I was just, “Oh, fuck them. I’ll go solo. I’ll show them.” Little did I know that when you lose your creative team, you lose your sound, you lose your direction. That’s why my first solo album sounded nothing like Kajagoogoo. I didn’t have that bass funk from Nick. You can have a great look and you can have a great voice, but you need all the other ingredients. That’s why we were successful in the first place. And when they lost me as lead singer, they lost something as well.
NICK BEGGS: The elephant in the room here is the fact that Limahl never has and never will take responsibility for the way he behaved. If he had not treated us all like shit, we would not have fired him. Why would a band at the top of their success do that without good reason? None of us could bear to be around him at that point because he was impossible. I’m very disappointed he found it necessary to bring it up. I’d hoped he would have squared this away with himself by now. But…here it is again. He does himself no favors by raising this point ad nauseam.
As with so much music from that period, “Too Shy” sounds like the eighties. I think the Jupiter-8 synth and the production is what made it work in the end. It’s not a great song; it’s just a reasonable pop tune.
I remember [Gambaccini attempting to salvage the band]. However, I believe if we had worked with Limahl again at that time, it would have resulted in at least three of us serving custodial sentences and not just me.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
A Limahl-less Kajagoogoo had several more British hits before truncating their name to Kaja and calling it a day. Beggs formed a few more groups before becoming a freelance bassist for hire and working with everybody. Literally everybody. Limahl had an international hit with the Giorgio Moroder–produced theme from the nightmarish children’s fantasy movie The Never Ending Story. He has popped up on numerous reality shows including I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here. The band re-formed in 2008.
LIMAHL: They gave me a lump sum to leave. This was all very skillfully negotiated by their lawyer. In return, I would take a reduced royalty on the first album. I remember thinking, Why the fuck would I do that? I’ve been fired! But the lawyer had negotiated the split for Haircut 100, and he told me it was quite normal. And I didn’t know what I was doing at 24. So instead of being an equal fifth, 20 percent, I was 6 percent. It didn’t matter until 1998. The eighties revival started, and “Too Shy” was on every compilation in the world, and it was used in The Wedding Singer. Every time I got my royalties, I’d think, Oh God. It was quite painful, and I lost out financially for quite a few years. That’s why our reunion didn’t happen sooner. They approached me to reunite twice, once in 1998 and once in 2000. Twice I said, “Yes, but I want my royalties reinstated to the full equal.” And twice they said no. The third time—this was 2008—they said okay. So I got my royalties back. I’m so happy I held out. I can die happy now.
We all knew why we were doing the reunion. None of us had repeated even remotely the success we’d had as Kajagoogoo. It seemed like a lot of bands were reuniting. And, a bit like a vase from the sixties, it’s now got this antique value. We never really discussed the past, because we all knew we can’t undo it. All the emotion shit was stuffed in a big closet and a big padlock put on it. We didn’t talk about anything. A lot of people have said, “They were their own worst enemies,” but I would say, “They just made some mistakes.”
And then Nick buggered off, which is why we’re not working together again. After three years, he said, “I don’t know what I want to do.” We’d all worked so hard, made a new video, made a new EP, did a load of gigs trying to get the momentum going and telling everybody we’re back together, and he just went off. I think he thought it was going to be bigger, and it may have been if we’d stuck at it.
BEGGS: Wow! He’s gonna develop an ulcer if he’s not careful. I’m sorry to say that, once again, that is not quite accurate.
Limahl had a list of demands that had to be met before he would agree to work with us again—top of the list related to money. We agreed to give him what he wanted. I’d just bought a new house and felt that, by giving him what he wished for, we would all make enough to justify the shortfall. It worked. And I’m glad we did it. I also think it brought us together as friends again.
We all discovered that, after 30 years, not a lot had changed. Subsequently, it resulted in us losing three managers and a lot of work. Where do you go after that? Truth is, I’ve had too many offers of other work to waste my time on continuing with something that is destined to fail. We should all look back on that period of our lives and remember it for the good times. Other than that, I’m over it. I also think Limahl should stop bitching about us in the media because it makes him look tragic, and the truth is even less palatable. I wish Limahl well, but he needs to take a long, hard look at himself.
