Thomas Dolby
O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London
22nd August 2024
Flying solo, the genre-hopping Thomas Dolby time travels through the decades — all the way from She Blinded Me With Science to 2011’s Spice Train — at Shepherd’s Bush Empire.
To those not paying attention, Thomas Dolby is something of a one-hit wonder. Yes, he never quite matched the ubiquity of single She Blinded Me With Science (and Magnus Pyke’s exclamations of “Science!”). But it’s only a fraction of a genre-hopping 40-year career. And, on his first UK headline tour in over a decade, he seems keen to remind audiences of that.
As Dolby tells everyone in Shepherd’s Bush Empire tonight, after playing only the hits on a recent ’80s nostalgia package tour, he now wants to perform some personal favourites and deeper cuts. He does exactly that, pairing signature singles with album tracks and selections from 2011’s often overlooked A Map Of The Floating City.
There are even a couple of covers, like the energetic take on New Order’s Blue Monday that opens the show. The vocoder effect on his voice is the first reminder that Dolby was one of the earliest people in the UK to own a Fairlight or that he’s credited on Def Leppard’s Pyromania as Booker T. Boffin. He loves a gadget and tonight’s flashiest is a tablet-sized mobile keyboard (2024’s answer to a keytar?) that seemingly allows him to play and control his rig from anywhere on stage.
Otherwise, his setup is relatively minimal (a couple of keyboards and laptops plus a MIDI pad controller for samples) but more than enough to recreate (and refresh) his back catalogue without the need for other musicians. Europa And The Pirate Twins, complete with real harmonica solo, sounds especially revitalised, while a pared back I Love You Goodbye absolutely glows. Hyperactive!, originally written for Michael Jackson, gets a flashy new arrangement that Dolby expertly creates from scratch, one loop at a time.
Even the funkadelic Hot Sauce gets a spring clean despite the accompanying video celebrating ’80s US culture. Written by George Clinton, it’s just one of several offerings that underline the eclecticism of a musician who played keyboards on Foreigner’s Urgent, contributed synths to Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven Is A Place On Earth, and produced both Prefab Sprout and Joni Mitchell. Spice Train, one of two selections from this millennium, is all glitchy beats, Punjabi singers, Middle Eastern string quartets, and even a Mariachi horn section.
From the same album, the Billie Eilish-endorsed My Evil Twin Brother is more noir detective soundtrack — claustrophobic and menacing with semi-spoken verses, rounded off by a string quartet, thumping chorus, eerie synth solo, and police sirens. One Of Our Submarines is musically less eclectic but no less complex and the rarest kind of ’80s synthpop: intelligent. Tonight it features snippets of Gary Numan’s Cars and Duran Duran’s Save a Prayer.
By contrast, a gentle Budapest By Blimp and tender Airwaves show off Dolby’s quieter side. But even these sweeping ballads are performed with an enthusiasm missing from many of his contemporaries out there playing songs from 40 years ago. Perhaps it’s due to his long breaks from live performance — like when he ran the company that created Nokia’s polyphonic ringtones or in his current role on the faculty at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University — but he’s clearly excited to be sharing his music and memories. That includes the day he played at Live Aid with David Bowie, celebrated tonight with a rendition of Heroes performed to a video of personal and broadcast footage from the day. He’s not even tired of trotting out The Big Big Hit, updating the song with snippets of everyone from Steve Jobs to Hillary Clinton saying, yes, “Science!”.
Thomas Dolby ends his first UK headline tour in over a decade with an encore show at Islington’s O2 Academy on 24th August. Tickets for the event are on sale here.
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Words by Nils van der Linden. You can visit his author profile for Louder Than War here and his website here.
Photos by Naomi Dryden-Smith – Louder Than War | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | portfolio
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