A Conversation with Thomas Dolby – HuffPost 10.28.11

Mike Ragogna: Good morning, Thomas.

Thomas Dolby: Good morning, Michael.

MR: How are you, sir?

TD: Very well, thanks. It’s nice to be back.

MR: Let’s talk about the new album A Map Of The Floating City, starting with “Nothing New Under The Sun.” But everything’s new under the sun, right?

TD: “Nothing New Under The Sun” is a little bit tongue-in-cheek because it’s a song about writer’s block. It’s about sitting there trying to figure out what the lyric is going to be for my next line, and feeling a bit skeptical that there’s nothing new I can sing…but then realizing at the end, as you say, that there’s everything new under the sun and it just has to come streaming out.

MR: And your observations about humanity in each song…it seems that you have a fantastic grasp of world culture, especially American culture.

TD: Well, it’s kind of you to say so. It takes an outsider to see clearly, but I was especially struck by the tradition of American folklore and folk writing. It really seems to be that those stories were told around a campfire from one traveler to the next, and I have as much right to have a seat around the campfire as anybody else, but I don’t disguise my English accent. I’m very much an English guy singing American songs and telling American stories, hence the Amerikana section of my album.

MR: (laughs) By the way, I think one of the best American “around the campfire” folklore of all the songs you’ve recorded is “I Love You Goodbye.”

TD: Yes, it does quite totally have that vibe. I’m sure many people, like myself, have had one or two wonderful New Orleans experiences, and it’s such a rich source of original American culture. It’s really a precious place that’s obviously been in the news in recent years. I think I maybe spoke for many people when I wrote my love song to New Orleans, having been there only as a casual visitor.

MR: So, A Map Of The Floating City basically is comprised of the three EPs you previously released, now tied together as quite a complexly themed album. Can you take us through the album’s theme and complicated history?

TD: Sure. “The Floating City” is an imaginary place, it exists on different levels. It’s the view from outside my window in my converted lifeboat on the East Anglian coast in England. It’s a kind of esoteric, invisible layer in between reality and fantasy, and it’s also a dystopian diesel punk future in which there’s been a terrible climate catastrophe and the planet is basically boiling. The only place cool enough to exist for the few survivors is out in the northern ocean towards the North Pole. Around the North Pole are the three remaining land masses: Amerikana, Oceanea, and Urbanoia. Within the game, your way to survive is by requisitioning the abandoned hull of a container vessel ship and pushing it out into the ocean rafting up to your tribes-people until eventually, the nine tribes from the three continents converge at the North Pole and form The Floating City. So, that’s the backdrop for the game, and it’s still online at floatingcity.com. The principle game play was completed a couple of weeks ago, and the winners of the game–which was really an alliance between five tribes–won themselves the grand prize of a private concert at which I’ll play The Floating City in full.

MR: I was one of the winners, wasn’t I?

TD: I don’t know whether you’re one of the winners, but there’s a special dispensation for journalists and DJs that I like.

MR: (laughter) It was really a brilliant marketing concept as well as a great education process. It would be wonderful for future artists to educate their fans on their new releases and catalog in a similar way. So, this has been developing since last September?

TD: That’s right. I was originally going to do three EPs, one for each of the continents, and I got as far as two. Then people starting e-mailing me saying “Hey, if I buy all three EP’s, you can’t really expect me to buy the album.” I thought I might be shooting myself in the foot to do three EPs–I can’t really ask people to pay twice for the same music. Then I came up with the idea. I really wanted to give people a sneak preview of the music of the album, so how about using a different medium altogether? People aren’t really buying many CDs these days, but they do seem to be spending a lot of time playing video games and on social networks. So, I thought I needed a new messenger for this discovery of the new music. Why not create a game in which people can browse around, explore, solve puzzles, meet friends, share their enjoyment of my back catalog and their expectations of my new songs–hence the genesis of the game.

MR: Basically, you’re looking at your back catalog as an element of the game and as part of the “clues” people were getting through the game, right?

TD: Yeah, there’s always been a strong thread of mythology through my lyrics, whether it’s imaginary places, or characters, or even items that show up in more than one song, such as the “spam tins” for example. (laughter) The first thing I did was to put all of those items, places, and characters into a giant database, and then contacted a game developer, Andrea Phillips, who has a lot of experience in this area. She said it was a great basis for the trading card model, so what happens in the cargo hold of your abandoned ship, you have various random items and the way you move towards the North Pole is by bartering those items with other players. Each of those items belongs in a set of five, which make up a song, and a set of nine songs make up one of my five albums. The moment you complete a song or an album, you get a free download of that album. So, there are two incentives to trade–one is to get free music, and the other is to move towards the North Pole and be one of the survivors.

