Totally Tubular Festival Hits Louisville: A Conversation with MTV Legend Thomas Dolby

80s Alternative fans- it’s time to dance! The Totally Tubular Festival hits Iroquois Amphitheater on August 14th. The festival consists of a legendary lineup from 80s past including A Flock of Seagulls, Men Without Hats, and Thomas Dolby and The Lost Toy People.

LEO was fortunate to have a conversation with Thomas Dolby, whose song “She Blinded Me with Science” was a staple in the popularization of MTV, defining a new generation of music that made a lasting impact on culture. We talk all things Totally Tubular Festival, fusing technological exploration with music and art, and 80s revival amongst the younger generations.

LEO: What inspired you to be a part of the Totally Tubular Festival?

TD: Two years ago I did the Totally Tubular Tour. I did it solo, just myself and a bunch of synths and computers. When I was asked to come back this year, I thought, well, I want to do something a bit different. I had this great idea, which was that in the late 1980s, when I first moved to California, I formed a band called The Lost Toy People to go out and play clubs. It’s a really hot, funky band, and we made an album called Aliens Ate My Buick, which has sort of become legendary and is still used to this day by sound engineers and audio files to test out their speaker systems. It had a really pristine sound to it.

I decided to reform The Lost Toy People and take them out on the road for this tour. We’ve got a great 6-piece band with live horns, percussion backing vocals, no clicks or stems or anything. It’s all live, and we’re having an absolute blast.


LEO: I know the Totally Tubular Festival is a rotating group of musical artists. How did all of these moving parts come together to create the fest?

TD: I think these sort of 80s packages are very hot right now. There’s several 80s bands touring this summer and 80s nostalgia seems to be bigger than ever. Surprisingly, it’s not just people of my own age. It’s young people coming and I wonder whether some of them grew up with the music because their parents are playing it all of the time. But when I talk to them, it actually turns out that a lot of young people manage to discover music of the 80s sort of all on their own.

I can only put it down to the fact that there’s a sort of rarefied feeling about it. I mean, only a few albums a month came out in the 1980s. Today, you know, it’s like a fire hose of thousands of new tracks everyday. So, I think young people today sort of appreciate how music was back then.


LEO: Yes, actually I am one of those young people. I’m 28, but my favorite music is 80s music. I talked to my dad back in the 2010s a lot about how we wanted 80s festivals to be a thing, so I am excited to see that it’s finally coming into fruition, because I think you’re right. I think there is a crave for it.

TD: Yeah, and I think [the 80s] was very diverse musically. For a couple of reasons. Number one, technology had gotten away from just the tyranny of guitars and drums. Now you had synths and drum machines and samplers. The number 2, I think American radio had been very rigid until the early 80s. You were either Hard Rock, or you were Rock and Roll or Pop or R&B, and it was very rare that radio programmers sort of varied their playlists.
MTV comes along, and if you got a great video, then MTV will show it, and people were staying home to watch MTV because it was cool and new. They would get hooked on ‘She Blinded Me with Science’, and then call their local radio stations to request it. Then the radio stations would go “well I don’t know if this is Pop or Rock or R&B or what it is, but if we get enough requests, we’ll just have to play it anyway.”


LEO: How has your passion for innovation and invention fueled your music career- like videos versus music? Can you speak on that a bit?

TD: Well, I am always thrilled by the new and diving headlong into something that I don’t really understand yet. In fact, nobody does because it’s like you throw away the user manual and you can come up with creative ways to use new technologies that nobody has thought of. I love being in that space. It’s very stimulating. I love being one of the first people to explore the new technologies or new techniques and show the world what you can do with them. So whether it was those synths and drum machines, whether it was making music videos later on, whether it was making video games, the Internet, mobile phones, AI now, I love being an explorer in that space.


LEO: What are you working on currently that you feel like is in that space with the technology increasing so rapidly in our world?

TD: So I’m actually working on it. My next thing after The Lost Toy People and the Totally Tubular tour is a symphonic project. I feel the sort of 80s craze is very fluffy. It’s all about the leg warmers and the headbands and you know, “Walking on Sunshine”, that sort of upbeat 80s. “Material Girl”, et cetera.

But in fact, if you live through the decade, especially in the UK, we had Margaret Thatcher. We had the Falklands War, the miners’ strike, we had AIDS, corporate greed, all of these things going on. It was actually quite a dark era to live through. The Cold War. That is reflected in the music of Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure and The Smiths. Not so much the fluffy stuff that tends to get played at the rewind festivals.

So I wanted to lean into that a little bit. As sort of a toolbox for that, I decided to use a symphony orchestra. I’m sort of layering and mashing up some of my favorite bits of music and lyrical ideas from the 80s and using them as sort of symphonic motifs to develop through symphony orchestra. So, from next summer, I’m going to be touring with symphony orchestras around the country, including, I hope, Louisville.
Doing this show is really a reflection of the more serious side of 80s music and the experience of living through that. But it’s ultimately optimistic and realizing there was some incredible music written in that decade. I was very proud to be a part of it.


LEO: I think that we are so far away from the 80s and we tend to forget what people went through back then and how it felt to live through those things.

TD: I think in many ways it’s been sort of eclipsed by today’s experience. I mean, because all of the things that I mentioned were terrible at the time, but they seem relatively innocent compared to what’s going on in the world today. I think younger people do appreciate that, you know, the experience was quite different for my generation back then.

And [my upcoming tour] is really a way to wrap all of that up. There are Dolby fans, but there are a subset of 80s fans as a whole. At my own shows, I get people that are hardcore, you know, into my deep cuts and things like that. But I’ve already broadened the appeal of that to include people like Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Crowded House, all those kinds of bands as well.


LEO: Anything you want to tell audiences who are interested in the Totally Tubular Festival?

TD: You know, it’s very rare to see bands that are completely live. I mean, a lot of the bands on these packages are sort of basically doing canned versions of their hits or their hits from the 80s. They’re doing doing it every night the same, and they’ve been doing it for years the same way. No disrespect to them, but we’re actually taking more chances. Everything is live. We’ve got a 6-piece band. We’ve got percussion and horns. We respond in real time to the vibe on the night. Intros or jam sections in songs are loose. They can be longer or shorter, different people take solos. It’s just got aliveness to it and a vitality that I think is quite unusual for a lot of sort of festival bands these days.


LEO: Final question. I know you’ve worked with a lot of different musical acts throughout the years. Is there anybody in particular that’s inspired you in a stand out way or pushed you out of your comfort zone in any way?

TD: I’m not a huge music consumer really. I come across stuff occasionally that I love. I think the sort of new crop of artists, there are some I have an affinity with. Billie Eilish I love, and found to my great delight that she and FINNEAS, their dad used to spoon feed them Dolby music when they were on camping trips when they were kids. There’s this great podcast that Billie does with her dad where she’s singing along with my songs. She thinks I’m really weird, but she thinks I’m great. I met her and FINNEAS and have had a good laugh with them about that.

Get tickets to Totally Tubular Festival here.