll with the punches a little bit. I’ve had so many different chapters to my career as a teacher, a film maker and now an author. I’m glad that they still want to come out and hear the music. They bring their kids to a lot of places. They’ve grown up listening to my music and this is the first chance for a lot of them to see me live.

The placement of some of your songs has also turned on another generation to your music. “Hyperactive” was the video game Grand Theft Auto Vice City and that game was a huge hit.

It is great; I worry that when they hear it on the radio that they’ll want to run off and jack a car (laughs). It’s great that it’s been used in so many of these things. It (“She Blinded Me with Science”) was the theme used in the pilot of The Big Bang Theory. It was also the ringtone of one of the villains in Breaking Bad. It pops up in e weird places, but it’s great that it’s still being played.

It was used by Mobb Depp in their hit “Got It Twisted” back around 2004 and I remember hearing it and being totally caught off guard.

I’ve always had this strange connection to hip-hop that goes all the way back to the early 80’s when there was a very strong crossover to the South Bronx hip-hop dancing and European electronic music. Afrika Bambaattaa was sampling Kraftwerk and things like that. It was this really odd cross pollination of music. “She Blinded Me with Science” was a very big club hit back in those days before it made it into the charts and onto MTV. Over the years I’ve worked with Whodini, George Clinton and so on which is a very cool and different side to what I do. My audience is very diverse generationally, racially, nationally, whatever and I love that. I love looking out and not seeing a homogeneous kind of audience. I lend myself to a lot of different styles. I’ve accepted offers throughout the years to a huge range of people from Foreigner on Foreigner 4 on things like “Waiting for a Girl like You” to Lena Lovich, Belinda Carlisle, Joan Armatrading, Joni Mitchell, Roger Waters, and David Bowie. Those are a wide spectrum of different styles. I’m able to be a little bit of a chameleon type with the music that I come up with and blend it with what they do. If you look at some of the guests on some of my albums, I’ve had Jerry Garcia, Regina Spector, Imogen Heap, Jason Mraz and a very big variety of different collaborators.

I wanted to ask you about your book, your first novel ‘Prevailing Wind.’

It’s out now in paperback on Amazon and it’s coming out in hardback and on e-book on June 25th which is the first day of the tour. I’ve written a memoir before which was fairly easy because it was stories that I’ve told over and over. It was just a case of getting them down on paper, but a novel is really hard. I started it during Covid and I’ve had a great time writing it.

Can you trace back to where the obsession with classic sailing yachts happened?

When I was a boy, my granny had this big gorgeous black and white coffee table book called Beken of Cowes and it was old photographs of these giant yachts from the turn of the 20th century. These yachts were seven stories tall and they were mainly owned by factory workers, railroad tycoons. These yachts were so huge and hard to sail that they needed 35 or 40 guys to sail them so they would recruit sailors. They would go to poor lobster fishing towns like in Maine and they would hire their sailors there who were already rough and ready with leathery hands and worked great together as a team. They were cheap, especially when the fishing was bad and they didn’t feel the cold. The best thing was at night they would just lay in their hammocks reading their Bibles instead of going out drinking. The New York Yacht Club had more wealth and power than the US Government in 1914 and they didn’t pay any income tax. It’s kind of ironic that for fun they would race their yachts which would require them to hire all of these penniless Maine fishermen. I just feel like it was a great opportunity to examine the cavern between wealth and poverty which of course has not gone away. So I set my story against that but I wrote it from the point of view of one of the poor kids from Maine whose one opportunity to get out of the cycle of poverty is to get hired on the crew of the New York Yacht Club on the racing yacht.

You started the book back in Covid?

Yeah.

Wow, it took a little bit.

Oh it did, but I’ve also had a full-time teaching job the last couple of years. I’ve only had a few months out of the year to work on it and weekends and things. So, writing a novel is not a very easy thing and I’m very proud of it. I hope that people, whether they’re into my music or not, will enjoy the book.

I saw a post on your social media that you’d be signing some copies at Totally Tubular. Will those be available at the merch booth or will you be there sitting doing an actual signing?

I don’t think I’ll be sitting there signing them but I will be signing and numbering a bunch of books. I’ll be mixing them in with the ones for sale so it will be a pot luck thing. If you pick it up at Totally Tubular you’ll have a reasonable chance of picking up and autographed and numbered one. By the way, I’ll be doing a few meet and greet book signings in different cities at book stores, museums and cool places to do signings.

So the novel was much harder than writing your memoir.

Oh yes, no question at all; the characterization, the dialogue. It has a bit of a thriller aspect to it and thrillers are very hard because you have to lay breadcrumbs to keep people guessing and coming back to it. There’s a lot of grunt work involved in all of the revisions and so on. I hope it will be a movie one day. It’s easier to describe sailboat racing with a couple of drone cameras and some CGI than it is to translate into words.

I wanted to ask a few things about your musical past. How did Mutt Lange find you for Foreigner 4?

