THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.60 - THOMAS DOLBY

Episode Date: December 9, 2017

Adam talks to Thomas Dolby about his pioneering adventures in the music and tech industry, including revealing tales of close encounters with Michael Jackson and David Bowie.Adam Buxton’s Old Bits DVD is out now from gofasterstripe.comDownload the free Adam Buxton App for more jingles, videos and exclusive podcast episodes. Prints - roomfifty.comThanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for production support and Matt Lamont for additional editing. Music & jingles by Adam Buxton Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how you doing listeners? Adam Buxton here. I am freezing. I didn't wrap up properly today.

And it is frosty. there's going to be snow apparently have a listen to some of these leaves down here by the path they're great frosties i got the same problem again with the gloves trying to operate the notes on my phone yes i know you can get gloves which enable you to operate the notes on my phone. Yes, I know you can get gloves which enable you to operate touchscreen devices. I have been given many, many pairs of them in the past. That's the standard Christmas gift from my wife. Here's a pair of gloves which enable you to operate touchscreen. But I either lose them or they just don't work. Anyway, listen, I'm going to scroll down the notes with my nose, so we'll be fine. Hey, I'm so glad so many of you enjoyed the last episode of the podcast

with director Tim Pope telling his amazing high-speed rock and roll stories. And if you're up for more of that kind of thing, check out a new podcast that's just been posted on the Adam Buxton app, featuring a conversation with my friend, director Garth Jennings, talking about the videos that he made for Blur and Supergrass, REM, Pulp, as well as the work that we did together

back in 2007 with Radiohead. And if you want to hear that months before anyone else, because I suppose the plan with some of the bonus content on the app is that it will eventually emerge as a regular podcast at some point, but not for a while. There's a regular podcast at some point, but not for a while. And if you want to hear that conversation with Garth, for example, way before anyone else does, then you can do so via the app for a tiny fee of 99 pence, which will go to help pay for the construction and ongoing maintenance of the app. Anyway, listen, even more amazing musical anecdotes coming your way now via my guest for episode number 60 of the podcast the great thomas dolby joe cornish got me into thomas dolby when

we were at school in the early 80s and uh i got thomas's first album the golden age of wireless which included she blinded me with science and One of Our Submarines. Oh, I love that song. Thomas Dolby's second album, The Flat Earth, was a big one as well for me and Joe. That felt more analogue and emotional. That became one of the cassettes that I would reach for very often when I was having a bout of teen angst. Both Joe and I really loved the song Screen Kiss. I still do and it was cool to hear British comedian Chris Morris use this section that I'm playing right now underneath this years later as part of the Blue Jam radio series that eventually just turned into Jam, didn't it, for the TV version.

Anyway, since those school days, I've continued to listen to music from every part of Thomas's career, off and on. But earlier this year, Joe recommended Thomas's book, The Speed of Sound, which gave me a very welcome opportunity to go deep level Dolby again. And that book, I really recommend it, features many great stories from his days as an international chart topper, as well as some fascinating accounts of the people that he's met and worked with, including Prefab Sprout and Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder,

who unfortunately we didn't get round to talking about on this occasion, although we do hear some revealing stories about Michael Jackson and David Bowie. Wouldn't be a proper podcast without an anecdote about David. Thomas is probably best known, as Richard Herring would say, for appearing on a Vinyl Justice segment on the Adam and Jo show. And that was the first time that Jo and I had met him. But years before, he had attended the same school that we did, Westminster School for Elegant Young Men. He was there, well, about 10 years before we were. And we talk a little bit about

that in this podcast and about the musical awakening that he had there that came via a classmate who himself went on to become a legendary musical figure. This conversation was recorded at Thomas's home on the Suffolk coast on a beautiful day in August of this year, 2017. And as you will hear, we talked in the little studio he has in his garden, just metres from a long stretch of beach and the North Sea beyond. In fact, you may be able to hear the occasional hum and whir of the studio's little generator during this conversation and yes both the chat and the generator were run by back for more waffles at the end but right now here we go Let's have a ramble chat We'll focus first on this Then concentrate on that

Come on, let's chew the fat And have a ramble chat Put on your conversation coat And find your talking hat Yes, yes La, la, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, Could you please set the scene for us? We are sitting in the Nutmeg of Consolation,

which is a 1930s ship's lifeboat, originally from a British merchant vessel in the South Seas, which had made its way back to Britain and was being used as a canal boat, but had leaked badly. And when I found her on eBay, they were on the point of burning her and selling the brass fittings, which they felt were worth more than the boat. So I snapped her up and brought her to East Anglia and put her in our garden on railway sleepers and found some local traditional boat builders who helped me restore her and convert her.

She now serves as my studio and office and thinking space. We're sitting in the wheelhouse, which has a 360-degree view of the North Sea. Originally below us, there was a diesel engine, which I've replaced with a bank of batteries. And on the roof of the wheelhouse is a pair of solar panels and a wind turbine. So on a day like today, which has wind and sun, I can generate enough power that if I wanted to, I could work all night using just the energy stored under our feet I mean it couldn't be more perfect and especially for the Thomas Dolby fan to find you here taking advantage of wind power it's perfect and it's such a lovely day incredible view out there of the sea ah you've got it sussed absolutely and in the

distance there is a wind farm actually at this in this stage of the sea ah you've got it sussed absolutely and in the distance there is a wind farm actually at this in this stage of the light you probably can't see unless you have very good eyesight but that was something that i dreamed of in 1981 when i recorded wind power yeah and here we are so it's uh it's great i was listening to a lot of your songs on the way up in the car they form a big part of my youth myself andelf and my comedy partner, Joe, bonded over your music. Joe introduced me to your stuff. And it was very much an illustration of our enthusiasms, both his and mine. He was more of a kind of soul, funk guy.

I was more of a kind of angular art music guy. And your music always fused those two elements very enjoyably. So it was great fun driving along, listening and singing along, finding I knew every single lyric and all those memories flooding back of when we were into that stuff. First of all, the first flush. I was thinking about wind power and thinking, wondering where it came from. Some of the stuff there reminded me of, well, it made me think of Brexit. Wind power, switch off the mind and let the heart decide. What inspired that song? When I started out, I felt I was a maverick, a boffin, and that I was sort of on the outside.

