Press Clippings

THOMAS DOLBY
Academy, Manchester / Stephen Dalton / The Times
*** (three stars)

  Almost a quarter of a century since Thomas Dolby last played in Manchester, he still managed to draw around 200 curious fans to the Academy on Sunday. The London-raised, US-based electro-pop veteran remains boyish and youthful on the eve of his 49th birthday, although the blond moptop of yesteryear has been eplaced with a shiny William Hague dome. "It's really nice in Manchester," he quipped, "so I make a special point of playing here every 24 years."  

A pioneer of synthesizer pop in the late 1970s, Dolby spent most of the 1980s balancing a successful chart career with a sideline as a session player for such big names as Def Leppard, Joan Armatrading and Stevie Wonder. He performed with David Bowie at the original Live Aid, and with Roger Waters at his 1990 restaging of The Wall in a newly reunited Berlin.  

His biggest hits, Hyperactive and She Blinded Me with Science, are bouncy synthetic funk-pop affairs which still sounded fresh and bubbly on Sunday. But he also played more moody sci-fi lullabies including Airwaves and One Of Our Submarines, which evoked a lost era of Cold War paranoia and technological anxiety. A few tracks were reworked to incorporate more contemporary nods to post-rave trance and techno.  

Since the early 1990s, Dolby has lived up to his cartoonish boffin image for real, founding a Silicon Valley company specialising in digital music files. But he finally returned to live performance last year, encouraged by his growing cult fame on the Internet and the sampling of his back catalogue by younger artists. Between numbers on Sunday, he told a droll anecdote about trying to serve an online writ on Kevin Federline, the former Mr Britney Spears, over an unauthorised sample.  

The first half of Dolby's 90-minute set felt more like a sales conference presentation than a rock concert. But midway through, he was joined by a trio of brass players and the music took on a new swing. His cover versions of the old Specials tune *What I Like Most About You Is Your Girlfriend* and the vintage latin-jazz standard Sway were unexpected and playful additions to an evening of good-natured nostalgia for a pop future that never quite happened.