The fate news fake news and i dunno how we address that. What i thought was interesting i did not have access to the saudis digest followed the mahon twitter. And i started reading that they treated in arabic at least three of them said i did not do that some deals did. So in another conversation the power of the internet and social media but it encourages people to be more aggressive but we but they try to convince me they did not treat that then to say if you didnt then answer the question. So i think that danger of platter, to give people the license for what they were saying to be retracted. Did you come out of that [inaudible conversations] we have a discussion on music and technology coming up next. [inaudible conversations] good afternoon to the next panel if you are interested of music and technology were in the right place. And with a choice anecdote this is how you begin your memoir. You find yourself in the heat of the nevada desert desperately trying to communicate over a phone line, a phone booth. You remember phone booths . Are battling off a fire ants and you had just written a song for someone and you are having a hard time getting through to this individual or tell us the story. So, this was the morning after a gig we did at the greek theatre in los angeles and backstage at the Greek Theater was none other than Michael Jackson and he said to me, to my astonishment he knew the names of some of my songs and asked me if i had any extra songs knocking around and im like sure i do, michael. He said yet anything like hyperactive. It so happens i have something exactly like hyperactive and he said when can i hear it and i said i can make a demo in the back of my tour bus and i can send it to you from my personal computer and i had a personal computer from radioshack, you know one of those things with the little screen and acoustic couplers, which were these rubber pads that you would plunder receiver into. I spent half the night making a demo in the back of my tour bus and i got the driver to pull over by the side of the road in a cloud of dust at a phone booth halfway to salt lake city. Armed with my acoustic cups and radioshack computer i attempted to send this file over a phone line to Michael Jackson at the record plant in los angeles. I remember i was wearing corduroy trousers in the pockets were bulging with quarters and i camp pumping them in and i had a hard time getting the file to transfer, 1984 or Something Like that. Michael said why dont you do it the oldfashioned way and see me that tune and i thought what have i gotten myself into, so i took a deep breath and started banging on the microphone like making up the words as i go along in the time honored fashion and there was this silence at the end of the line and finally, he said anything else. [laughter] your beginnings in music were humble. The very first synthesizer you can cross because quite frankly that technology was expensive, was actually in a dumpster. Yeah, this is the winter of discontent in london where there were various strikes going on including a garbage strike and you could find the most Amazing Things stacked up on street corners and in dumpsters and it was in one such dumpster that i found a Circuit Board which as it turned out was the guts of machine called a transcendent 2000 and i took it home and sold it put it together and it was my first ever synthesizer. Had no keyboard, mind you. You made noises by turning knobs , but i was happy as a clam. I find one of the anecdotes in book especially interesting and may be illuminating. You came it from a family of academics and maybe they were suspicious of this interest in the music as a profession, but the very first time his family saw him perform was actually on a show in the uk called top of the pops, which was like Ed Sullivan Ed Sullivan for as a decade before, big show and you are performing a song you had written called new toy which became quite a hit. That was the first time your family saw you perform. Probably the first time they took me seriously, actually. My father and his father and his father were all cambridge professors and my mother taught algebra and statistics and i am the youngest of six kids and they were all academics in one level or another, so i was the black sheep of the family leaving school at 16 to work in a fruit and vegetable shop to sort of feed my night time punk rock habits, so during the day i worked in this store and at night i would see the sex pistols and the clash and at that time everyone was kind of a punk. If you didnt have long hair and flared trousers you must be a punk rocker. Elvis costello was a punk and the police etc. And i saw all of them in little pubs where he lived in london. Fantastic time, but my parents were waiting for me to get a proper job and i think the night they finally saw me on top of the pops along with maybe a third of the uk watching at that moment i think was the first time they really knew i was not bluffing and was really going to be a career i would pursue. Your initial thrust toward pop success did not work out exactly as planned and you find yourself busting in the parisian metro, but uk phone call from one make jones in your thinking the clash is reaching out to me. Not so much. Turned out to be the other mick jones, the one that played in foreigner, the american a or rock group, so i was a bit disappointed to be honest. Sorry, next. I thought did they have like something called cold as ice or Something Like that . They said, could i go to get on the next plane to new york and do some session keyboard playing on foreigner fall, their latest album and i didnt really want to go, actually. I thought this was just temporary and any minute i would get signed up by record label and i would make my own stuff. My friends, joe that i bust with said if you dont really want to go why dont you just quote them the [bleep] price. Sorry, cameras. They said yes, so it