Thomas Dolby

Thomas Dolby was born Thomas Morgan Robertson in London on 14 October 1958, and he came into the '80s as one of the new breed who treated the synthesizer as a songwriting partner rather than a gimmick. His debut album, The Golden Age of Wireless, arrived in 1982, all chilly synth textures wrapped around warm tunes, with "Europa and the Pirate Twins" as its calling card and "Airwaves" drifting along behind it.

Then came the international hit. "She Blinded Me with Science", which also turned up on the 1983 EP Blinded by Science alongside "One of Our Submarines", is a mad-professor romp of bleeps, barked vocals and a groove you could dance to in a lab coat. The Flat Earth followed in 1984 with the jittery funk of "Hyperactive!", plus "I Scare Myself" and "Screen Kiss", proof that the man could write a moody, grown-up song as well as a novelty.

Aliens Ate My Buick in 1988 was a wisecracking, big-hearted record with "Airhead" and "My Brain Is Like a Sieve", and Astronauts & Heretics in 1992 brought "I Love You Goodbye" and "That's Why People Fall in Love". Along the way he worked as a producer and a session player, and his film music picked up 2 Golden Raspberry nominations, for Worst Musical Score in 1986 and Worst Original Song in 1987, which is its own kind of distinction.

In the '90s the gadget obsession turned into a business. Dolby founded Beatnik, a Silicon Valley software company whose technology played audio over the internet and later ran ringtones, most famously on Nokia phones. He was music director for the TED Conferences, and since 2014 he has taught at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where he leads the Music for New Media program, whose first class arrived in the autumn of 2018.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.