It’s been more than 46 years since the ’80s began, and much of the musical firmament of that time – from boomboxes to an MTV that played music videos from Duran Duran, the Go-Go’s and the Cars – is gone.
But the new wave music of the ’80s? It never died, especially in Southern California, where its popularity flourishes in a renaissance of new wave concerts this summer.
Thomas Dolby headlines the Totally Tubular Festival at the House of Blues in Anaheim and the Hollywood Palladium on Thursday and Friday, July 23-24, with opening sets by A Flock of Seagulls, Bow Wow Wow, the Producers, Animotion, the Escape Club, and Tommy Tutone.
On the same night, fellow synth-pop star Howard Jones brings his Things Can Only Get Better Tour to the Greek Theatre with Wang Chung, the English Beat, Modern English, and SiriusXM DJ Richard Blade.
Duran Duran headlined the BeachLife Festival in May. A month later, Human League, Alison Moyet and Soft Cell played the Hollywood Bowl. In August, David Byrne of Talking Heads has two concerts at the Bowl, followed in September by a night with Squeeze, Adam Ant, and the English Beat.
So what’s behind this ’80s new wave rock renaissance? We asked pop scientist Dolby, who took a stab at answering that question on a recent Zoom call.
“I think the ’80s was a very sort of fertile time for music for a couple of reasons,” Dolby says from his home in Baltimore, where he’s a music professor at the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University and founding director of its music for new media program.
“No. 1, I don’t think it’s necessarily cultural or political or anything to do with the Cold War and corporate greed and Ronald Reagan,” he says. “Actually, I think technology had a lot to do with it in different ways.
“For a couple of decades, drums and guitars were basically the bread and butter of rock and pop and R&B music,” Dolby says. “And when electronic instruments came along and became accessible, it greatly widened the palette of what you could do with instruments, of what you could call pop music.
“That was sort of the start of it. That every time somebody put out a record, it felt experimental because there was a lot of fresh stuff happening. There were new artists emerging who were sort of pure electronic artists like Kraftwerk and Gary Numan and so on.
“But also in the late ’70s, you had sort of dinosaur bands like Pink Floyd who did amazing things with synths on their records, so you had this sort of hybrid sound,” Dolby says.
Then, too, there was MTV, which with its debut on Aug. 1, 1981, cracked open the grip radio held on the airwaves in the United States and introduced scores of fresh faces and sounds to audiences everywhere.
“Music videos were sort of new and exciting,” says Dolby, whose 1983 hit “She Blinded Me With Science” benefited greatly from the popularity of its music video on MTV. “Partly because music videos were sort of new and exciting. A different way to consume music.
“I think a lot with it was that radio programming was quite rigid,” he says. “It’s like, ‘You’re not R&B, you’re a rock act, but if your guitars are too heavy, then you’re heavy metal. There tended to be a lot of pigeonholing.
“But if you’ve got a cool video on MTV, who the hell cared what genre or sub-genre you were in, or what format you fitted,” Dolby continues. “It was so influential that radio stations were following the MTV playlist because they were getting requests for it. People were getting hooked on the songs and watching the videos and then calling their radio stations asking for them.”
At the House of Blues on Thursday, July 23, and the Palladium in Los Angeles on Friday, July 24, Dolby will play the songs that got radio play in the ’80s: the No. 5 hit “She Blinded Me With Science,” of course, but also “Hyperactive” and “Europa and the Pirate Twins.”
But beyond those fan favorites, Dolby says he’s also bringing something different this time, too.
‘Aliens’ and Lost Toy People
Dolby’s first two albums, “The Golden Age of Wireless” and “The Flat Earth,” included many musicians but were largely the product of his own creative vision.
But when he moved to Los Angeles for the first time in 1986, he was determined to form a real band, Dolby says.
“I was in a mood to get out there and play some clubs,” Dolby says. “I put an ad in the Recycler for musicians, and I got a sack-full of cassettes, I think about 200. They were mostly relatively unknown musicians, and they had interesting credits on their resumes.
“Larry Treadwell, the guitarist I eventually hired, his claim to fame was that he once supported the Pope [John Paul II] on the Popemobile tour,” he says.. “The drummer, Dave Owens, was the house drummer at Knott’s Berry Farm and was once forced to play drums in a chicken suit. The bass player, Terry Jackson, I think he used to do the Jerry Lewis Telethon every year.
