#Thomas dolby radio silence portable#
#Thomas dolby radio silence code#
#Thomas dolby radio silence series#

… I seemed to be moving into a sort of post-apocalyptic reverie, a parallel universe. In Dolby’s memoir he talks about the frame of mind behind his first album’s lyrics:

#Thomas dolby radio silence series#

That didn’t happen so much as finding other, stranger signals over the airwaves: Morse code, the woozy sine waves from turning the dial, the pirate radio ship Radio Caroline, and one late night at the end of the short wave a series of beeps and spoken numbers that only decades later I would learn were spy agency transmissions or “ number stations.” This was my own golden age of wireless, way more interesting than my Southern California radio that played classic rock, stoner rock, AM pop, sports radio, and religion-two frequencies and not much going on at the ends of either dial.

I would stay up late under the covers and, with one mono earpiece (found in a drawer) plugged into my left ear, use up the batteries trying to connect over the wireless with those cities.

#Thomas dolby radio silence portable#

Nan also had a smaller portable radio that I quickly took as my own, which had the same dials. None of the dials really tuned in to those station locations, but I liked turning them and hoping. Oh, and it had a radio, one of those large, Bakelite machines the size of a tumble dryer, with four (!) frequency dials and evocative city names as markers: Luxembourg, Stockholm, Berlin. But now they had all married and moved and it was large enough to have rooms with a funereal weirdness to them: the “front room” that once hosted piano parties now hosted just a piano. My dad had been divorced for five years and we would go on holiday (or you could say retreat) to my Nan’s house in Essex, a pre-war, two-story brick house large enough to once have raised a large family inside. England was “the old country” where my aunts and uncles and grandparents lived. As self-involved as it sounds, “Windpower” feels like it was born out of my summer vacations in East Anglia.īoth of my parents were English, but I was first generation American.

The last time I revisited it, with a much better sound system and a nice French 12” single I bought off Discogs, I realized how much Dolby’s obsessions had become my obsessions, but with a little bit of chicken-and-egg confusion. And then time would pass and styles would change, and each time I returned to the song it got a little bit weirder, stuck out just a little bit more than usual, and started to feel like a direction that pop music never followed again-not even at the hands of Dolby himself.

I listened to it so much over those years that for a while I wasn’t even hearing it-the song had become a natural state of things, a section of DNA. This is Thomas Dolby’s 1982 song “ Windpower,” and in some alternative universe it’s the song he’s best known for, instead of his herky-jerky pop hit “She Blinded Me with Science.” Then again, my 12-year-old self would never have heard of Dolby if not for that MTV-dominant single, and I wouldn’t have purchased one of my first ever vinyl records, the Blinded by Science EP on which “Windpower” is the opening track of Side Two. And then our singer steps up to the mic: “Switch off the mind and let the heart decide… who you were meant to be.” There’s a short intake of breath, a low om-like hum.

#Thomas dolby radio silence code#

It starts as it always does, with the sound of a cold, synthetic wind, whistling tones, and the nervous twitch of a Morse code signal.