“Too Shy” has stood the test of time for no other reason than, like perfume, music can transport us across the years to where we once stood. It had the x-factor for a few seconds back in 1983. Like the big bang, the background noise is still all around us. You can also see the debris if you look hard enough.
“SHE BLINDED ME WITH SCIENCE”
you’re a music consumer of a certain age—i.e., old—you heard Thomas Dolby long before you knew his name. That ethereal, lengthily gestating introduction to Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You”? That’s him. That defibrillator of an intro to the same band’s “Urgent”? Him as well. The vocoder and synths on Whodini’s “Magic’s Wand”? Same dude. Dolby also co-wrote Lene Lovich’s hyper-caffeinated “New Toy” and was an early keyboard player with the Thompson Twins. But if you know his name as a solo artist, chances are it’s for his 1982 Top 5 song “She Blinded Me with Science.” Though Dolby isn’t technically a one-hit wonder—the follow-up to “Science,” 1984’s “Hyperactive,” went to number 17 in the U.K. but only 62 in the United States—the combination of a song about science, a tweedy, academic image, and an indelibly goofy video, featuring real-life eccentric boffin and British TV personality Dr. Magnus Pyke, tied a bit of an anchor around him. He would go on to dabble in many genres of music, but to the audience who first experienced Dolby through that video, he would forever be the guy who was to MTV what Dr. Bunsen Honeydew was to the Muppets.
JB: One of the hallmarks of the decade was the willingness of artists to blow up the formula that had brought them success. I applaud Thomas Dolby’s disinclination to stand still and repeat himself. I just like his earlier stuff better. “Europa and the Pirate Twins,” that headlong propulsive rush set against nostalgic imagery of an idyllic childhood, is still thrilling. “Airwaves” is one of the great heartsick, paranoid laments of the era. “Radio Silence,” “One of Our Submarines,” “Urges”—I have warm feelings for them all. “She Blinded Me with Science” was a great leap forward: way more of a jam than anything else he’d done—hilarious concept, deranged vocal. And I appreciate someone selling himself as cerebral at a time when his contemporaries were unabashed in their superficiality.
LM: Science was never my favorite subject.
THOMAS DOLBY: I left school at 16, and I sat in my bedsitter [studio apartment] in South London with my one synthesizer and two-track tape recorder trying to express myself. I’d program a kick-drum sound, then rewind it and program a bass-drum sound, and ping-pong back and forth. If you made a mistake, there was no unraveling it.
I needed to get out [so] I joined bands and got invited to do sessions. I got invited to do Foreigner’s 4, and at the time, I was living in Paris, trying to make a few centimes on the Metro with my guitar, playing Dylan songs to Japanese tourists. Foreigner rescued me from that and got me to New York. I played on that album and earned enough money working in a month to go back to England and record my first album [The Golden Age of Wireless, 1982].
I had no idea about image at all. My very first appearances were with Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club, who were at the very early days of the New Romantic period, and we had outfits that made us look like
we were in Barbarella. It became clear to me, seeing myself on TV or in the music papers, that I was not a pinup boy like Adam Ant or Simon Le Bon or Sting, and I thought, There’s no point in trying to be something you’re not. I should go back and look at my background. My father was an Oxford professor, and most of my siblings are teachers—there’s no showbiz at all. So I came up with the idea of the mad professor character, this young scientist. I explored it a bit in my early photo sessions. Music videos were just starting to come in, and I talked my record company into giving me a budget for a day’s worth of shooting. So I came up with a storyboard, which was “She Blinded Me with Science,” before I had a song. I had the title. I very often come up with the title first—I have a notebook filled with potential song titles and I work backwards from there. I visualize an empty stage with a spotlight, and a guy walks into the spotlight and starts to sing a song called “She Blinded Me with Science”: What does it sound like? What’s the groove, what are the words, what’s the chord sequence? I fill in the blanks from there, and it becomes like a crossword puzzle.