MR: How well do you feel the social networking part of this game succeeded in its mision?

TD: The social networking aspect worked extremely well, and actually became more important to some players than the trading aspect. It was just done on a text basis, within forums, and the interesting thing is that roughly half of the 5,000 people playing the game were concerned Dolby fans, and the other half had never heard of me or were game fans that were drawn in by the appeal of the game itself. So, they were all bedfellows, they were sorted into tribes according to their geographical location in the world. But they became friends, and in recent weeks, there’ve been spontaneous tribe meet-ups in bars and clubs and so on. They’ve come up with an actual deck of trading cards. They’re bringing along random objects with them from the game, like people going to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show bringing lights and umbrellas. So, it’s turning into this whole cult thing. Over the course of October and November, I’ll be out on the road and I can’t wait to meet up with some of these posses of game-players, many of whom, up until a few months ago, hadn’t heard of me or my music.

MR: Although part of the task is promotion, it does seem like you’ll have much fun on the road.

TD: I do think this is going to be lots of fun. Any way you can introduce a new or younger audience to your music is great because, while it’s terrific that tens of thousands of people can make and release their own albums, it’s increasingly more difficult to rise above the noise. Even having a record deal with a big corporation and marketing budget doesn’t necessarily help you. What you can do is to be more effective and targeted with your work. For example, when promoting The Floating City game, we looked at some parallel games such as Echo Bazaar, Fallen London, and so on. We deliberately targeted fans of those games because we knew they would like The Floating City. I went on Facebook and found that there were 17,000 people who named me in their profile saying things like “Thomas Dolby is one of my favorite musicians,” who were not actually subscribed to my Facebook group, so those were easy people to target. On Facebook, if you advertise to people, you only pay per click, that comes back. So, for a few hundred dollars, I was able to get some highly qualified potential new fans to check out my page and listen to my new music. The next most popular artist named after me was Peter Gabriel. Peter has 100 times the number of fans I have, but I can get to his fans via Facebook and say, “Hey, if you like Peter, it might be worth checking out Thomas’s new album.” I love the fact that that’s what marketing is about these days. It’s about word of mouth, adding some fuel to the fire, tracking and analyzing where there is some traction, heat, and interest in your music, and adding some free stuff to reel people in. Expanding your audience is a much healthier situation than the old days where you’d pay a fortune to get the back of a Billboard or a few second regional TV ads.

MR: Quite frankly, you’re brilliant in this environment. And of course, you do the TED conferences all the time.

TD: I do indeed. I’m the musical director of the TED conference. I book the talent for the TED conference and also have input into the way music is represented and curated as a whole as part of the TED program.

MR: It seems this is the era you’ve been waiting for.

TD: It’s a fantastic time. You hear a lot of news items and read a lot of articles about the woes of the record industry. Well, it’s a bad time to be working for a record label, but for musicians and music fans… I think there’s never been a better time; it’s wide open. I was listening to Sean Parker, the founder of Napster and one of the founders of Spotify and Facebook, speak at an event. He was saying, “Look, we all lived through the worst downturn in the music industry’s economic history, and if we can stick around, we’re going to have seats at the biggest upturn,” because sooner or later, with all the costs gone out the window, the new music industry will be reborn.

MR: And profits are going directly to the artist as opposed to seven people in the middle.

TD: Yeah, which fans appreciate as well; and I think consumers have never had it so good. People are spending less money and getting more music for their money than they ever have in history. But I think eventually it’s going to have to stop being, “Well, I’m going to p,ay x for a single and y for an album.” I think it’s going to be, “Wherever I am in the world, if I want to hear My Chemical Brothers, I just flick through a few playlists and there they are.” I don’t think it’s going to be having a collection of CDs or records anymore.

MR: Tell us a bit about your song “Spice Train.”

TD: Well, “Spice Train” is an anthem for The Floating City game; it’s more electronic than most of the stuff on the album, and has some very curious sounds and a new approach to vocals. It’s like a sort of crazy multicultural bazaar of different musical spices and flavors.

MR: Using the concept of A Map Of The Floating City, how do your songs “Nothing New Under the Sun,” “Spice Train,” “Evil Twin Brother” with Regina Spektor, and “A Jealous Thing Called Love” connect?

TD: They all have an urban feel to them. I don’t mean urban in terms of musical genre, but they have that intense, somewhat claustrophobic feel. Amerikana has a sense of wide open spaces; you picture a couple in a ’50s convertible burning across the desert on their way to Reno or Vegas in a Hollywood B movie. Oceanea is wide open, picture big landscapes, seascapes, and skylines. So, Urbanoia has a definite darker, more cityscape type of feel to it.

MR: What about “A Jealous Thing Called Love”?

