Photos by PAUL MCALPINE
Interview by DONNA BALANCIA
PLYMOUTH, Mass. – Thomas Dolby’s “Iconic 80s Recollections Tour” is selling out to rave reviews and now the teacher has proven to be a successful student of a new style in music performance.
For the last several years, Dolby has been a professor and the head of the Peabody Conservatory’s Music for New Media program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. But with his latest production, the “Iconic 80s Recollection Tour,” the artist known for his electronic music is educating new and veteran audiences throughout the US and UK.
The British-born Dolby has enjoyed a remarkable career, from performing with David Bowie, to blasting to fame in the 1980s with the iconic new wave track, “She Blinded Me With Science,” all the while embracing tech opportunities and even creating the ring tones on millions of hand-held devices.
Dolby’s recent endeavors led him to Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, where he’s been teaching, as well as learning about the true fineries of symphonic music. And he is bestowing the opportunity to learn about music for media upon others.
“I love being a professor,” Dolby told U.S. Rocker in an exclusive interview. “I left school at 16 and back in those days there was no university program for the kind of degree I would have wanted. I never trained in music so I was already at a disadvantage and there was no way to learn film music.
“I was also interested in creative writing and filmmaking,” he said. “I didn’t know about Johns Hopkins as an arts school but I actually came across them via an ad saying they were building a film music program.”
Dolby was integral to the creation of the department and helped design the recording studio on campus.
And his relocation to Baltimore was easy and actually quite familiar, he said.
“My wife is from New York and it was close enough to New York and as it turns out I love Baltimore,” he said. “I love seeing the comings and going in the port and Federal Hill and Fells Point. There are a lot of the ports in the UK like Liverpool and Bristol that look similar in architecture to where I”m living now.”
Dolby’s tour opened in Plymouth, Mass. and continues through the U.S. and to Europe.
With this newly embraced arrangement to his performances, Dolby is able to incorporate his deep love of orchestra into his shows and says he was inspired by collaborator Andrew Lipke.
“I saw Andrew Lipke performing a fusion show with the Baltimore Symphony,” he said. “I’m obsessed with symphony orchestra at the moment. I got to know Andrew and found out he was relatively local to me and he’s been helping arrange the music.”
Dolby has surrounded himself with veteran musicians like drummer Mat Hector who’s worked with Grace Jones and Iggy Pop, and David Bowie bassist Gale Ann Dorsey, whom he met on stage with Bowie in New York.
Did Bowie impact Dolby’s work?
“Massively,” he said. “You’d be hard presssed to find someone from my era who wasn’t influenced by him. His ability to find future trends and emerging art forms was a massive influence.”
Dolby tells stories of his work with Bowie and other stories in his memoir, “The Speed of Sound.”
“Since I wrote my memoir, ‘The Speed of Sound,’ a lot of people have been have become interested in the stories,” he said. “When I do ‘meet and greets’ at the show people are curious. So the storytelling became a part of my solo shows.”
The latest show incorporates band members who are equally enthusiastic about aspects of symphonic music. Dolby said it has been a labor of love blending his own ‘synth-cratic’ style of music with his new command of orchestra.
“It’s new to me, it’s not second nature to me,” he said. “It’s something I’ve absorbed since I’ve been at the Peabody. The knobs and sliders do as they’re told, they can’t listen to each other there’s no concsiousness. With an orchestra it’s like a ‘hive mind,’ and I find that really fascinating.”
Dolby, known for his technology endeavors and tech-influenced and futuristic tracks that made him a star in the 1980s, said he is embracing artificial intelligence and works with it. He said AI and the latest technologies enable musicians to focus on the music rather than taking time to master the tools that create a certain effect or sound.
“Before, a musician would make a request to an engineer,” he said. “Nowawadays I can do all of that on my laptop. If you’re not a sound engineer why should you have to do that? The way we interact with AI is in some way more intuitive. I’m a fan of the new creative possibilities it opens up. If you look at my career I’ve always been a ‘glass-half-full’ type.”
And while members of the tour audience are not exactly Dolby’s students, they too, are learning right along with the professor about this whole new expanse in music.
“Actually, I’m workshopping the new material and I have to ask audiences to treat it with discretion,” he said. “The show, you will see, is really a sneak preview of what my symphonic show will be like.”
The Iconic 80s Tour dates:
APRIL, 2026 – USA
16 Kingston, NY Assembly
18 Lansing, MI Grewal Hall
19 Indianapolis, IN The Vogue
20 Chicago, IL House Of Blues
21 St. Louis, MO City Winery