I have a lot to be thankful for because he was the guy who pretty much discovered me. Mutt and some South African partners had a sort of a hit factory in South London called Zomba. They listened to everything. They had great ears, they were publishers, they were recording studio owners and they managed producers. I sent Zomba a demo cassette and they shared it with Mutt and asked what he thought of the keyboard playing. Mutt, at the time, had just started producing Foreigner and they were looking for someone to add a different kind of flavor. They had done mainly AOR, radio rock at that point. Mick Jones had some great ballads and he played a bit of keyboards himself but he wasn’t a specialist. So, they really wanted someone to come in who was great at the sound. So my first big gig as a session player was when I flew to New York and spent a month working on the Foreigner 4 album. I did mostly at night, on my own because in the day they were in the studio doing Lou Gramm vocals. They would come back in the morning and I would have put down some keyboard ideas. That whole intro for “Waiting for a Girl like You” came up in a backroom at Electric Lady. When they came in the next morning, I played it for them. They weren’t so sure at first, but Mutt’s a real visionary. He and Mick Jones decided that they loved it. That became the big hit from the album along with “Urgent” which is very synth heavy.

That was definitely a different direction from classics such as “Hot Blooded” and “Cold as Ice” for them. Were you credited under your name on that album?

Yes, on that one I was credited under my name. Mutt’s next project after that was Def Leppard’s Pyromania. He asked me to work on that one as well and I was a bit worried that I might be getting pigeonholed as a session player. I asked if I could do it under an assumed name. Mutt’s actual nickname for me is Booker T. Boffin, so that’s how I was credited on the album.

That was one of questions that I was going to ask. Where in the world did he come up with that nickname (laughs)?

Boffin in the UK was a nerd and someone good with machines and always has the tech answer. Booker T as in Booker T & the M.G.’s and T was for Thomas.

Have you ever been shopping in a store, unrecognized, and have one of your songs start playing overhead?

Yeah, it happens quite often and so much that I guess I don’t pay that much attention to it anymore. I think the oddest experience was when I used my credit card at the checkout counter and the guy behind the counter started laughing. I asked what was so funny and he said ‘I feel for you man; my name is Dean Martin.’

Did he realize that it was the actual Thomas Dolby in front of him?

No.

I have a fan submitted question from Jeff in North Carolina. First off, thank you for all of the music over the years from The Golden Age of Wireless to Map of a Floating City. What a body of work. With the new digital release of the deluxe edition of The Flat Earth, are there any plans of doing the same for Golden Age of Wireless with bonus tracks/alternate versions? Also, I would love to see the release of a live show from 82/83.

I don’t think there are currently any plans. I think my last two studio albums Astronauts & Heretics and A Map of the Floating City are a little bit overlooked so I’d like to breathe some new life into those. The next big anniversary that will come around is Aliens Ate My Buick and a lot of people have picked up on that one as their favorite era of mine. So, I’d like to do something for that anniversary.

We all know that the music scene has changed tremendously since your early stuff, but are there any plans at all for new material?

I’ve been teaching full time and writing this novel so I really haven’t had time to write new stuff so nothing is in the pipeline at the moment but you never know.

Was the version of “Hyperactive” that you presented to Michael Jackson a full demo? I curious as to how much is was compared to the version that you recorded that we all know and love?

It was just bass and drums. I came up with the bass and drum groove in the backseat of my tour bus. Michael came backstage at one of my gigs in LA and he said that he was making the Liberty album with his brothers. He said there was a lot of infighting about the songs being presented and he didn’t think the material was very good. He said if I had anything I should send it his way. So, that was a call to action if ever I’ve heard one so I stayed up all night making the groove. I came up with some lyrics over the top and it wasn’t “Hyperactive” at that point. It was called “Interference” and I played it for him over the phone. I wrote about this in my memoir. I stopped at a phone booth in the Nevada desert and tried to play him the demo over the phone and all I heard were crickets (laughs).

I’m glad that it ended up being one of the classic Dolby tunes that we all know and love

Miles Davis was going to do it as well.

Wow! I can’t imagine that one either! The press release for your memoir says that you stumbled across a circuit board in a dumpster and it all started there. To me, that’s a pretty amazing story for a career that spans over 40 years and is still going.

They were very expensive and rarified in those days and heavy and didn’t stay in tune and wasn’t the easiest thing to get into for a 17 year old.

Here we are today and technology has probably finally caught up to you and things you always wanted to do.

Because it was so rarified you knew that anything you were doing, you were a pioneer because only a half a dozen people in the world had access to that kind of technology so you knew it had to be original. Today, I think just the opposite is true where you can almost guarantee that if you have a good idea, somebody somewhere in the world has come up with the same idea at the same time. It’s great that it’s opened up to the guy in the street but it’s harder as an artist to express yourself as an individual and rise above the crowd. That’s what I try to teach my students at Johns Hopkins is with all of these choices and solutions at your disposal, how do you express yourself? How do you use your individual creativity to stand out?

This is coming from a man who has done so in so many different formats. Thomas, thank you for your time today and we are so stoked for the show next month in Raleigh, North Carolina!

Thanks Johnny; hope to see you there!

Interview by I’m Music Magazine Owner/Editor Johnny Price