So I was always very interested in different technologies, different uses uses ways of adapting technology to serve one's purpose so i was very attracted to things like wind power and i remember in about 1980 reading an article about a bloke up in the hebrides who i believe is still there actually who had damned his stream and put up wind turbines and was self-sufficient and off the grid and this was an amazing concept to me at the time. And in those days, I used to research my stuff by going to the library and pulling out Encyclopedia Britannica and stuff like that.

And I found that, you know, one of the origins of wind power was actually Nazi Germany. And Hitler, before the war, had a plan to put wind turbines all along the north coast of Germany and entirely power the country using that. And then decided against it because he had better uses for his iron than putting up wind turbines but he

could easily have had the first wind farm in Europe in about 1936. He got the trains running on time and he was forward-thinking eco-friendly. Yeah yeah although in in my song Leipzig is calling you the trains are running late is it Leipzig somewhere you spend a lot of time or why did you pick that place I'd never been to Leipzig you know the sound of it yeah I like the sound of it in the early days of electronic music there was a strong attraction to that sort of east European aesthetic really you know something rather fascinating about that. And I guess, you know, to be fair, Bowie and Eno started that with the Lowe album, you know,

when they went off to Berlin and recorded there. And they were obviously inspired by krautrock and, you know, people like Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk and so on. But they also, you know, I mean, side two of Lowe has evocative names like Warsaw. And the idea of writing pop music that was about a city in Eastern Europe was sort of a novel concept and it sort of tied in with you know synthesizers electronic music were a little bit unsettling when you first came across them the idea that

you know we'd always thought of music as being played on beautiful instruments guitars violins drum kits things like that and now suddenly there were these rather sinister machines that were making music instead. So and it was the time of the Cold War. And, you know, there was this definite link there. Do you feel as if you're there's a kind of tension between your forward looking love of technology and the way the world is going in general? I wonder if you've read that book Sapiens. Absolutely. I read that book. Yeah, no, I mean, it's amazing, really. But the thing is, you know, there's this sort of onward march of progress with new technology and what it promises.

And then there's this sort of dystopian view or alternative view of what if we went a completely different direction? What if there'd never been circuit boards and we actually were powered by clockwork mechanisms and steam and things like that what if things had turned out differently and that's always been very evocative for me and so that's where my imagination tends to go is into sort of parallel existences did you find i haven't finished sapiens yet did you find it overall sort of depressing? I didn't finish it either. I'm wondering what sort of ending it has. I think it ends badly. It does hit, okay. That's what I hear.

It gets all sad. Okay. Now I'm at the moment where it seems to be wheat's fault. Like pretty much everything that's gone wrong is down to wheat and the cultivation of wheat and the agricultural economy and the pursuit of a lifestyle that is in keeping with making money from wheat and growing wheat and basically being wheat slaves we've been dominated by wheat interesting yeah i mean if it was something like lime or cyanide or whatever mercury you could understand it but wheat seems so benign doesn't it yeah it does and yummy you know i like wheat wheat the silent killer it is apparently

though oh dear anyway i haven't finished the book so i don't know how it turns out maybe wheat makes a comeback. We've met before, a couple of times. Last time I saw you was at Latitude. You played a great set there a few years back. But the first time

was right here when myself and Joe came out while we were doing the adam and joe show for channel four and we did a thing called vinyl justice where we'd go around to people's houses and look through their records and you were nice enough to have us around and uh that was fun did you were you okay with that i was okay with it i mean you know i think i mean this is before reality tv and stuff yeah but i think in a way you guys were quite sort of prescient of that. It was like YouTube before YouTube a lot of the show.

It was. And it also had that thing where you're half admiring, you know, the entertainer and half poking fun at them. I guess that's true. Which was certainly true. And I think probably the reaction to that, probably my established fans might have thought it was interesting to see inside my life and people who weren't established fans might have thought what

a tit you know but yeah i mean that was that was fun and i think we were quite creative with it you know we were talking about bales of euro trash dance 12 inches being washed up on the beach and yeah things like that and i think we had a little bit of sex pistols and a bit of you know bit of pistols bit of keith harris and orville with you with you being keith harris and joe being orville sat on your knee right come to my party it was fun we were very excited to meet you because yeah as i say you were uh the glue that really held us together initially. I mean, yeah, it was the soundtrack to my kind of love affair with Joe. We were growing up.

It was wonderful. And then, of course, we went to the same school for a while. We did. We weren't there together. You were there a few years before me. But one of your fellow pupils was Shane McGowan. Yeah. And he was a very smart student. I I mean he wasn't much of a trier

I would say we would sit at the back of English lit class sort of making snide comments about what was going on and then in breaks we would be around the corner at the local coffee bar smoking unfiltered cigarettes and talking about music and Shane from a very you know I was probably there with him from maybe 14 to 16 or something like that and during that time he knew everything about music he had an encyclopedic knowledge of music and so he was regarded in our group as the authority on on music what we should be listening to and it was a very it was very interesting time because compared to today you had very limited access to information about new music so you know other than the stuff that was being reviewed that week in the melody maker you hadn't

heard about obscure bands from detroit or whatever and what we what year are we talking here like 75 yeah no earlier than that so it would have been from about 73 74 something like that yeah so there's a lot of good music to listen to well there was although what was on our plate at the time was sort of progressive stuff you know it was pink floyd i don't know genesis and yes and stuff like that and relatively little live music i mean obviously we weren't allowed in pubs and clubs and things but um you know i went to my first festival at sort of 15 and and it was the Allman Brothers at Nebworth. And I saw The Grateful Dead at Alexandra Palace.

