Thomas Dolby – Cloudburst at Shingle Street

It was a whim. I had never heard of him before, but I liked the cover of the record. And turning it over and seeing that both Lene Lovich and XTC’s Andy Partridge had been involved, I thought, what the hell, it’s worth a chance. And so I bought Thomas Dolby’s debut album, The Golden Age of the Wireless.

When writing about Buggles, I mentioned their facility at evoking that peculiar nostalgia for the future (what the Brazilians call sodade) that permeates their first album, The Age of Plastic. Thomas Dolby trumps that nostalgia on this beautiful, underrated album. The cover features Dolby, with his spectacles and sober beige suit, standing on a stage with a book open in his hands, surrounded by ancient instruments of science – a telescope, a set of scales, a globe. And off in the corner, facing away from us, a blurry figure wrapped in white contemplates him. It looks like Dolby is defending himself from some arcane inquisition. On the back cover, there is a replica of one of those exciting mid-century comic books full of hope and machinery and dreams of the future, featuring a drawing of Dolby on the cover – lit from below and pouring through a mass of circuitry and tubes like some sort of mad musical Frankenstein.

But the music! Such exquisite songs! Such imaginative production! Dolby specialized in the PPG Wave synthesizer, an arcane piece of technology that was too complicated and quirky to ever catch on, but which allowed him to get sounds and textures wholly unlike anything else anybody else was doing at the time. Coupled with his unusual and captivating musical sense and evocative lyrics, Dolby created a whole magic, tragic, beautiful world on this gem of an album. Each song is a little slice of nostalgia, a perfect piece of hope and longing wrapped up in silvery paper and tied with a bow. The lyrics range from lost childhood sweethearts to mid-life crises, nuggets of universal truth buried in songs about planes and ships and radios and rain. The whole album sounds futuristic and baroque at the same time and feels like looking through a box of childhood mementos, and remembering wistfully when the future was bright and golden and shining and full of possibility.

One of the quirks of records that’s entirely lost to the CD generation is that they had two sides. This subtly alters your perception of the music, and allows an album to be broken into discrete halves. For instance, I was discussing Pink Floyd’s ubiquitous Dark Side of the Moon album with a (considerably younger) coworker. Derrick said he truly loved the album (as any good space cadet (like myself) does – it hasn’t remained on the charts for almost thirty years by accident), except for that irritating song Money. To him, it totally disrupts the flow of the album and seems out of place, like they were trying to write a hit and just shoehorned it into the album, hoping it would help sales. I didn’t understand his vehemence (the song’s not that bad or out of place), until I realized that he had only listened to the CD of the album, and didn’t understand that on the original release, Money kicks off side two. His eyes lit up as he understood. Side one ends with the vocalese of The Great Gig in the Sky going from a roar to a whisper and drifting out into endless space. Then you’re supposed to get up off your beanbag chair, turn the record over, and spark up another bowl. It’s really designed to be two sides and I could see how disconcerting it would be to be nodding off to the end of what was side one and to be suddenly jarred awake by the sound of a cash register opening.

The fact that records do come in sides sometimes plagued me. I accidentally listened to side two of Oingo Boingo’s second album, Nothing to Fear, first, and will forever think of those two sides reversed. And occasionally, I’d get stuck on one side of the record and never make it to the other. This happened with Golden Age of the Wireless for almost a year. I loved side one, but never had enough momentum to turn the record over. Later, I realized that the reason I had probably never made it through the other side was that the only dog on the album, the only track preventing it from being that rarest of rarities, the perfect album, was the opening track on side two, Commercial Breakup.

When I did discover side two, in the spring at the University of Chicago, during a visit from Eric, I gained a whole new respect for the album. Side one has some real gems on it, but side two is an incredibly powerful, beautifully moving musical experience. At least, once you get past the first track. Urges is all twitchy and nervous and beautifully illustrates the push and pull between the body and the mind. Airwaves is a stunning ballad full of longing and peace and ending with the beautiful lines,

Give me your shoulder,

I need a place to wait for morning.

No, it was nothing,

Some car backfiring.

Please don’t ask questions.

I itch all over.

Let me sleep.

Radio Silence is a charming, driving, high-energy number about the dance between men and women with lots of creative production and the repeated mantra “try to think of nothing” courtesy of Lene Lovich.

And then there’s Cloudburst at Shingle Street, which wraps this remarkable album up in a beautiful, sad, perfect little package. It was this track that took the longest for me to like, but its hooks have sunk the deepest of all, and this whole complicated, wistful album can be summed up in my mind by this one track. The story of a man waking up to his life in the rain (or is it about a nuclear holocaust?) is simple and staggering and it builds to a soaring climax, full of drums and voices and sound and fury. And then, as this magisterial procession fades into the distance, Dolby’s lone, frail voice floats over it all with some of the most heartbreaking words every put in a song:

When I was small,

I was in love,

In love with everything.

And now there’s only you.

Now there’s only you.

The needle picks up, the record player shuts off, and there you are, alone in the dark, still hearing those last echoes of longing and regret and happiness and resignation drifting out into the eternal night.

Thomas Dolby was never able to recapture the magic of this first album. Shortly after it was released, he hit it big with the single She Blinded Me with Science – which crystallized his public persona as a not-so-mad scientist. The record company, in a scramble to capitalize (or, considering the company, to Capitolize) on his success, quickly repackaged Golden Age, cutting off two of the better tracks (Urges and Leipzig), and replacing them with She Blinded Me with Science and One of Our Submarines and, inexplicably, drastically remixing Airwaves (to terrible effect) on some of the releases. If only they had replaced Commercial Breakup and left Airwaves alone, the second version of this album would’ve achieved the holy grail – musical perfection without one bad track. But, alas, it was not meant to be.

Some people think his second album, The Flat Earth, is best, but they’re wrong. Although there is plenty to warrant praise on that disc, there’s also the hideous Mulu the Rainforest to gum everything up with. After that, Dolby moved to California and his brain fell out. He traded in the musty, nostalgic, heartbroken scientist in the English rain for a shiny, happy, well-adjusted pop star in the sun and the world was poorer for it. Oh sure, some of his subsequent tracks were diverting enough – Key to Her Ferrari is sporty and fun and full of Freudian quips, Dissidents is a wonderful cut – but for the most part, his later career can be summed up in two song titles from his Aliens Ate My Buick album: Airhead, and My Brain is Like a Sieve.

Although, to be fair, I really like his soundtrack to the animated film, The Gate to the Mind's Eye. But the golden age of Thomas Dolby was back in 1981, with the first release of the first album. And now I get that same nostalgic feeling he cultivated so well inside the album by looking at the cover. All that talent, all that promise, a future that looked so bright and clear and strong. All that but a memory. Oh, well, time goes on. We can’t all get or be what we want. Please don’t ask questions. I itch all over. Let me sleep.

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