Thomas Dolby and the art of doing the right thing
Thomas Dolby was taking a chance on his recent tour of the United States, offering fans the opportunity to pick the songs making up the setlist for “An Evening of Music and Storytelling.”
But oh, that Mr. Dolby is too smart to get left having to dig out some obscure B-side from the early 80s to relearn on the fly.
“There’s a subset of songs that I’m willing to let them pick from,” he said. “David Bowie, on one of his last tours, allowed the audience to vote online and the most requested song was ‘The Laughing Gnome,’ which he wasn’t too happy about. Democracy isn’t always a good thing.”
Dolby laughs, clearly at ease with life in this crazy business these days, maybe because he doesn’t need to tour or release new albums with execs breathing down his neck. He authored a memoir, The Speed of Sound, which was a critical and popular success, and you may consider his “day job” to be his gig as a professor at Johns Hopkins University.
But music will always be a part of him, hence the release of a career compilation, Hyperactive, last month, and this tour, which wraps up with an Atlantic City gig tonight and a Baltimore date on Wednesday, August 8. They’re intimate shows, and he’s been enjoying them as much as his fans are.
“I decided to do fewer songs, but going into a lot more depth, and I think the audience will like that,” said Dolby, who was never one to let folks behind the curtain when it came to his music. He’s changed that thinking.
“It’s a mixture of things, really,” he said. “Early in my career, I was quite guarded about never breaking that fourth wall. I think the way the industry was back then, it was sort of set up like that, where you kept your stars at arm’s length and sort of deified them by deliberately keeping them remote from the audience. There were always the artists that had the ability to break through that wall, but I wasn’t one of them really. I think a lot of that’s because I’m not naturally a very outgoing person. I’m really a bit of a hermit with a thin streak of exhibitionism that comes to the surface every now and then. (Laughs) But I’m really quite an introvert. So my reaction to being in the spotlight was to have a bubble around myself in terms of my relationship with the public.”
And on stage, while Dolby was note perfect, that was also a blend of being a perfectionist along with being someone who wouldn’t go off on 20-minute improvisations on a whim.
“When I would play live in those days, you always have a choice; do I try and reproduce what I did in the studio or do I just be in the moment and let it evolve naturally?” he said. “I pretty much chose the former and part of that is because I’m a perfectionist and because I think the recording studio is really my instrument. I’m not a virtuoso pianist or singer so I don’t have those as a crutch. I’m not a song and dance guy that you throw in the spotlight and can entertain a stadium of people like an Elton John or someone like that. So that was the path that I took.”
There’s nothing to prove anymore, though. As the years have passed, Dolby’s music is appreciated more than just for “She Blinded Me with Science,” and now he’s seen as not an 80s nostalgia act, but as a vibrant and still relevant artist whose songs have aged remarkably well. That’s good news for both Dolby and his legion of fans, as many of his peers haven’t had the same fortunate outcome.
“In defense of some of my contemporaries, it’s not often recognized that, like an athlete, you have a shelf life,” Dolby said. “Your singing voice is a set of muscles. Not many people can run marathons when they’re in their 60s, 70s, 80s, but a few can do it. Some people pick up music in middle age as well, and more power to them. But the problem is, you see one of these artists and in your mind they’re still 23 and on MTV in the full blossom of youth. And the reason they’re getting an audience in the door is because they want to walk down memory lane and re-live that moment. And that’s a really hard comparison to make when your decade’s over. To do that with dignity is really tricky. And yet many, let’s say legacy artists, will tell you, ‘Well, I tried to play the songs from my new album and everybody went to the bar.’”
Dolby, 59, has always been one of the smartest guys in the room, and that hasn’t changed, as his observation proves. It’s why he is willing to play the hits on this tour and also willing to open up the door for his fans to give their input as well. It’s a far cry from how he dealt with all this a few decades ago, but if you’re not evolving, well, you’re not evolving.
“I think as I’ve grown older and hopefully wiser, I’ve realized that if you’re willing to take chances and willing to be in the moment and let your guard down, you have good and bad nights and there’s a risk of falling on your face,” he said. “But on the occasions when that’s happened, the audience laughed with me, they’ve seen the funny side and they willed me to pick myself up again, and I came away feeling very happy about my relationship with the audience. And on the good nights, it’s fantastic because you went above and beyond and excelled and fresh things happened that wouldn’t have happened if you were just trying to reproduce what you did on the record. So that’s why I’ve gone more that way as I’ve gotten older.”
It’s a welcome development in a remarkable career, and one Dolby can be proud of, not just for his commercial and aesthetic success, but because he did things his own way, which wasn’t exactly a popular notion when he broke big in the early 80s.
“Almost as soon as I had that springboard, I saw that as an opportunity to play people the other side of Dolby, really,” he said. “I used that as a way to get a large number of people in the door and play them something a bit more tasteful. And it was frustrating for the industry because a lot of people said to me, ‘You have no idea how lucky you are to make that break and come up with a hit formula. It doesn’t happen that often. We’re a hundred percent behind you if you work with us to homogenize that and consolidate it and then maybe in a few years’ time you can start getting a bit more experimental.’ And I immediately took the path less traveled.”
And it’s led him here. It would be wrong to call him content because that would mean he’s ready to pack things up. But maybe there’s a hint of satisfaction in knowing that after everything, he’s still doing things his way and bringing his fans along the ride.
“I do feel more appreciated as the years go on and I’m very grateful for that,” Dolby said. “There’s actually a lot to be said for doing the right thing. You reach a lot of crossroads in your career and very often there’s a lot of pressure to take one path versus another. And I always followed my instincts, much to the annoyance of the businesspeople around me.
“I think as a consequence, my audience is small,” he continues. “A lot of them are no longer around, they don’t go out to gigs, they’ve got college fees and mortgages to worry about, and they can get all the music they want virtually for free on Spotify or YouTube. There is a whole plethora of reasons why it gets tougher as you get older to have a large audience. But when you play a small club you can see people’s faces. Very often there’s not this big, artificial wall between the artist and the fans, and somebody buys you a beer afterwards. So there’s a lot of satisfaction to be gotten from that and coming face to face with my audience.”
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