Thomas Dolby

Biography

Thomas Morgan Robertson is an English musician, producer, entrepreneur and educator. Born on October 14, 1958, in London, England, Dolby is a self-taught musician, and his early musical experiences were with choral singing, guitar and then piano. His adopted last name of Dolby was a reference to the audio noise-reduction process invented by Dolby Laboratories, inspired by his fascination with technology and taken on to differentiate him from popular musician Tom Robinson. In 1979, Dolby formed the Camera Club with Bruce Woolley and later performed with Lene Lovich, penning her hit New Toy. He also worked as a session musician with several artists, including Thompson Twins, Foreigner and Def Leppard, before embarking on his solo career. His debut album, The Golden Age of Wireless, was released in 1982 and was later reconfigured to include his follow-up hit single She Blinded Me With Science, a major success in the US and Canada whose music video was a staple of early MTV. He migrated to Los Angeles and released three more albums, featuring the hits Hyperactive!, Airhead and Close But No Cigar. Dolby performed as part of David Bowie's band at the Live Aid festival in 1985 and produced albums by Joni Mitchell and Prefab Sprout. In 1986, Dolby composed songs for the film Howard the Duck and the score for the film Gothic. In 1988, he married actress Kathleen Beller, with whom he has three children. In the 1990s, Dolby migrated to the San Francisco bay area, and in 1993 he co-founded Headspace, Inc., an interactive audio company who produced small sound files for websites and cell phone ringtones. From 2001 to 2012, Dolby supervised the music for the annual TED Conferences held in Monterey and Long Beach, California. In 2006, he reignited his solo career with the Sole Inhabitant Tour, and in 2010 he released three EPs of new music concurrent with a multiplayer online game, A Map of the Floating City, followed in 2011 by an album of the same name. In 2012, he filmed the documentary The Invisible Lighthouse, which won the DIY Film Festival Award for Best Picture. He became Homewood Professor of the Arts at John Hopkins University in 2014, and starting in 2017, he led the four-year degree program Music for New Media at the Peabody Institute.