Thomas Dolby is one of the great legends of electronic music. His career as a solo artist includes two of the most unique and recognizable hits of the genre, She Blinded Me With Science and Hyperactive!.
Dolby promoted himself as a kind of mad scientist, an egghead that had successfully harnessed the power of synthesizers and samplers, using them to make catchy pop and electro-funk.
Before he launched his solo career, Dolby had already notched up a mouth-watering catalogue of cred as a studio musician, technician, and songwriter; after starting out as a teenaged live sound man mixing The Fall, The Members and others using a PA he built himself, he formed the arty post-punk band Camera Club (also known as Bruce Woolley & the Camera Club) with Bruce Woolley, Geoff Downes, Trevor Horn and Matthew Seligman. Within a year, he had left the group and joined Lene Lovich’s backing band and gave her his song New Toy, which became a British hit in 1981. That same year, he released his first solo single, Urges, on the English independent label Armageddon.
By the autumn, he had signed with Parlophone and released Europa and the Pirate Twins, which nearly cracked the UK Top 40. Dolby started playing synthesizer on sessions for other artists in 1982. That year, he played keyboards on def leppard’s Pyromania and Joan Armatrading’s Walk Under Ladders. His most distinctive session credit is that keyboard line after the chorus on foreigner’s Waiting For A Girl Like You.