These are the bands that I loved, American rock bands. But you didn't see singer-songwriters in little bars in those days. And certainly that mainstream stuff was what we were aware of. And we would analyse it and pour over the double gatefold sleeves and read the lyrics and the credits and there'd there'd be little grains of tobacco and bits of ritzler all over them and things like that and that was very much the thing until one day shane walked in and said it's all rubbish what do you mean the beatles are stones all crap how can you say this how can you possibly insult you know the gods of rock and roll music like that

what should we be listening to shane and he'd go mc5 new york dolls uh iggy pop and we'd never heard of any of this stuff you know and uh it was very shocking that he he would be so um you know he'd be slagging this stuff off yeah but we duly would go out and listen to that stuff you know you'd go up to virgin records and oxford street where they had aircraft seats and you could ask for a record to be put on and you put on these headphones and you could listen to the whole 22 minutes of a side you know without them hassling you so that's how we spent our rainy afternoons and so if shane said mc5 you'd go up there and listen and give it a really good listen yeah wow and then a few years

later there he is being photographed in the hundred club getting his ear bitten off or whatever there was that and then there was the fact that you know i think i bumped into him when i was recording prefab sprout no it was actually before then um maybe fallout club at marcus music shane was in there and he was involved in some label, but it was the first time I'd seen him since school. And I said, what are you up to? He said, I'm forming a band. I said, oh, what kind of band?

And he said, it's like punk folk. And I went, ha, like, you know, this had to be a joke. Punk folk. Didn't see how those would go together at all, but he proved me wrong. He made it work. He made it work. He made it work. Attention. I really enjoyed your book.

Was that fun, writing that? Oh, it was great writing it, yeah. I mean, most of it was written right here. And I realised after a couple of weeks at the rate I was going, by the time I hit the 90,000 word mark, which was the deliverable, I'd only be a third of the way through the story.

So I sort of rushed the ending of it and gave it to my publisher, hoping that they would say, Thomas, have you ever thought that maybe there are two books here? And I go, what a great idea. Why didn't I think of that? But sadly, they sort of said, this is great, go on and finish it. And then we'll trim it down a little bit and get it down to the right word count. So broadly speaking, it divides into two halves, the first being your musical career, into two halves the first being your musical career and the second being your exploits in the world of tech as a businessman and an innovator both fascinating and packed with amazing stories and very candid i'm thinking specifically of one of your business associates

an ex apple employee you know you don't trash the guy but but he doesn't come out of it particularly well yeah so i did take advice. You know, the publisher had a lawyer and went through things. And what they basically told me is, you know, look, if you're telling the truth, people can't refute that unless they can prove, you know, that you're not telling the truth. The liable laws are different in the US from what they are in the UK. They're a bit more sensitive in the UK. So, you know, Lord Ponsonby will often sue the News of the World for something they wrote about him, which is not about truth or untruth. They're

just defaming his character. And that kind of thing doesn't happen so much in the States. But in the case of the business associate you're talking about, I did change his name. And the lawyer sort of said to me, you know, it's unlikely he's going to step forward and step up and say, well, that was actually me because, because you know he wouldn't want to draw attention to himself although of course you know had it been a new york times bestseller as they say where there's a hit there's a writ right um but so far touch wood i haven't had any problem you're very fair i think and you don't a lot of the pitfalls that people usually um succumb to in in autobiographies you avoid very well such as such as just being insufferably smug and up themselves and wanting to firmly stamp how important they are in history

yeah on the reader's minds well and the thing is you know a celebrity memoir most of the people named in the book other than you, you know, other celebrities, will never get to write their own version of the story. And so, you know, history will be rewritten according to the way that that celebrity wrote it. So that's a real danger. And in fact, I mean, you know, one experience I had, which I haven't talked about before now, was that in the early days, I had a very brilliant manager called Andy Ferguson. And he retained every fact and date and figure ever. And in fact, as a backup in his attic,

he's still got, you know, tour accounts from 1983 and things like, which he will never get rid of. So I just sent him the first draft. And it came back with about 98 notes on it, comments on it. And they started off fairly civil, and as time went on, it just ended up being, where do you get this crap? That wasn't what happened at all, which was quite amusing.

But, you know, the general picture was he said, you sound disgruntled, you sound like a disgruntled artist. Believe me, I represented a lot of artists, and you were one of the lucky ones, because you really had your cake and eat it you signed to a big record company EMI and you didn't sell buckets and buckets of records for them and yet they allowed you to design your own record covers direct your own videos they didn't veto new song ideas even after you had a huge international hit they never

put their foot down and said, churn out another dozen like that, you know, before we'll let you go do your self indulgent album with the rainforests and all the rest of it. They just let you run with it. And you were really lucky that that, you know, the system worked for you. And yet you come over as bitter and disgruntled in this. So, you know, I took that advice to heart and I went back and looked at it and I thought, yeah, compared to a lot of musicians, most musicians didn't get signed at all, number one. And those that did, most of them were desperate

to get out of their contracts. So I was relatively lucky that they indulged me like that. But there are some hair-raising stories about the music business in there. I mean, it just seems like the record business doesn't really change. No. is shocking though I mean that the the extent to which people are taken advantage of really lied to more or less is a shame do you think it's peculiar to the record business or do other businesses work in the same sort of way I think

the record business got away with it more than most because there was this chummy sort of attitude of you know we're all having a great time you know we're making music which is what we love we're out all night in the VIP area of the clubs and we get freebie this and freebie that and it's rock and roll you know that there was there was a slight sense that well it's all worthwhile because at the end of the day, we want to get the great music heard. So I think for that reason, they got away with it. The other thing is, you know, what they were selling was not actually soap powder, you know.

They may have behaved like that sometimes, but it wasn't a known quantity where you go, if we change this label from blue to red, we can predict an 11%. You know, you couldn't, it's magic. It's fairy dust, really, music. It's very hard for even the most musical executives to accurately predict what's going to happen with a record. So they threw the shit up against the wall and hope it stuck, you know.

And if you have 50 acts on your label and three of them are really successful and most of them aren't, then you can just about balance the books up to a certain point. And, you know, it worked for them like that for decades because they had this lock on the manufacturing distribution mechanism. You know, unless you had that brick and mortar infrastructure, you couldn't sell records. But the internet came along and suddenly they weren't the only game in town anymore.