sort of became a model of mine that i return to many times over the years when i didnt really want to go anywhere. It was exception because i couldnt wait to come to annapolis. Well, they paid and you provided synthesizers and warned up some of these foreigner tracks that became quite famous in their successful. With that money you were able to then focus on your thing and you were able to record that first record, the golden age of wireless, which sold modestly. If im not back stake in it was on its way to number one in guatemala and were it not for other unfortunate coup detat in mina got there. You were a fan of silent movies. I know you love Buster Keaton and artists like that and when this new thing called mtv began to pop you are interested and you began to think, well, maybe i could provide some things for this and that really began the ascent of thomas dolby. Yes, so my album had come out and been very well reviewed and sold about three copies and it wasnt getting much radio play in the us and radio play was really the key to the charge of the usa and counted towards the billboard charts and really was proportionate to sales as well. Com. Mtv came along and for the first time in major cities, cool people were staying at home i saturday night to watch mtv videos instead of going out to gigs and clubs, so mtv was very influential and i could see this and i could see that people that were successful with mtv were starting to get radio play as a result and would end up on the charts. A lot of the videos on mtv were not that inspiring. I always had this sort of hankering to be a silent movie star by keaton or lloyd r chapman or whatever and part of that was because this is 1981, you know, the pentup front men of the day where people like adamant and staying in i didnt feel i was going to compete in the handsome boys stakes, so i might as well and shot launch onto this image that was after all part of my gene pool. So, i made a video, which started out with a storyboard and i thought if im going to be viewed as a scientist i will be a hip scientist, so i need like a japanese Lab Assistant and a vintage motorcycle with a sidecar and i created this parallel life for myself and i wrote the storyboard in which this character went to this the many asylum and there was a sinister operation featuring this Mad Professor psychiatrist type. I wrote the storyboard and took it to my record label and begged them to give me the budget to write and direct this video for myself and they said this is great, but thomas, wheres the song and i said i will bring in and on monday morning. I had the weekend to write a song and i had a title, she blinded me with science, but i didnt really have a song, so i went to my home studio and wrote it and took it in on monday morning. Im detecting a certain pattern here. Yeah. Sure, i have the song. I will be right back and of course it became a breakthrough top five hit the United States and was then added to the golden age of wireless. The first to not have that song, but it enabled album to chart and not hyperactive was a followup single a couple of years later and at least by my estimation it should have been a top 10 hit the us and did very well in the uk, but here you are perhaps for the first time given a real hard look at the nature of the Music Industry with all of its well at times could be dirty and vindictive pitocin bit about what happened to hyperactive here in the us . When you have a hit record everyone slaps each other on the back and you go out and celebrate and you from artist sam. You assume it was because it was a great song a great performance and i got i deserved when a song flops, you immediately start to do a postmortem and analyze what went wrong. As i dug into the reasons that possibly hyperactive had not done so well, i started to come facetoface with some of the sort of grim reality of the Music Industry when i saw what hadnt gone right for that single and it was depressing to me, quite frankly and i probably overstepped a mark that artists are expected not to cross. Generally, when that happens they will just commiserate with you and say when are you going back into the studio to make us more hits and we will do better next time, but i dug into it and began to realize that just as all the ducks had been in a row, several things went wrong with hyperactive. Including a lot of sort of political wrangling between the Record Companies and a rather strange Organization Called the network. Now, the network was populated with guys who in theory were radio experts, so they were independent consultants at a Record Company would go to in order to figure out which song often out one to pick to go on the radio whether he needed editing, what sort of segment of the radio world they should approach with the song. Basically, without the network you couldnt have a hit record because in fact what was happening was made indirectly controlled what actually got played on the radio and there are a lot of brown envelopes changing hands and so on and it was really upsetting to find this out because when you find out Something Like that you realize maybe it wasnt on the merits of my music or my words or my performance that the other one was a hit in this one was it maybe it was just the right palms got greased, so i sorted to become disillusioned with the Music Industry and started looking elsewhere. However, with that said this success, this pop hit it with she me with science all got you noticed in a lotto quarters and you were able to do some Amazing Things during the 80s. Amazingly tacky. For example you are invited to play live aid with david bowie. You are asked to two connect musically with Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock and asked to perform at the wall, the berlin wall when roger waters brought that pink floyd masterpiece back. You work returning mitchell, jerry garcia and bob weir, this line of legends and