Thomas Dolby
14 Oct 1958
| My first contact with Thomas Dolby was a bootleg cassette in Camden Market in 1982 or thereabouts. I must have remembered his name from the NME, and possibly heard him on the radio. Anyway the bootleg was a revelation as he introduced his computers to the audience - that kind of nerdiness was something I could definitely get on board with. Somehow I didn't notice his appearance in David Bowie's band (including Clare Hurst) at Live Aid in 1985, and I guess just had him in the back of my mind through the late 80s as a fellow traveller in electronic music. It wasn't really until I found Aliens Ate My Buick in a secondhand CD shop in Camden (or was it Islington?) that I got back on the Dolby train, and happily I got a family ticket as Lucy is also on board. Co-incidence time: in 2014, just before we moved house, we thought we needed a holiday. We stuck a pin in a map and found ourselves in a pair of shepherd's huts near the Suffolk coast. On the first day we went down to the shingle beach at Shingle Street, the inspiration for the Thomas Dolby song "Cloudburst at Shingle Street", from the album The Golden Age of Wireless, and it so happens that he has a home and studio boat (The Nutmeg of Consolation) quite near there. Like his appearance at Live Aid, I found out about this quite a bit later. |
| The Golden Age of Wireless | |||
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| The Flat Earth | |||
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| Aliens Ate My Buick | |||
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| Astronauts & Heretics | |||
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| A Map of the Floating City | |||
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| Back to Music | |||