“She Blinded Me With Science” by Thomas Dolby

Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science" is synth-pop played as a lab-coat farce, and in 1983 it turned up on the EP Blinded by Science and on a re-release of his debut album, The Golden Age of Wireless. Dolby wrote the music, shared the lyric with Tim Kerr and co-produced it with Tim Friese-Greene, and the credits read like a party guest list: Matthew Seligman on bass synthesizer, Simon House on violin, Kevin Armstrong, Miriam Stockley and none other than Robert John "Mutt" Lange on backing vocals, and Magnus Pyke hollering the spoken bits.

The whole thing pings, burbles and hiccups like a bench full of runaway gadgets, with Dolby's nervy lead vocal darting in between, and it's funny without ever being a novelty throwaway.

Home gave it a cold shoulder: it only scraped to number 49 on the UK Singles Chart. North America went the other way, sending it to number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and to the top in Canada for 2 weeks. It stayed his only Top 40 hit in the States, which is why VH1 kept putting it on one-hit-wonder lists (No. 20 in 2002, No. 13 among the '80s entries in 2009), and years later it served as theme music for the pilot of The Big Bang Theory.

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