that must have been enormously satisfying. Yeah, these are the legends of my teen years and i dont know about you guys, but i still have a certain adulation for the stuff i loved when i was 15, which i find hard to replicate with any new music today and its not necessarily judgment on the music. I just think at that age we are especially influential double implausible, so it wasnt credibly clattering to attract the attention of some of my heroes and to get to play with them and see what i could do to enhance what they do. For example, Joni Mitchell who i had adored since i was maybe 12 or 13 i think blue was the first album i bought with my own pocket money. She had had a succession of music collaborators like tom scott and so on who had sort of flavored an era of her work, her music and if so when i got invited to work with her i pictured myself as being the flavor of the hopefully the decayed decade and it turned out to be more like three months we didnt really click am unfortunately. But, she was astonishing to be around, had endless unbelievable stories, i mean, true, but unbelievable about when she was living in a cave on a greek island writing carry and stuff like or the night that miles davis passed out in a paris hotel suite with his hand gripped around her ankle and she had to call the house detective to comment prior his bony fingers up her ankle. So, she was great to be around and fabulous artist and completely deserves the accolades she has had from generations of singer songwriters that followed in her footsteps. So, yeah, like you say it was really very gratifying to be able to work with people like that. You have to tell the story of explaining to georgia clinton that he in fact was not about to be abducted by the mothership connection that it was actually bioluminescence. I coproduced songs on georges album, some of my best jokes our friends. We did this in miami and what george would do on his days off would go fishing and charter a fishing boat he went to the fishing like a big boat and we would go miles out and you could still see the skyscrapers of miami behind you. It was this his way to relax and he would play bass just blasters and every now and then the captain would yell fish on and he would pitch a button and this electric fishing rod would start an identity was very sportsmanlike and i thought at least if you did it from a kayak or sportfishing, i have no idea. But, george told me about a night that he went out into the Bermuda Triangle with Bootsy Collins in a chartered fishing boat and they got enveloped by a silver cloud and globs of mercury were falling out of the sky and spattering on the deck and they were convinced of that this was an attempted alien abduction and the skipper of the boat was drunk and locked himself in the engine room and they had to navigate their way back to land after having had this Close Encounter pure i said yeah, george, have you ever heard of bioluminescence and he said was that and i said its like these organisms that live in the seat that absorb the light during the day and at night they glow and sometimes you see a trail of them and those on the boat and it looks eerie. He said oh, what about the silver clouds and i said if you have a full moon it would appear you are in the midst of a silver cloud and couple that with the globs of green luminescence on the deck and it would be given i dont know what you are on, but i can see that would be a pretty weird experience and he said you ate no fun, man. [laughter] you blighted him with science you continue to make records throughout the 80s, brilliant albums, but there was also a sense that the music biz, you are beginning to be attracted to what was happening north in california, Silicon Valley. You are using a lot of the technology coming out of their, synthesizers are not sort of thing and there was a natural affinity. Tell us how you make that transition to Silicon Valley . As you say, i had been using software and hardware that had come out of Silicon Valley and in the early days of my music i was using mostly custom kits like the Circuit Board from the transcend or 2000, but as time went on the equipment that my fans were using was sort of converged with what i was using to make it on, so by the late 80 i had a apple mac and a lot of that my audience was out there with an apple mac as well and the software was becoming cheaper and more freely available and yet it did not always do what i wanted it to, so i would often go to Silicon Valley and consult with companies and i would feature make feature request, which if i was lucky six months later the software that included my request, so i sort of got bitten by the bug. Simultaneously i was getting disillusioned with the Music Industry and getting really excited with what was going on in Silicon Valley and remember, this was the early days of the internet. I took a look at that and thought once we are connected, why cant i just send my files from my apple mac via the internet to your apple mac and suddenly we bypass the Music Industry that i was so disillusioned with and i have disconnected directly with my audience. I was kind of right about that. I was just off by about 15 years or Something Like that, but i saw no reason why this should it change overnight and i was really more excited about that, so went to Silicon Valley and for my own Software Company cnet which was eventually called beatnik. Yeah, beatnik was originally our product and it was designed to make webpages so horrified so instead of just sauna fied so instead of clicking around on the web you made music as you went in in order to do this you had to have a synthesizer that worked in software, not a synthesizer with a keyboard and knobs, but just a chunk of code that would download in your webpage and a trigger these sounds and so that was our technology and through much of the 90s we were pushing this technology and getting millions of downlo