So, you know, the wheels came off the bus. The way that the radio plays and things like that are structured in the UK, and we're talking about the early 80s, so you would have thought, you know, you associate payola and things like that are structured in the uk and we're talking about the early 80s so you would have thought you know you associate payola and things like that with 50s america but actually the way that top of the pops worked and the power that the bbc had to make a hit even though they weren't necessarily fixing things per se they weren't paying people off but if you appeared on top of the pops your record would climb the following week i think the only exception to that was blue monday which fell after the first week after they appeared on there because

they played it live oh really i didn't know that yeah they played a weird live version anyway tell me about the whole business of appearing on top of the pops and the hoops you had to jump through as far as the musicians union went oh well i mean it was nuts it was so there was a weekly routine the chart would be published on i think monday evening it probably varied over the years and shortly afterwards it would be announced who was going to be on top of the pops that week which you would shoot on a wednesday for broadcast on thursday evening and that would mean that tuesday afternoon and evening there were certain recording studios around london that the bbc had booked out in order to put the bands in to re-record their song and this was because the musicians union demanded that they didn't just play a backing track that musicians

needed to get hired and paid again in order for them to go on top of the pops but that may have worked in the 60s when you know a typical recording session was just a few hours long. But, you know, by the 80s, it absolutely didn't work. I mean, there were singles that took six, seven, eight months to record and cost half a million pounds, you know. So it was absolutely ludicrous. So what would happen is the band would show up. They roadie would show up with the equipment they set up in this studio. And the BBC guy and the union guy and a record company guy would show up for the first five minutes and then the record company guy would say well why don't we nip around the corner for a

curry while these boys do their thing and they go around the corner for a curry and a few pints and they come back an hour and a half later as the roadies were packing up the gear and there sitting on the console was a pile of gleaming tapes which the band had just re-recorded everybody knew what was actually going on which of course it was just a copy of the original master including the union guys it was just a complete sham and yet you went through this rigmarole every week for why exactly i'm not really sure it was just this anomaly that existed it's so weird isn't it one thing i didn't quite understand from the book was why you originally got dropped from your first deal, why that didn't come together as you thought it would. I had this sort of full start.

So before I had any record deal at all, you know, I had been successful as a keyboard player for other people, people like Foreigner and so on. I'd written the Elena Lovitch hit, New Toy. I'd sent demos round to various record companies and publishers. And one company, A&MM were very keen to sign me and we went through the whole contract stage and you know I was around there every couple of days and all getting ready for the release and on the absolute eve of the signing ceremony they inexplicably dumped me and the reason that they gave was that my then manager this is before Andy Ferguson who is no longer with us had tried to chisel them at the last minute that was the reason they gave he denied that and said no they just used

me as a scapegoat that didn't actually happen I'll never actually know the truth but during the run up to that I was so convinced I was going to get a fat check that I was probably living beyond my means and when it fell through I was hounded by debtors and i sort of fled the country and i went to paris in a refrigerated chicken lorry and um became a busker in the in the metro for about six months yes where you played a lot of stairway to heaven i played a lot of stairway to heaven and that was stairway to heaven was probably the song that got me lunch earliest in the day you know if i if i threw in a few of my own compositions it might be three or four in the afternoon before I could afford to go eat and what did that tell you about commerciality well it's a very good lesson you know very hand

to mouth you know in terms of commerciality I think the what it taught me the philosophy that those early years gave me is that balance is always at your fingertips and so even after i sort of hit pay dirt and actually started selling some records and that would have been golden age of wireless i guess yeah well actually you know even after that initially come out because she blinded me with science was not on that album that's right yeah that was that was sort of an afterthought and it came out and was a hit in the states and very minor hit here then they reworked the album with that and one of our submarines on and the album went gold in the States and very minor hit here. Then they reworked the album with that and One of Our Submarines On

and the album went gold in the States and that was sort of really the beginning. But even then, I mean, I felt that I still had a choice. I felt that I could either cookie cutter out a bunch more, you know, of whatever the formula was that had made me commercially successful or I could use it as a springboard to experiment more, you know, and try different things.

I wanted a fair light, you know, I wanted to work with a wider range of instruments, maybe an orchestra. I wanted to do some film stuff or TV stuff. And so I chose to use this as a springboard to expand all of those other ambitions, which included, as it turned out, collaborations with a variety of different musicians. How much was a fair light going for in those days? I think it was a little over £90,000. Whoa, so that's quite a lot. And the same year that I bought it,

I spent what was the rest of my advance check on a flat in Fulham for £24,000. Right. So that gives you a sense of scale, you know, about how you could have bought three or four flats in central London. Why were they so expensive? It was just a brand new technology. It was like, you know, this is the days of, you know you could have bought three or four flats in central london so expensive it's just a brand new technology it was like you know this is the days of you know putting men on the moon in in you know with a computer that would fill a room yeah and now you can probably do

everything that you could have done on a fairlight on a phone app oh yeah on your iphone yeah there is actually a fairlight iphone app i believe is that real melody a Fairlight iPhone app, I believe. Wow. Is that real melody? Have you seen my phone charger? What? I left it right there. What?

Did you see it? What? Have you got it? What? What? Where's my charger gone? What? Did you see it? Have you got it? Where's my charger gone? Where's my phone charger? The battery's about to die. It was on the table.

Round and round in their heads go the chord progressions, the empty lyrics, and the impoverished fragments of tune. And boom goes the brain box, at the start of every bar, at the start of every bar. Boom goes the brain box. you mentioned blinding me with science there and i've seen you talking before about the interaction you had with magnus pike which made me laugh so he was just a bit of a grump was he was just worried about being made a fool of was he yes i mean i think you know i i found his contact info in central casting catalog yeah and for younger listeners magnus pike was a

a kind of tv science personality he fitted the profile of a kind of nutty, eccentric old scientist. Yeah, and he was, I mean, his background, he had a bona fide science background. This is very sort of quirky delivery, like a mad professor. And it was in the days, there was another guy called David Bellamy, who was a botanist, you know, who was also very quirky. A lot of the presenters in those days Patrick Moore the astronomer yes that's right sort of very very wacky personalities but he was hireable by the hour or by the day you

know through central casting and so um I'd written She Blinded Me in Science and I'd come up with a storyboard for the video and I sort of felt that to have a bona fide scientist there would make me look more like a pop star it's like a boffin so i hired him but having accepted the fee and so on he came down and then had very strict ideas about what he wouldn't wouldn't say or where or what he would wouldn't do because his public expected a certain thing of him right so so for example i mean you know i put i had him in front of the microphone in my studio and i said he said, feed me the line. I said, she blinded me with science.

