17. Thomas Dolby, The Golden Age of Wireless (1982)

Upon its initial release, Thomas Dolby’s debut album had different track listings for its U.K. and U.S. versions. This was hardly an uncommon practice in the nineteen-eighties. What stands out all these decades later is that neither of those versions included the hit single most strong associated with it, “She Blinded Me with Science.” In May 1982, The Golden Age of Wireless was released on Dolby’s own Venice is Sinking label with distribution support from EMI Records in the U.K. At roughly the same time, the record was issued by Capitol Records subsidiary Harvest Records in the U.S. The album enjoyed only modest success, placing a couple singles in the lower reaches of the British charts and not much else.

A little more than five months later, Dolby put out “She Blinded Me with Science” as a standalone single. The song was another middling performer for Dolby at home in the U.K., but it subsequently turned into a small sensation across the Atlantic, mostly due to MTV airing the track’s music video with a frequency that nearly rivaled that of the moon man bumper played at the top of every hour. The single went Top 5 in the U.S. and topped the chart in Canada. As the song raced up the charts, Capitol Records urgently summoned Dolby to Los Angeles for television appearances and a revamp of The Golden Age of Wireless that positioned the extended U.S. mix of “She Blinded Me with Science” as the lead track.

Because his ascendent signature song was both heavy with synthesizers and included the word “science” in the title (that word is memorably shouted several times throughout), Dolby was quickly held up as the avatar of the still developing incursion of electronic and digital instrumentation in pop music. Other factors contributed mightily to that status, of course. Thomas Dolby is a stage name for the musician born born Thomas Robertson, and that pseudonym derives from a nickname based on audio giant Dolby Laboratories that was given to him because he was constantly tinkering with equipment. The album title chips in, too, with its evocation of mechanically inclined individuals happily lost in a box filled with wires and tubes. Dolby pushed back against the techie characterization from the start.

“The radio pioneer experimented because he had a desire to communicate, not because he liked the color of his circuit boards,” Dolby said of his personal relationship to the album’s title.

It was his work with a fairly unlikely collaborator that gave Dolby the ability to fulfill his desire to communicate through the recording of The Golden Age of Wireless. Dolby was fishing around for a publishing deal around the time the nineteen-eighties got underway. He sent demo tapes all over, including to Zomba, the music group co-founded by producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange. Enlisted to co-produce Foreigner’s follow-up to their 1979 hit album, Head Games, Lange had an immediate need to find a musician to replace the band’s recently departed keyboard player, Al Greenwood. Lange remembered Dolby’s tape and brought the young synth player into the mix for the sessions taking place at Electric Lady, in New York City. It was a transformative experience for Dolby.

“Up until that point, I’d never spent more than about ten hours at a stretch in a professional recording studio, and then I was watching the clock because I was paying for it,” Dolby recalled many years later. “So to have the luxury of being up all night at Electric Lady most nights of the week with any keyboard that I chose to hire from S.I.R., that was certainly a real thrill. I think especially the band themselves didn’t really know what I was putting on their records. During the day, they were doing vocals with Lou Gramm, and they would leave me at night or put me in the other studio working on my own with a relief engineer. And then they would come in and they would say yea or nay to the stuff that I’d done.”

The album with Dolby’s distinctive synth parts all over it is 4, which became a career-defining smash for Foreigner. Dolby raked in sizable earnings from playing on 4 and joining Foreigner on tour in support of the album. He put a lot of that money into making The Golden Age of Wireless. If the windfall eased the part of Dobly’s mind that fretted about finances, there were other heady issues that he brought into his creative process.

“The songs are sort of about relationships in the face of something happening on a world level,” Dolby later said. “So there’s a sense of ‘after the apocalypse’ or impending war. A lot of them are very much about the extra weight that’s added to emotional feeling in the context of wartime. I think that’s a pervading feeling through all the songs.”

The symbolism is sometimes quite overt. “One of Our Submarines” puts mid-tempo electronica to a tale of maritime disaster (“The red lights flicker, sonar weak/ Air valves hissing open/ Half her pressure blown away”), and the jumpy “Europa and the Pirate Twins” is preoccupied with a relationship thwarted by international conflict (“Down the beaches, hand in hand/ Twelfth of never on the sand/ Then war took her away”). Even tracks that are a little more cryptic have a general doomy air about them, as is the case with “Weightless” (“And the sump started leaking/ All over New Jersey/ Gas stations everywhere/ Not one drop to fill me”). Across all of these cuts, the music is like sharpened scissors. Dolby delivers weirdly danceable dread.

Dolby’s musicianship is impeccable on the album, and the production, which is mostly his doing, rises to meet it. “Airwaves” mirrors the price-is-no-object appropriated new wave found on Billy Joel’s 1982 album, The Nylon Curtain, and “Windpower” throws in all sorts of extra bloops and burbles without ever sounding indulgent. “Radio Silence” is presented in a “Guitar Version” on the modified U.S. album, and it has the slick, slightly gooey rock sound that would overtake AOR FM stations in the years ahead. In astutely tapping into the currents of pop music at that moment and shifting them to his own whims, Dolby predicts — or maybe influences — much of what’s to come in the remaining decade.

The mild defensiveness about his mastery of synthesizers and other digital equipment never entirely left Dolby. Even as he occasionally diverted away from music to pursuits that were undeniably tech-based, Dolby was quick to downplay the importance of electronic tools in his art. He didn’t define himself the way others did.

“I think I’m fundamentally a songwriter, and I could play a lot of my songs with just piano and voice,” Dolby told The A.V. Club. “Wouldn’t be my choice, but I could. I use electronics to enrich and enhance the textures and the atmosphere. I’m not really into the sound of electronics for its own sake. Never have been.”

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.