The song was like a soundtrack for the film. I viewed videos as silent movies with soundtracks and, in silent movie terms, my heroes were always the underdogs—Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin. These were not romantic heroes, but they were the underdogs you sympathized with, so that was the character I created for myself.
It was very easy getting Dr. Magnus Pyke to be in the video. I told him the concept, we agreed on a fee with his agent, and then he showed up on set and refused to do most of what was on the storyboard. I wanted him to wear a white lab coat, and he refused point-blank because that wasn’t the way his audience saw him. I asked him to say, “She blinded me with science!” But he did it like a question, not a statement: “She blinded me with science?” I was like, “It’s really more of a statement, Dr. Pyke,” and he was like, “Yes, but it would be a bit surprising if a girl blinded me with science.” He was very concerned about whether his car would be there to take him off to his next appointment. He didn’t exactly get in the spirit of it. The last time I saw him alive, he’d just come back from a lecture tour of the U.S., and I asked him how it went. He said, “Badly, Dolby.” I asked why, and he said, “Every time I walked down the street, someone would come up behind me and shout, ‘SCIENCE!’ It frightened me out of my skin. Your MTV video is better known than my body of academic work.”
Most of my first album was definitely new wave electronic rock, definitely pretty white. So why was “She Blinded Me with Science” a bit funkier? Maybe because it juxtaposes the geeky bookworm character with the funky dance groove. Also, this was after “Planet Rock.” It was the time of DJs taking elements and turning them into different styles, so the groundwork was laid. It was an R&B hit, but I’m sure most of the R&B audience had no idea who I was. Michael Jackson thought I was black. I’m not sure whether that should be flattering or not.
“She Blinded Me with Science” was a one-off for the film that I made but, very much to my surprise and most other people’s surprise too, it took off commercially. Suddenly the media and the industry were expecting the Dolby formula trotted out over the course of multiple hits and albums and tours and videos, and that was never really the intention. The record company wrang their hands when they heard The Flat Earth, which I think is one of my best albums. Their point of view is, it takes so much hard work and effort to break somebody—once you’re there, you’ve got to do a few more copycat hits. They said, “Look, Thomas, when you’re on your third or fourth album, maybe you can start experimenting with jazz instrumentation and brushes on the cymbals and trombones. But, for heaven’s sake, let’s make hay while the sun shines.” I think the middle-aged me with a mortgage to pay might think they have a point, but when I was 24, it was like, “Forget it.” I will tap into different genres of music in order to help tell a story and set the scene. I’ve always been jealous of novelists who, with each book they write, get to pick a period of history or geographical location and a new cast of characters. It’s like a dirty word in music, though. People get suspicious if you’re too free with your leaping between genres—they think there’s something fake about it.
I don’t feel the boffin image encroached, but I do feel that if people only know one thing about me, it’s the wacky boffin image, and maybe that was a turnoff for people if they couldn’t see past it into the more organic and emotional side of my music. But the really loyal, long-term, hardcore fans don’t talk about “Science” or “Hyperactive.” They talk about “Screen Kiss” or “Budapest by Blimp,” and those are the songs that mean the most to me. You sit at a piano and you come up with a chord change, and it melts your heart. And you just hope if you put it out there, it’s going to melt a few other hearts as well. The difference between a few thousand and a few million is not apparent from the artist’s point of view. The main thing is, you’ve made the connection.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
It’s easier to make a list of what Dolby hasn’t been doing. But that’s another book. He led David Bowie’s Live Aid band. He has produced records by Joni Mitchell and Prefab Sprout. He has composed scores for video games and movies, most notoriously George Lucas’s Howard the Duck. He’s worked extensively in Silicon Valley. He has been the musical director of the TED conferences, and he helped create the polyphonic technology that brought ringtones to the world. In 2011, he returned to music as a solo artist with the three-part album A Map of the Floating City, the third section of which was available only as part of the accompanying video game.