And he would go, she blinded me with science? I say, Dr. Pike, it's not really a question. It's sort of more of a statement. And he'd go, yes, but as a known scientist, it would be surprising if the girl blinded me with science. Hence his delivery of, she blind me yes it's science it's unbelievable and he said i mean when he got back from the usa and people would walk up behind him on the sidewalk and yell science and scare the life out of him he complained to me that for some unknown reason you know my bloody mtv video is better known over there than his body of scientific work. Yeah, there you go.

Don't meddle with pop culture. Science! I like that, the idea of people sneaking up behind him and just going, Science! And that was a great video, which you pretty much directed, right? I did, yeah. I mean, I came up with the idea for the video before I'd even written the song. I mean, writing the song was pretty much a soundtrack for the storyboard.

Yeah. So you were one of the early adopters of that art form as well, the world of music videos, which I love and I'm fascinated by. And it always seemed amazing to me that not more people did get creative with that. And there were a handful of people. Steve Barron, who was maybe in line to direct She Blinded Me With Science. He was, yes.

But he was off working with Michael Jackson. Well, he actually blew me off at the last minute. I had tried to hire Steve as the director of She Blinded Me With Science and it was all set, but then he sort of, he blew me off because he got invited to go direct Thriller, you know. Right, yes. Sorry, not Thriller, Billie Jean.

Billie Jean, that's right, with the illuminated sidewalk yeah yeah yeah and then um you and jacko of course met a few times well we we met initially because steve barron was editing the billy jean video in a edit suite in soho london And I was next door. And I literally met Michael at the water cooler. Right. And we sort of exchanged numbers. And he said, well, next time you're in LA, look me up. And I'm like, yeah, right. But I wrote it in my in my file of facts, you know, and the next time I was in LA, I was I actually flew over to do a live TV show to do science on a live TV show. And as an excuse to escape my entourage of Capitol Records executives,

I sort of said, well, actually, I promised to see a friend tonight. Pulled out my file of facts and there was the only LA number I had and it was for Michael. And to my astonishment, he answered the phone himself and said, well, come on over.

And was this pre-Bubbles? It was just pre-Bubbles, yes. So he wasn't full-blown super crazy michael jackson megastar no i mean he he was a superstar don't get me wrong you know the jackson's very big and he'd had off the wall and stuff he was you know dance superstar no question but he wasn't the phenomenon commercially that he became when Thriller started breaking all the records. Right. And nor was he hounded and sort of hassled and psychoanalyzed, you know, by the media in the way that he, you know, became after that. So did you find him to be quite sort of approachable and, quote, normal to talk to?

To talk to? Yes. The conversation, if you saw a transcript of our conversation, it was completely normal. It was between two musicians, like many musicians when they meet you know we sort of bonded over favorite mixing boards favorite synthesizers you know he had a sync clavier I had a fairlight but we talked also about our childhoods he was fascinated to hear my dad was an archaeologist I traveled a lot as a kid and he said oh yeah I traveled a lot as a kid as well. And this was sort of in limos with the brothers and things like that. But, you know, he rued the fact that he sort of felt he'd missed out on his childhood because of traveling and being in the spotlight so much. You know, he talked about England, how much he loved England. He talked about the East Coast versus the West Coast.

Really? Yeah, the changes in the weather, the fact you saw a proper fall, you know, and a real change in the weather. Los Angeles he found too, you you know temperate year round it was a very human conversation you know but the setting couldn't have been weirder he was sat on a throne he had this giant throne that looked like it had been designed for henry the eighth i mean we've all got a throne absolutely he had to sort of climb up to get into it so it's like one of those optical illusions where you're trying to create a miniature person and and he put me on a poof you know on an ottoman yeah and uh and we had this conversation and it was in the middle of his hallway this sort of reception hall of his house which had these twin busby berkeley

circular staircases coming down the stairs and we had this whole conversation you know with him and his throne and me on my ottoman me thinking that we were alone in the house but halfway through the conversation i was suddenly aware of these little faces peering through the banisters every time i would look up they would disappear it was like the munchkins tito and janet yeah well no actually it was it was the neighbor kids right that he on on a thursday night whatever it was he said oh no i invite the neighbor kids over to play with their radio controlled cars why don't you come on down fellas he said and they traipsed down the stairs in pajamas and dressing gowns yeah with these tonka toys and radio controlled cars and they

they sat on the floor around us as we continued to speak. And so we're talking about, you know, Sinclair sample rates. And every now and then he'd go, excuse me a second. Billy, the batteries are running out on that. Sorry, go on. Jimmy, what did I say about sharing? So that was the way the conversation finished up. So it was very odd. Having said that, I mean, it was bizarre, but I didn't detect anything sinister about it right and so i would tell this story you know and over the years as he became more of an

object of you know sort of speculation speculation yeah i would tell this story and people's eyebrows would fill you know and they they thought i was implying that there was something weird going on and in fact i mean when the book came out, for the most part, I had nothing but positive feedback, but I had a few rabid Michael fans who would post online just one more person trying to exploit Michael's memory. But you don't trash them at all. I mean, you don't say anything weird about it.