TD: It’s about a triangular relationship…about losing my girlfriend to my best friend.

MR: An American pastime.

TD: (laughs)

MR: Thomas, you have Eddi Reader on “Oceanea” right?

TD: Yeah, Eddi Reader is a wonderful Scottish folk-singer that I’ve worked with before. She was originally in Fairground Attraction, and she sang with me on a song called “Cruel” offAstronauts & Heretics, and I’ve also produced and mixed songs for her on her own albums. We stayed friendly and I needed somebody to be the voice of my mother; my mother was born in East Anglia, and if she were watching my family and I as we moved back to East Anglia, I think she would’ve been very proud. So, I needed somebody to be the comforting voice of my mother on the album.

MR: Since Regina Spektor appears on “Evil Twin Brother,” are you pals? Is she your evil twin sister?

TD: Well, Regina played at the TED conference a few years back. I’ve loved her music for a while. I think she has fabulous talent. I love her voice, and she was delightful in person. When I wrote “Evil Twin Brother,” it was a story about being jet-lagged in New York City, being wide-awake at 3 o’clock in the morning when it’s too hot to sleep, going out to get something to eat, finding an open diner on 14th Street where the waitress on duty is a hot Russian woman, getting into conversation with her, and she mentions that she gets off at 4am and that there’s a little club nearby that I should check out. So, I end up going kind of against my will to this club where there’s this stomping Eurotrash Ibiza trance music coming out to the alley way, being pulled into it, and ending up being swirled around the dance floor by Ylaina.

MR: (laughs) Oh, the evil.

TD: So, I needed someone to play the Russian waitress in the song, and I immediately thought of Regina, who speaks great Russian of course. She left (Russia) when she was still quite small, so she didn’t quite have the vocabulary that I needed, but with the help of some consultants, we were able to get the right kind of phrases for Regina to play the waitress.

MR: So, let me ask you about new artists. Is there any advice you would give to them?

TD: It’s to follow your heart. Every artist when they’re 17 believes that the public’s going to hear their music and fall in love with them and they’ll be a superstar. When I was 17, I was actually wrong. (laughs) That’s not the way things work. First, the music industry had to approve my music before the public ever got to hear it. But these days, it’s actually true. You could become an overnight star whether it’s by X Factor or via putting a Facebook clip of yourself singing in your pajamas in your bedroom up on YouTube as Jessie J did, and waking up a month later to find yourself a global superstar. So, the barrier to entry is down and it’s easier than it’s ever been before. If the cream rises to the surface, and you’ve got talent, then you will indeed be a star.

MR: So, Thomas you’re speaking to us from a solar-powered lifeboat where you do most of your recording, right?

TD: I do, and it has a 360° view of the North Sea, the marshes behind, and migrating birds. It’s in a tiny hamlet on the East Anglian Coast. There are 20 houses and about the same number of full time residents here, and there’s no pub, which means nobody ever comes, which is terrific as far as I’m concerned. (laughs) I like the seclusion. Up on the roof, I’ve got solar panels and a wind-turbine up the mast, and where the diesel engine used to be under the floorboards, there’s a bank of batteries. So, on a day when it’s either sunny, windy, or both, I pair up the bank of batteries and that means I can work late into the night in my lifeboat using only renewable energy.

MR: There are certain areas of the world that could really take advantage of solar energy and wind power all the time, it’s interesting they don’t. Well, I guess here’s a related thought. considering the dystopian world that’s depicted in The Map of The Floating City, are you concerned that we’re headed in that direction?

TD: Well I think there’s a huge risk that we’re headed in that direction. The society was in denial that we can change things. I can’t remember who it was that said “If you’re in Los Angeles and you’re trying to drive to San Francisco and you find yourself in San Diego, it’s no good just slowing down to 30mph.” There’s really little hope for reversing what we’re doing to the planet unless it is with the scientists. Scientists have continually wowed and surprised us in the past with game-changing discoveries and inventions. We’re not going to get any relief from governments or from large corporations, they only seem to mess things up. That’s one of the reasons I go to TED, because I want to hear the scientists tell us what solutions there may be. Just the other day, I was listening to a guy tell me that he can grow a mushroom in the sea that can absorb all the oil spills. It’s stuff like that through TED that gives you some hope.

MR: What were some other discussions or inventions that were enlightening?