DOLBY: The record companies made themselves virtually extinct. The industry is now a cottage industry, and people are trying out all sorts of alternatives. It’s like Detroit in the 1920s when there were 125 automobile companies. Stamping out records and putting them in trucks and shipping them across the country, that’s a pretty hard thing to do. But making an album on a laptop from home and uploading it to YouTube or SoundCloud is something tens of thousands of people can do, which is fantastic. But then you have this sea of white noise. How do you rise above that? None of the old formulas apply anymore. It’s like the Wild West. What I’m doing now is contrarian, which is what I love. You can argue, “Doesn’t that make it hard to promote? Isn’t it like pushing a rope or swimming against the current?” It certainly does. But just making an album with a cover and lyrics and getting it on the radio weren’t going to work for The Floating City. That’s why I came up with a multiuser game; that’s why I came up with The Invisible Lighthouse film that I’m doing now. These are all areas where I get to learn new skills and try out new forms of expression for myself, which is what keeps my creative juices flowing.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs About Science, Technology, and Robots 1. “Video Killed the Radio Star,” The Buggles 2. “I Dream of Wires,” Gary Numan 3. “Weird Science,” Oingo Boingo 4. “E=MC2,” Big Audio Dynamite 5. “Science,” Berlin Blondes
“LOVE MY WAY”
The Psychedelic Furs were the most seventies of all the bands to make it in the early eighties. Many, many acts chronicled in these pages wore their David Bowie influence like badges of honor. The Psychedelic Furs seemed less like rabid fans and more like a band who could actually have been on the same bill as Bowie or Roxy Music or Mott the Hoople. They would have been pretty far down the bill, as the group, with their droning sax player and the singer with the nicotine-raddled larynx, began life making an ugly, muddy wall of sound. But they had that quality that Roxy Music, especially, used to have: They dressed the part but kept their distance. Part of them always remained in the shadows. Even when producer Todd Rundgren treated them like a mud-caked camper van with “Wash Me” written in the dirt, the lush, shimmering music they made still refused to wear its heart anywhere near its sleeve.
LM: “Love My Way” and “The Ghost in You” are two of the most transformative, hypnotizing tracks in my record collection. “Love My Way” is the darker of the pair, but both radiate all the hop
e and optimism of a young girl who’s yet to have her heart broken. Whenever I hear “The Ghost in You,” I become that girl all over again. Richard Butler may look and, certainly on the first two Furs albums, sound like a more mature John Lydon, but after Todd Rundgren got a hold of him, the singer-songwriter parted ways with the petulance and morphed into one of the most romantic figures in music.
JB: lf I can indulge in a new wave career-trajectory version of Fantasy Baseball, I would liked to have seen the Furs continue in that wistful, vulnerable direction that so suited Butler’s phlegmy tones. I would like to have seen them follow the path of latter-day Roxy Music, where they faded into tasteful anonymity and the music became almost mouth-watering in its sophistication (Flesh + Blood = awesome, underrated record. Reappraise!) until ultimately they made the Most Beautiful Album Ever (Avalon—no reappraisal needed). The Psychedelic Furs took another route, but in a parallel universe, “Love My Way” was just the first step to a glorious future.
RICHARD BUTLER: The songs that were really important are the ones that changed the course of our careers, and that would be “Pretty in Pink” and “Love My Way.” “Love My Way” turned things around a lot more than “Pretty in Pink” did, and that’s why we went on to do songs like “Ghost in You.”
I was working with [ex-Furs guitarist] John Ashton on the third album [1982’s Forever Now]. I was supposed to have written some ideas before I went over, but I’d been out carousing instead. The next morning, I had one of those little xylophone things, and I picked out these three notes and made this little melody [sings the opening notes of “Love My Way”]. It was all done in about 10 minutes, and I thought, That’s good. I can go to John’s now. I loved the song; John wasn’t so struck by it. Then Ed Buller, a keyboardist who was working with us at the time, put this marimba part on it, which became the bulk of the song.
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