I don't, but it was a sign that over the years, you know, they'd become sensitive to that because most of what's written over the years would be more this sort of morbid curiosity yes no you talk about your uh experience of meeting him you don't you don't go into any of the sort of allegations against him over the years the only story you tell which doesn't show him in a particularly good light is when your wife approached him one of the last times you met him apparently and and quietly

whispered in his ear admonishment for not having uh kept up with a loyal associate an assistant is that right he had a personal assistant for two or three years called mary collar who went to came from the same small town in new york state as my wife, Kathleen. They'd grown up together, and Mary became Michael's, she'd been in the music business, but she became Michael's personal assistant, during which time her job would be to run around and get a last-minute birthday present for Elizabeth Taylor on Rodeo Drive, or to entertain Mr. and Mrs. Astaire when they were invited to dinner, but Michael was off playing

space invaders in the east wing yeah because as it turned out he was too intimidated by Fred Astaire is that a real story yeah it's a real story Mary they would have these signs Michael would tweak his earlobe or something when she had to make an excuse for him because he would get this sort of social phobia you know and have to withdraw moonwalk out yeah and then plus she had to run around and you know round up bubbles the chimp or the llamas or whatever you know when they'd escaped and that was her job for two or three years and she was very very close to him he would beep her in the middle of the night because he couldn't find the popcorn you know and so she was on 24-hour hold while she was living she was actually sharing a house with

my wife then my fiance and unceremonially michael sacked her and refused to see her or speak to her and never told her what she'd done and she was absolutely heartbroken and it was humiliating to her and the next contact any of us had with michael was backstage at the Forum in LA when he was playing this series of mega gigs with an audience of all Hollywood celebs. And we went backstage and we were shown into this sort of tent where Michael was having photographs taken. It was like a Rudolph Valentino sort of Bedouin tent with a camera set up.

And he wanted to make an album of himself with all Hollywood celebs. And so we walk in there, you know. A photo album. Photo album, yeah. So we walk in there and we're lined up for the camera, and I see Kathleen bending to Michael's ear and whispering something, and his face just cracks. I had no idea what she was going to say to him.

And I said, what did you say? And she said, I just told Michael that he broke Maryary's heart and he ought to be ashamed of himself something that he was probably not used to hearing from anyone exactly yeah and and his reply was oh barry will deal with it the family go talk to the family retainer yeah oh it's such a strange story it's so sort of weirdly heartbreaking in a way, isn't it? That someone that talented can have their lives completely warped. People don't generally come out of the experience of being super successful and well-known intact. They don't.

You know, I've met people over the years at my relatively humble level of celebrity who are both divas and egocentric and completely humble and normal and down to earth so so i i don't know whether it's somebody in michael's position it was just impossible for him to keep you know to stay level-headed or whether at that level it's just another planet from the podcast in between the next bit and the rhythm once last every now and then you have to take a little rest otherwise you're going to get tired and depressed take a look around think that you exist

think about the person you last kissed right that's enough now think about keys think about sausages think about trees think of alien vehicles moving out in space

think about the wonder on the little baby's face now think of Stevie Wonder's face on the baby's face Now stop thinking completely Because you're ready for the next part of the podcast Here it is And of course you were one of the pioneers of the whole world of music and technology coming together You set up companies that variously made music for

video games and uh and then for the web the web right and then of course a story that has been told a lot about you is your association with nokia and the development of the polyphonic ring tone there i was listening to the the song Vals by Francisco Tarrega, a Spanish composer and classical guitarist of the Romantic period. Died in 1909. I'll play you a little bit now, listeners. Here's the key part of that. so there you go you can recognize the nokia ringtone there did you actually um develop the technology to put those synthesizers in phones yes Yes so what had happened was that my tech startup

Beatnik was the Silicon Valley startup which had developed a software synthesizer to sonify web pages. Right. And the idea was that as you clicked your way around the web you'd be triggering sounds and creating a soundtrack as you went. And that was something that you had thought like why isn't anyone doing this? This is a big part of the whole experience missing is this yeah and what i was betting on was that it was a missing part and that advertisers and ad agencies and so on would want to leverage the sort of sound assets that they had i mean you know coca-cola for example have got their logos and their bottle caps and labels and things like that but they've also invested over the years in their jingles you know so that and even the sound of you know a bottle being open or a can being opened

they they recognize that and their ad agency on madison avenue recognized that so what i was gambling on in 1993 94 or whatever was that there was a need for sound on the web you know turned out i was wrong about that um and we would have gone up in smoke, you know, when the bubble burst like many other dot-com companies. But you were wrong because they didn't agree or because the technology wasn't there? The technology was there, but they didn't agree. And a lot of computers didn't have sound or didn't have consistent enough sound reproduction in terms of their speakers and their sound capabilities. And so we just didn't win that argument, really. And so we would have disappeared in about 1999, 2000,

except in the process, we'd created the world's most efficient and smallest software synthesizer, which is so small that when you hit a webpage, it would download in the background without you knowing about it, samples and all, and would then be triggering sounds just by you clicking around.

So Nokia were looking for a way to do musical ringtones. And there were sound chips available out of Japan that they could have licensed and added in, but they didn't want the expense and they didn't want the liability of a third-party component in their phones. Everything in a Nokia phone was made in Finland. And so they looked for a software-based solution

where there'd just be a chunk of code they could license and integrate into their products so they would now have an onboard synthesizer. And their phones were very puny, you know, the processors in the phones. They were, you know, mass market, absolute minimum processing power. So we were able to get four voices of polyphonic

ringtone working in their phones without any additional chip or hardware and so they licensed it from us in 98 and since then every nokia phone that shipped had this beatnik technology on board right and you talk in the book as well about your slight ambivalence towards what the whole world of ringtones became, the phenomenon it became and the sort of ever present noise that it became. you know, on a bus or a tram or in an airport lounge, you know, I would hear this thing go off and I go, well, that's the beatnik synthesizer, you know, and the irony was that at the start of my career, people would refer to me as the guy that sort of brought some humanity, you know, to the electronic music world that, you know, my sounds were lush and had this warmth to them, you know, that didn't exist in a lot of electronic music. And now it had been reduced to, you know, these beeps. And it was especially upsetting, you know, didn't exist in a lot of electronic music and now it had been reduced to you know these beeps and it was it was especially upsetting you know the days when people were

downloading like the latest hits as as bp ringtones played back by the beatnik synthesizer and i would hear something by you know one of my heroes rendered in in four notes at a time on the beatnik synthesizer across the room and i would just sort of shirk at the the idea that this is what i've been reduced to it's fascinating and you talk in your book about a meeting you had with various heads of tech including bill gates and someone is describing the concept of uploading files to the cloud and he just says that's bullshit it was in the most formal possible setting you could get in the u.s it was a private room in a very posh restaurant in georgetown washington dc and everybody was in a suit and it was always you know ceo of deutsch telekom and the you know founder