“But they’re all great players and so we sort of jammed and based on that I wrote a set of songs, which we went out and played around clubs on the West Coast.”
The band became the Lost Toy People, and the songs became Dolby’s third album,” Aliens Ate My Buick,” a more funk-and-dance-oriented collection than the moody synth-fueled dreamscapes of the two that preceded it.
“We only did a total of I think 20 gigs, the last of which was the Rose Bowl concert with Depeche Mode and OMD, which is iconic,” Dolby says of the 1988 show that capped Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses tour and was filmed for the concert documentary “101.”
With the 40th anniversary of “Aliens Ate My Buick” this year, Dolby reformed the Lost Toy People with a mix of original and new members. Outside of his handful of radio hits, Dolby plans to play the “Aliens” album in full, he says.
“Although it has an eight-and-a-half minute dirge called ‘Budapest by Blimp,’ which I won’t be doing at Totally Tubular,” he says.
Perhaps it could be his outro music?
“That’s a good idea,” Dolby says. “I think I’m going to steal that. Thank you for the suggestion.”
New wave flashbacks
In March, Dolby was a guest on Richard Blade’s Hollywood Happy Hour, an intimate live event for listeners of Blade’s show on SiriusXM’s 1st Wave channel.
Since the early ’80s, Blade has done more than any other radio host in Southern California to popularize new wave rock in Southern California.
He played it when the genre was new at KROQ-FM, and later on KROQ’s Flashback Lunch shows. Since the early 2000s, he’s broadcast it to the world on the satellite radio network.
“Punk was the thing that said we’ve got to do something different, and that really paved the way for new wave and new romantic and all of that,” he said before a Hollywood Happy Hour event with Ali Campbell of UB40 in May. “That was the excitement for kids, and for us, because we were nearly kids at that time. It was a new music.”
The ’80s were colorful, not just in music but in fashion, music videos, movies and television.
“My Vans have some of the colors of the ’80s on them now,” Blade says, pointing to his rainbow-checkered slip-on sneakers. “Suddenly, it was the look. Howard Jones with his hair and Kajagoogoo. It was an amazing time.”
When he and his KROQ morning show cohost Raymond “Raymondo” Banister added new wave singles to their playlist, it sometimes felt like everyone in Southern California was tuning in.
“We used to joke that if we sneezed during the show, for the rest of the day, wherever we went in Southern California, people would come out to us and go, ‘Bless you,’” Blade says. “Because everyone was listening.
“If you were a kid, if you didn’t listen to KROQ at the time and listen to new wave, you couldn’t be part of the clique at school,” he says.
“Andy McCluskey of OMD said when John Hughes wrote his movies [such as “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink”] he was obviously a KROQ listener,” Blade says. “Because it wasn’t only the new wave music he wanted [for the soundtracks], but all of the central characters were the outsiders. The ones that wouldn’t have been listening to KISS-FM or KMET. They were listening to KROQ.”
Dolby noted the rise of younger fans in his audiences who weren’t born before the millennium much less in time to hear new wave music when it first arrived in the ’80s. Blade said he, too, started noticing that age demographic rise in the early 2000s.
“Kids were starting to discover the ’80s because of their parents’ playlists,” he says. “They don’t go, ‘Oh, I like this one because it’s new, I don’t like this one because it’s old.’ They like it because of the beat. That’s why so many bands have crossed over to the younger generation.
“Kids love A-ha, ‘Take On Me,’” Blade says. “The same with Duran Duran, who they’d find on YouTube and go, ‘These guys are cute.’
“But that spark to the renaissance of the ’80s and kids listening to it and the parents hearing it again? That’s so cool.”
A ‘Science’ star
When the switch flipped on at MTV and the channel flickered to life on TV sets everywhere, the first music video played on MTV was the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.”
In a strange coincidence, Dolby had recorded a version of “Video Killed the Radio Star with his own band, Camera Club. (The group’s bandleader Bruce Woolley had cowritten the song with members of the Buggles.)
Both versions of the tune were released in 1979. The Buggles version was a hit; the Camera Club’s was not.