TD: There’s been some amazing discussions. The ideas that people come up with were extraordinary. One of the principals of Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold, who I believe is retired now, decided to do something about Malaria. He said, “I’m going to get a great team together and a fund, and I don’t care whether it’s a biological, political, or physical thing, I want to beat malaria. He discovered some amazing things about the mosquito. For instance, that they don’t fly more than 12 feet above the ground. So, he was able to build a laser perimeter around a hospital in a village in Africa where if a mosquito flew into the perimeter, the lasers could not only determine whether the mosquito was male or female–because it’s only the female that carries malaria–but it could also shoot it’s wings off, meaning that it would fall to the ground. So, this is how they kept malaria out of the hospitals. He demonstrated this live on stage. (laughs) He built this laser fence on stage at TED, and unleashed some mosquitoes. In slow motion on an HD camera, he replayed what had happened, which was that this laser had shot the wings off a mosquito. (laughs)

MR: When you see stuff like that, does it stimulate your own creativity?

TD: I love the atmosphere of invention and discovery. Some of these inventions are going to turn out as a hoax, some are going to be impractical in real terms, and I love the uncertainty…there’s an excitement about it. If you look back through history, that’s always been the case. Nikola Tesla for example, inventor of A.C. (alternating current), also arguably the inventor of radar, x-ray, radio, and all sorts of things, used to put on shows at Madison Square Garden. He would make sparks fly, and people ran for the exit. They didn’t know whether this was magic, conjuring, sorcery, science, or what it was. Looking back at that, it’s laughable, because now we understand it, but at the time it was terrifying and exciting. I love being in the middle of that looking to the future.

MR: Beautifully said. It’s that type of thinking that contradicts the dystopian future, and makes us hopeful for things to come. As long as brilliant minds are working at creating things like this, there’s always a march forward.

TD: Yeah, you’ve got to be hopeful, optimistic, and believe in it. It certainly isn’t going to happen unless we do. I think John Lennon said it best.

MR: “Imagine”?

TD: Indeed. He wasn’t talking about science, he was talking about more on a spiritual level. It certainly isn’t going to happen unless we believe in it.

MR: You have Mark Knopfler joining you on “17 Hills.” Do you find that some of the people you work with are like-minded?

TD: Absolutely! No question. Mark Knopfler played on my album because when I wrote “17 Hills,” someone pointed out to me that it reminded them of Mark–not so much his musical style, but more that he’s an English dude in America as an observer, yet has a valid voice to put on a very American story. So, it made perfect sense to invite him to play on it, partly because of his beautiful lyrical guitar playing, and partly because we’re a couple of fellow Brits–grumpy, middle-aged white guys, sitting here in a studio in England, singing songs about middle America.

MR: Grumpy? Really? I’m not detecting any of that.

TD: (laughs)

MR: If you could name one song we would play from the album right now, oh, let’s say if it were played on a solar-powered radio station in the Midwest, what would it be?

TD: It’s a difficult thing, because I know that this song is not a natural for radio because it has no groove to it. It’s a bit spacey, and it’s probably what a program director would term a train wreck. You’re all going to be changing channels. But in a way, my favorite song on the album is “Oceanea.” It’s the one song that was born organically out of my lifeboat, which 100% of it–the music, the lyrics, the vision–came from the sensation of sitting there, back in my homeland after my adventure in the USA, back with my kids enjoying the country the way I did when I was a kid. Staring out at the sea, in a dreamy hopeful way, I just put my hands to the keyboard, started mumbling, and “Oceanea” is the song that came out. So, in a way, it’s the one that I’m most proud of. It has no groove to it, it’s never going to be a radio staple in the USA. But nonetheless, it’s the song on the album that seems to affect people on the deepest level emotionally.

MR: Before we wrap things up, will there be any expanded editions of Aliens Ate My Buickor Astronauts & Heretics any time soon?

TD: I’d love that to happen. I remastered the first two albums, Golden Age of Wireless andThe Flat Earth, which were EMI albums. There are different ownership issues with the others, but it’s definitely something I’d like to come back around to. Maybe I’ll feature those albums a bit more on future tours, but my immediate plan is coming to the States in October, and doing seven live performances which are really sort of lectures about the game, with some storytelling and some live songs from the new album it’s hatched. If you go tothomasdolby.com, you can check out the dates. I’m going to be back again in the new year with a full band, touring theaters around the country. We don’t have dates for that yet, but I imagine that will be in the spring.

MR: Thank you. I hope to interview you again for that one.

TD: Well, that would be great. In the meantime, the album is out on October 25th, and I hope that you’ll check out one of the live performances in October.

MR: Wait, I also wanted to ask you if will you be performing “Your Karma Hit My Dogma?”

TD: (laughs) That’s something I do from time to time that’s not on the album, it’s kind of like a b-side from the album. It always gets a good laugh. So, who knows, maybe as an encore.

MR: Alright, I appreciate your calling in Thomas. It’s always fun, and let’s talk as often as you like.

TD: That would be great Michael, thank you very much.

MR: Thank you, Sir.

Transcribed by Lani Aulicino