of aol and all the rest of it we were all the speakers at the panel that was going to happen the next day the information superhighway you know, with Al Gore or whatever. And people were speaking in hushed tones. And we were across the table, you know, this table of 10 or 12 people from Bill Gates. And this, you know, young entrepreneur, Mark Peratt, was telling me about this handheld device he had where you wouldn't need a personal computer anymore. You know, you'd have all your files would be in this cloud

and you'd have these agents running around doing deals for you and just bringing you the results. And Bill Gates was eavesdropping our conversation and he suddenly piped up and said, that's fucking bullshit, Mark, and you know it. And this hush descended on the room, you know, and it was this moment of brutality. It reminded me of Robert De Niro's version of Al Capone in The Untouchables, who sneaks up behind one of his hoodlums and brains him with a baseball bat and he bleeds out over the tablecloth. It was that level of brutality. Why did he react like that?

Because he was threatened by it? Because he hadn't thought of it himself? Why do you think? He wasn't really being a thug. He's a guy who's so single-minded about code and the philosophy of code that at the time he thought he saw a technologist bullshitting a rock musician. That's what he thought he was hearing. And he believed that and he couldn't tolerate that.

And that's why he blurted it out like he did. Right. But I mean, you know, today it's all about the Microsoft cloud, cloud computing. Is it a compulsion that leads you to explore that leading edge of all of that? Yeah, I'm still a curiosity seeker, looking at the idiosyncrasies of things. A mountain or a tree is the manifestation of forces that we are not capable of dealing with. I'm very drunk in this. We're both big Bowie fans,

and one of the greatest days was watching Bowie play at Live Aid, and then the extra thrill of him introducing you. I was already a big fan of your stuff, and a big Prefab Sprout fan, so you had members of that band there as well. It was such fun watching it and seeing him totally nail it. And you talk in the book as well about how canny he was.

So how did that all come together? I mean, it came together very quickly, didn't it? Within like 10 days or something. Within about 10 days. Had you met him before that time? I had never met him, no. I mean, the connection was that he had relatively recently done the absolute beginners album uh and the guitarist and bassist on that album were kevin armstrong and matthew seligman who had been long time cohorts of mine

and when bowie announced he was going to do live aid and he approached them and said you know can you put the rest of the band together? They said, well, why don't you ask Tom? He's a producer and he knows people and so we can quickly put the band together. So this was maybe eight, nine days before Live Aid, you know. And at the time, he was extremely busy working on Labyrinth. So he was up at four or five every morning

getting his makeup and hair done, you know, at Pine true codpiece and that astonishing wig um so by the time we got him it was late in the evening and he was exhausted and so he wasn't even running on charlie in those days was he he'd given all that i have no idea i mean he seemed he seemed fit and energetic and healthy but we we had three nights of rehearsal in London and he would give us a list of songs to prepare and each night the song the song list was slightly different and I think what was going on in his head at that point was he was sort of adjusting to his understanding of what the event was all about. I think that went from being, this is a big charity event with a big viewership and it's a great opportunity to plug my new single,

Loving the Alien. It sort of went from that to being, this is actually a potential world changing event. It's easy with benefit of hindsight to view it as that, but at the time it wasn't that apparent. So he was getting focused on that. And so each evening evening he came down he was getting more focused and he would suddenly say well let's try let's try modern love and we were semi-prepared for this but we the main way that we were prepared for it as a group of musicians of that generation that grew up you

know adulating Bowie was that we knew you know these songs were really part of our musical makeup so if he says modern love we could sort of go into it you know and so he settled finally on the four songs that that we did only on the night before the show it was on the friday night and we played them in rehearsal we never played them back to back and it was tvc one five heroes he ended with. Yeah. So TVC15, I mean, five minutes before the show, he decided to open with that. That's a great show. And then there was Rebel Rebel and Modern Love.

There you go. TVC15, what a peach. Quite difficult to play, I would imagine, isn't it? Unless you're, you know, I mean, Jules Holland could play it standing on his head, but it's not exactly my style. It's a sort of New Orleans, you know, funky-tonkk style funky tongue there's a there's a new a new genre for you right there but uh so I could I could just about get my chops around it but barely and how are you in those had you played a crowd like that before no never never I mean I'd played open air

theaters I think before but but not on that scale. And so where was your head at? You'd just flown in on a helicopter, right? Yes. I mean, well, it was a fantastic day. It was a beautiful, clear day like this. And wherever you were in England, you could hear the preamble, you know, from early in the morning. So I remember going for a walk by the Thames and open windows. You'd hear the preamble coming out on the TV or the radio. It's your fucking money.

There was a very strong sense of the buildup. And because of the traffic issues getting to Wembley, I'd been instructed to go to Battersea Heliport where I was going to fly to Wembley from there in a helicopter with Mr. Bowie. And Xavier being afraid of flying was smoking lots of ciggies to try and calm himself down. Well I mean the thing was about Bowie was that he was this sort of inspirational figure at that point in time and he smiled a lot,

he wore this suit, he had this blonde coiffed hair and he was very outgoing at Bathsea heliport there was a gaggle of fans with records and things for him to sign he's very gracious you know he was signing all of that and and I was there waiting for this to happen and behind him the rotors of the helicopter were sort of beginning to circle and every time he turned around this look of dread would come over his face and um when we actually got in the helicopter and the door closed he turned from this sort of gentlemanly gracious figure into the thin white duke and for the 10 or 12 minutes that we were flying to bat to wembley uh he was a complete diva yes and he was chain smoking and the pilot kept telling him to extinguish his cigarette because it's bad for the avionics

and all he would say is, are there any pylons? Are there tall buildings in the way? How long does this take again? He was just very nervous about that. But then as soon as we touched down, he suddenly lightened up and there were paparazzi all around

and he just looked at me and he said, oh, I love this bit. And so were you able to enjoy being on stage and were you able to appreciate the moment? Absolutely. My view was of his back and the other musicians and the crowd. And it was still daylight, of course, you know, but people were really into it.

