Thomas Dolby Spotlights The 1980s Through Songs And Stories For His Latest Tour

The British synthpop artist Thomas Dolby’s career has spanned nearly 50 years, mirroring music’s technological and innovative changes. Of those decades, he will always be associated with the 1980s, a period that saw him achieve stardom thanks to the smash hits “She Blinded Me With Science” and “Hyperactive”; it was also a decade that saw him as a renowned session keyboardist for the likes of Def Leppard and Foreigner, and a producer for records by Prefab Sprout and Joni Mitchell.

So it only makes sense that Dolby’s upcoming headline tour is titled Iconic 80s Recollections, which starts this week and covers the U.S., the U.K., and Ireland. For these series of dates, Dolby will share his songs and stories from his memories of the decade that gave us Trivial Pursuit, MTV and, of course, synthpop.

The shows are sort of a precursor to an orchestral project that Dolby is working on called Requiem for the 80s. “This will be performed, hopefully starting ’27, but still in ’28, where I have a band performing in front of a symphony orchestra in cities around the world,” Dolby says. “And it’s designed as one of those touring orchestral hybrid packages.”

“So on this tour,” he later adds, “you will hear a virtual symphony orchestra, which is done with MIDI and samples. You’ll see sort of artistic shots of orchestral instruments projected on the video screen to give you some sense of what the audience experience will be like. It’s really a way for me to workshop the material, both in terms of the structure and flow of the music and my sort of spoken shtick.”

While subsequent generations see the ‘80s as bright and shiny, especially in the music, it was kind of dark for those who lived through it, according to Dolby.

“We had Margaret Thatcher. We had the Falklands, the miners’ strike. And then we had the Berlin Wall. We had Ronald Reagan, corporate greed, all that sort of thing. That tends to be glossed over in people’s nostalgia for the ’80s. And I actually find that when you speak to people who were there, they can actually relate to that,” he says.

“There was a period of quite a lot of dissociative behavior, which I think was reflected by English bands like The Smiths, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Echo and the Bunnymen, people like that,” Dolby later adds.

For these shows, he’s leaning into the colder side of the decade, as he’ll be quoting about 40 songs that he admired or influenced him, as well as material that he was involved with as a session musician and producer.

“There’s a little bit of Foreigner in there, a bit of Prefab Sprout, different artists that I worked with in one capacity or another,” he says. “And I use melodies and themes from those songs as sort of orchestral motifs that I develop over the course of the symphony. And I sort of tell my story, many of the stories which you’ll find in my book, The Speed of Sound. It’s a very personal retrospective of the decade and sort of putting it to bed.”

Although he tends to perform solo, Dolby will be accompanied by bassist Gail Ann Dorsey and guitarist Andrew Lipke on the tour. “I share the lead vocals with the two of them in this show. Obviously, Gail is doing various female vocals, and Andrew has a higher register than me. They’re both great singers, but they’re great musicians as well. And I’ll be joined in this leg by Mat Hector on the drums, who played with Iggy Pop for years and Thom Yorke and various others.”

The Iconic 80s Recollections tour had been previously performed in the States but not in Dolby’s native U.K., until now. “That’s going to be interesting because it’s going to be very different sort of covering The Smiths in Manchester from covering them in Las Vegas. I think a lot of the audience of my generation is going to really relate to a lot of this music.”

Dolby – who also established the Music for New Media program at Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins more than 10 years ago – calls these upcoming shows a love letter to the 1980s.

“I can also go out and do ’80s package shows where they want to hear “She Blinded Me With Science” and “Hyperactive” and so on,” he says. “[Iconic 80s Recollections] is definitely not that. It definitely leans into the sort of Dolby Side 2. My hardcore fans are more into “Screen Kiss,” “Airwaves,” “I Love You Goodbye” and songs like that. And they’re aware that a lot of my own stuff is very personal, introspective, atmospheric, cinematic.

“I think that looking back on my musical style as it evolved, I’ve always been a sort of frustrated orchestral composer. I wasn’t trying to make synths sound like cold robotic machines, which is fine. But I was actually trying to make them sound more humanistic, really. And my arrangements are like orchestrations in terms of the way I use colours and textures and the parts are all interwoven.”

Thomas Dolby’s Iconic 80s Recollections tour begins on April 14 in Plymouth, Mass., and continues through May 29.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com