9/10/2023 0 Comments Thomas dolby radio silence![]() ![]() … I seemed to be moving into a sort of post-apocalyptic reverie, a parallel universe. In Dolby’s memoir he talks about the frame of mind behind his first album’s lyrics: That didn’t happen so much as finding other, stranger signals over the airwaves: Morse code, the woozy sine waves from turning the dial, the pirate radio ship Radio Caroline, and one late night at the end of the short wave a series of beeps and spoken numbers that only decades later I would learn were spy agency transmissions or “ number stations.” This was my own golden age of wireless, way more interesting than my Southern California radio that played classic rock, stoner rock, AM pop, sports radio, and religion-two frequencies and not much going on at the ends of either dial. I would stay up late under the covers and, with one mono earpiece (found in a drawer) plugged into my left ear, use up the batteries trying to connect over the wireless with those cities. Nan also had a smaller portable radio that I quickly took as my own, which had the same dials. None of the dials really tuned in to those station locations, but I liked turning them and hoping. Oh, and it had a radio, one of those large, Bakelite machines the size of a tumble dryer, with four (!) frequency dials and evocative city names as markers: Luxembourg, Stockholm, Berlin. But now they had all married and moved and it was large enough to have rooms with a funereal weirdness to them: the “front room” that once hosted piano parties now hosted just a piano. My dad had been divorced for five years and we would go on holiday (or you could say retreat) to my Nan’s house in Essex, a pre-war, two-story brick house large enough to once have raised a large family inside. England was “the old country” where my aunts and uncles and grandparents lived. ![]() As self-involved as it sounds, “Windpower” feels like it was born out of my summer vacations in East Anglia.īoth of my parents were English, but I was first generation American. The last time I revisited it, with a much better sound system and a nice French 12” single I bought off Discogs, I realized how much Dolby’s obsessions had become my obsessions, but with a little bit of chicken-and-egg confusion. And then time would pass and styles would change, and each time I returned to the song it got a little bit weirder, stuck out just a little bit more than usual, and started to feel like a direction that pop music never followed again-not even at the hands of Dolby himself. I listened to it so much over those years that for a while I wasn’t even hearing it-the song had become a natural state of things, a section of DNA. This is Thomas Dolby’s 1982 song “ Windpower,” and in some alternative universe it’s the song he’s best known for, instead of his herky-jerky pop hit “She Blinded Me with Science.” Then again, my 12-year-old self would never have heard of Dolby if not for that MTV-dominant single, and I wouldn’t have purchased one of my first ever vinyl records, the Blinded by Science EP on which “Windpower” is the opening track of Side Two. ![]() And then our singer steps up to the mic: “Switch off the mind and let the heart decide… who you were meant to be.” ![]() There’s a short intake of breath, a low om-like hum. It starts as it always does, with the sound of a cold, synthetic wind, whistling tones, and the nervous twitch of a Morse code signal. ![]()
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