And I was actually very worried about sort of screwing up. I was particularly worried about Heroes for some reason, which on the surface is a very simple song it's only got a couple of sections to it but i was playing this sort of lead synth part and so it was it was would have been very easy for me to either miss my cue or to play it in the wrong place and then i'm sort of you know i'm vandalizing this this timeless classic but in reality i just let go when we got to that point. I was just in the moment and everybody was swaying and Bowie was getting into it.

It was just a fantastic feeling. And the teenage fanboy took over and my fingers just sort of played on their own accord. I remember that that song sounded particularly good and your synth line really made it. It shone out so clearly. It was terrific and then do you remember much about the did you celebrate the rest of the evening there's a funny video of you and bowie

being interviewed on mtv you with a cap on smoking a cig and holding a beer um you're shaking your head well youtube is awful like this because it's like blackmail corner you know so because there are things i remember and things that I've suppressed completely. And if you told me a couple of years ago that I was interviewed on TV right after we came off stage, I would have said, no, no, there was a party in the green room. And then we went out front and watched some of the set. But there is the proof on YouTube. And so there on YouTube, you know, we've just done this amazing show and Bowie's being interviewed and he's chummy but he's still able

to summon up you know to turn to the camera and say you really need to get your money out and think about these starving kids in Ethiopia he's very sincere and you know and next to him is this kid you know with the beer and the woodbine this goofy look on his face as if to sort of say it's David

fucking Bowie I know it's David fucking Bowen. I know. It's so great. That is exactly the look. It's like, what the fuck am I doing here? It's great. Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website I see success, yes success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes.

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Continue. Keep lighting me with fire. Hey, welcome back, listeners. Hope you enjoyed that conversation with Thomas Dolby. Very grateful to him for making the time. Yeah, it was great. I just, you know, I wish I could have talked to Thomas for a lot longer. As I said briefly in the introduction,

you know, he's worked with all these amazing people that I really love, especially Prefab Sprout. I could talk to Thomas about that all day really he produced a few of their best albums wow it would be amazing to talk to Paddy McAloon one day as well actually if you're a Prefab Sprout fan there's a really good conversation that the journalist Peter Pafidis did with Paddy McAloon. You could probably just search Peter Pafidis, P-A-P-H-I-D-E-S and Paddy McAloon and you would find it somewhere. But he doesn't do

many interviews as far as I'm aware, but that's a really good one. Okay, now, I don't know if you know, but it's coming up to Christmas, listeners. As usual, I'm behind on Christmas prep every year, I think. No, I'm going to leave the whole of December completely clear, and then I'll be able to just be a Christmas genius, and I'll get everyone really thoughtful gifts. I won't just pick stuff out of some shit catalogue. I'm going to really think about lovely personalised gifts and then I'll be a kind of hero. Wrong!

Shit catalogue time is the way it usually works out. But if you are searching for ideas for non-predictable Christmas gifts, of course there is now an overwhelmingly brilliant selection of podcast merchandise and of course the my live dvd which came out featuring lots of my stupid videos from the last few years adam buxton's old bits it's called if you search for that or you buy it from gofasterstripe.com but here's another idea that has nothing to do with me that might be good for gifts I know a lot of artists listen to this podcast it helps them to art one illustrator friend of mine made me aware of a new online print

store called room50.com I heard richard herring talking about this as well actually but it does sound good room50.com like the word 50 which sells limited edition prints by 50 of the best illustrators and designers in the world the list of 50 includes award-winning artists like keith negley who wrote and illustrated Tough Guys Have Feelings Too, Marcellus Hall, who has done a number of covers for The New Yorker, and also Jing Wei, who was once illustration director of Etsy. You know, Etsy. I'm showing my ignorance now. But is known for her large-scale murals and beautiful editorial work. The store ensures that a high proportion of the artists are women and people of colour, and it's truly affordable,

with each print starting at just £15. All prints come in three sizes, so you can get one to suit your space. There's also a 10% discount with the code BUCKLES until Christmas. You can find all this amazing art at www.room50.com oh drops phone uh phone survives nice it's almost worth dropping your phone sometimes just to see it survive i mean it's got a good case on it and i paid for them to um put

the special laminated cover thing on top when i bought it which normally i would always just say no to insurance no to any extras no to anything like that but this time i thought come on buckles you're nearly 50 it's time to take some precautions and it's at times like that when I throw my phone onto the frosty ground that I'm glad I did so anyway there you go an option for a slightly more imaginative gift prints oh I miss prints I'm getting melancholy now it's getting to that time of year again looking back taking stock yeah i'm so cold i'm gonna have to go listeners rosie rosie she's frozen she's not moving rose come on let's head back it's too, come on, let's head back. It's too cold. Come on, doggles. Come on, sweet girl. Oh, mate, she bounces round. Here comes the hairy bullet. It's a brilliant fly past.

Chong. Ah, she stopped to say hello. Give us a hug. I love you. Oh my goodness, it's cold. Aren't you cold? Hey, listeners, by the way, tomorrow I'm off to record with Joe for our Christmas podcast. That's going to be out on Christmas Day. That's the plan anyway. Thank you so much for all the messages that you sent in via my blog for things for myself and Joe to read out and waffle about. I read every single one and really appreciated them, and I'm touched by some of the kind, supportive messages included in there as well. But thank you very much for all of them. They were really good. I think there should be one more podcast between now and Christmas. But till then, try to stay warm help someone

else stay warm in a way that isn't creepy i love you bye Like and subscribe Like and subscribe Please like and subscribe Give me like a smile and a thumbs up Nice like a pat when my bum's up Give me like a smile and a thumbs up Nice like a pat when my bum's up Like and subscribe Like and subscribe Like and subscribe

Please like and subscribe Give me like a smile and a thumbs up. Nice like a smile and a thumbs up. Give me like a smile and a thumbs up. Nice like a smile and a thumbs up. Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe. Like and subscribe.

Please like and subscribe. Give me like a smile and a thumbs up. Give me like a smile and a thumbs up. Give me like a smile and a thumbs up. Thank you.