It’s always been this way. Each generation declares their music to be better than the one that succeeds them. Growing up in the eighties, those of my parent’s era had a pretty powerful case to make – they had the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Stones, whilst my teenage cohorts and I had to make do with Haircut 100 and the Thompson Twins. Granted, we had the Stones too, but it was during their far less successful pastel-suit wearing human-Muppet phase rather than, say, their living-in-the-south-of-France and jamming-with-Gram-Parsons stage. It hardly seemed fair.
It’s always been this way. Each generation declares their music to be better than the one that succeeds them. Growing up in the eighties, those of my parent’s era had a pretty powerful case to make – they had the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Stones, whilst my teenage cohorts and I had to make do with Haircut 100 and the Thompson Twins. Granted, we had the Stones too, but it was during their far less successful pastel-suit wearing human-Muppet phase rather than, say, their living-in-the-south-of-France and jamming-with-Gram-Parsons stage. It hardly seemed fair.
But even when the radio is cluttered with absolute rubbish, there’s always the occasional victory for good taste. In spite of everything, someone will – against the odds – manage to slip through the pack and deliver something of true and lasting quality. These are the mavericks and, over time, it’s their work that I’ve most come to appreciate. These are the folks who, on paper, are more likely to end up delivering your mail than they are to make the world want to whistle. Of all the eccentric talents to emerge in the eighties, none seemed more unlikely than Thomas Dolby. To begin, anyone described as a ‘boffin’ is unlikely to produce any song of note. But Thomas, without doubt, was a boffin of serious dimensions. As a child, he was became fascinated with the synthesizer, even building his own. He’s best remembered for that most unlikely of hits, ‘She Blinded Me With Science’. Lyrically improbable and undeniably strange, it managed to emerge from the muck in 1982. But it’s not my Dolby tune. That honour belongs to the tune, ‘Hyperactive!’.
Far too few songs include punctuation. Granted, there are some who rely on a question mark (Do You Know the Way to San Jose? by Dionne Warwick and How Much is that Doggie In the Window? by Metallica spring to mind), but rare indeed is the tune that can deploy an exclamation point and live to tell the tale. Suffice to say, ‘Wind Beneath My Wings!’ would have been a very different song indeed.
The song was originally intended for Michael Jackson but, presumably, was deemed not to meet the necessary standard. So it fell to the author to record it himself. Aside from the exclamation mark of the song’s title, the next remarkable thing about it is its brazen use of trombone. As fine an instrument as the trombone is, it’s rare that it should be used anywhere outside of jazz. Granted, Lady Gaga’s original version of ‘Poker Face’ was performed solely on trombone and an empty jar of peanut butter but was so heavily remixed as to be wholly unrecognizable. It’s not a mistake that Thomas Dolby would make.
Trombone aside, the song begins with a man inviting the singer to tell him about his childhood. This cunning therapeutic overlay then provides the environment for a couch-side confession. Thomas claims that at the ‘tender age of three’ he was hooked to a machine. What kind of machine is left to the imagination. Washing machine? Betamax video recorder? Kettle? According to the lyrics, toddler Thomas is strapped to an unidentified appliance to prevent him from ‘spouting junk’. To be fair, at three years old his vocabulary would have been limited. What follows next, however, stretches credulity to breaking point.
Dolby claims that they took him for a ‘fool’, but it gets worse. He then claims to have been expelled because, ‘…the teacher knew I had the funk’. Having been tied to some kind of household equipment, young Thomas has his education cruelly curtailed on the basis of a fondness for polyrhythm. If there’s the slightest skerrick of truth to this, it would surely be an outrage. It’s little wonder that he ended up with the behavioural issues that are detailed elsewhere in ‘Hyperactive!’. The singer then claims he was ‘hyperactive’ pretty much everywhere including his ‘bones’ and, somewhat preposterously, ‘your phones’. I’m not sure how anyone can seriously claim to be agitated in a communication device. It was, perhaps, a bridge too far.
The problem with mavericks is that they’re either in it for the long haul of the fizzle and fade from view. Thomas Dolby made some more records but they didn’t achieve nearly the same kind of notoriety. But then he did what all good eccentrics do and reinvented himself, forming a technology company responsible for – amongst other things – the Nokia ringtone – thus, finally delivering on the promise he made a decade earlier. It may well have been his most ubiquitous hit. In some ways, it was a fitting end for the most unlikely of pop stars.
For some, music is a trivial thing and songs like those of Thomas Dolby serve as ammunition. But I disagree. Sometimes wading into matters inconsequential is just another way of keeping everything in perspective. For better or for worse, a song that is as unimportant as ‘Hyperactive!’ has stayed with me when all manner of more significant things have withered. Oddly, I probably think it’s a better song than I used to. We are all drawn to romanticizing the past, particularly our own. I don’t know for sure whether Thomas ever got to complete his education. What I do know, however, is that wherever he is, he’ll undoubtedly still have ‘the funk’.