Things went better for Dolby a year or so after the Buggles helped launch MTV, when, in an attempt to breathe new life in Dolby’s debut album “The Golden Age of Wireless,” his record company suggested he write a new song and make a music video for it.
“My first album came out, and the record company had very high expectations, but outside of the U.K. and a couple of European territories it didn’t make much of an impact and was not getting played on the radio,” Dolby says. “But I was aware, and they alerted me to the fact that music videos were becoming a sort of backdoor to chart success.
“And this is like showing a bull a red flag because I’d always wanted to be a filmmaker,” he says. “I came up with the title ‘She Blinded Me With Science,’ and it sounded like a hit to me just from the title.
“I didn’t have the words or the song yet, but I started sketching out a storyboard for the video. I’d always been very enamored with silent film stars, you know, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin. They were the underdogs. They weren’t swashbuckling heroes.
“They were the little guy that won the girl by saving her from the bully and being sweet, and I liked that for myself,” Dolby says. “And also making a video is a bit like making a silent movie with a soundtrack. No dialogue and so on. I think the video and the song itself are really a string of memes and hooks back to back with an added pinch of Dolby quirkiness to them.”
The record company liked the idea but refused to write a check for the video until there was actually a song they could hear, Dolby says, laughing.
“So I ran home over the weekend and whipped off the song, got it done,” he says. “And when they heard it, especially when the American record company heard it, they said, ‘Well, this is the hit we’ve been missing.’”
Ringtones and rock ‘n’ roll
By the end of the ’80s, Dolby had grown disillusioned with the music business in Los Angeles and London and how corporate it had become. Silicon Valley, though, intrigued him.
“I was drawn to Silicon Valley, where they were making the software I was using and some of the synths that I was using,” Dolby says. “I thought well, I’m going to have a go at this myself.”
The early internet struck him as focused on images more than sounds, he says.
“They weren’t really talking about music and sound on the web,” Dolby says. “They said, ‘Well, it’s hard, music. We don’t have the bandwidth to do music. I thought, well, MIDI and samples, which are my domain, are highly efficient. We can do that with music.”
Dolby created a company that made it possible for cellphones to have polyphonic ringtones and licensed it to Nokia.
“They shipped it in two billion of them,” Dolby says. “I didn’t get a royalty from that, but it gave me some breathing space during which I worked with TED, which is a non-profit. [He was TED’s musical director for 11 years.]
“I was interested in that for awhile,” he says. “Then I took some time off and then I came back to teaching. Well, I say back to teaching. I’m from a family of teachers, so it seemed appropriate to pass on some of my wisdom and experience to the next generation.”
Since 2014, Dolby’s been on the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins, teaching while still touring regularly every year, often on tours with fellow new wave artists he’s known for years.
“I’ve probably crossed paths with most of them,” he says of the other acts on the ’80s tours he’s played between solo outings. “I have to say that when we were younger in our 20s, especially the British bands, we were quite snooty to each other. [He laughs] Like if you’re on ‘Top of the Pops’ with Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet you would sort of turn your nose up and walk in the other direction.
“It’s a bit like that scene in ‘Spinal Tap’ where they meet another band in the lobby of a hotel. They’re very friendly and afterwards go, ‘Bastards!’ [He laughs again] But now we’re all older and wiser and it’s a great scene.
“Everybody hugs and they’re very friendly,” Dolby says. “The green room is full of wives and boyfriends and kids with their nannies and personal trainers and cardiologists.
“Nobody stays up all night in the hotel bar getting wasted because you’ve got to be up at 7 to meet with your Pilates teacher.”
Totally Tubular Festival
Who: Thomas Dolby and the Lost Toy People, A Flock of Seagulls, Bow Wow Wow, the Producers, Animotion, the Escape Club, and Tommy Tutone
When: Thursday, June 23 and Friday, June 24
Where: House of Blues in Anaheim on Thursday, the Hollywood Palladium on Friday.
How much: $64 at House of Blues, $71 at the Palladium
For more: See Totallytubularfestival.com
Howard Jones’ Things Can Only Get Better Tour
Who: Howard Jones, Wang Chung, Modern English and the English Beat
When: Thursday, July 23
Where: The Greek Theatre, 2700 N. Vermont, Los Angeles
How much: $19-$206.80
For more: See Howardjones.com