Thomas Dolby Quotations

I started looking at small companies that were running a sort of virtual reality cottage industry: I had imagined that I would just put on a helmet and be somewhere else - that's your dream of what it's going to be.

At the same time, one of the things I noticed was that the moment there was any kind of audio attached to virtual reality, it really improved the experience, even though the audio didn't feel like a sound engineer or composer had been anywhere near it.

It was supposed to be a year or two just to refresh my batteries, but I moved to Silicon Valley in the early 90's, and one thing let to another, got very involved in high tech, and formed a company and it ended up doing pretty well.

The other thing I felt was that the philosophical concept behind the experiences also looked like it had been designed by technicians and not by entertainers. I felt I needed to grab hold of it and try and push the envelope as much as I possibly could right now.

I was desperate really for people not to accuse me of coldness. It was taboo.

So a more sensible thing it seemed to me was to go to Silicon Valley and be pushing on the technology companies to accelerate the use of audio and music in computers.

The games industry is already bigger than the music industry, and it's mainly directed at teenage boys.

The man who never dreams, goes slowly mad.

From a technical point of view, there seemed to me to be absolutely no reason why - with the existing technology - we couldn't do very high quality audio, because whereas the boom in digital graphics is ongoing, the boom in digital audio has already happened.

It's been over 15 years since I toured... over 12 years since I did any recording under my own name. I never really intended to take that long of a hiatus.

So evidently music was a killer app and is a killer app for computer and the Internet; it just took the tech industry a long time to hear that message.

The hardware manufacturers, game designers, cable companies and computer companies and, in fact, film studios are going to ensure that this thing marches on. They know that they are going to make an enormous amount of money from it.

I was very pleased to find that once I had records out music videos were starting to happen, so I directed some of my own music videos and got to experiment in other areas of expression.

So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top.

Then I have a head mounted display which actually was designed for the military to do synchronized building entries and that's looking down at my hands, so projected on the big screen behind me, you can see my hands as I'm putting the tracks together.

Well, you know, I mean, I first did my live shows in the late 70's and in those days I had a boatload of equipment that always seemed to be going wrong.

There are a lot of producers coming out calling themselves interactive and a lot of them at the moment are being designated by the big companies.

It's especially great with Head Space because it's kind of like forming a band, I can bring on board some of my friends that I think are talented.

That record actually got a lot of recognition in Europe, but it was lost in the shuffle in the States. I keep running into people, most recently the president of a major record company, who say it's one of their favorite albums of all time.

I'm actually more interested in the other half of the world, because I wouldn't like to be excluded from any of this technology.

In a way, my role now is to shift into the next set of tool, which is virtual reality and interactivity. That to me is very enticing.

I never really intended to take 10 years away from the music business.

If you think back to the '70's, there were these new tools, with very few people using them in pop music. There's a real parallel with that now.

If you're Take That for example, you don't need to be seen in the studio. But they have their own fans, and their fans would like a way to get closer.

But it really took this long for me to be able to take a breather from it and come back to music which was always my first love.

I build the songs up from scratch. Sometimes I start off with just a click, then add a drum beat, bass line and guitar sounds. When I've got the groove going, I'll eventually go into the song and sing it over the top.

It isn't cool to abuse the ability to swing.

I've been out on the periphery.

Switch off the mind and let the heart decide who you were meant to be Flick to remote and let the body glide There is no enemy! Etch out a future of your own design Well tailored to your needs Then fan the flame and keep the dream alive ... ...the future is roses! Roses!

If I were a 13-year-old and I wanted to create subversive art, I wouldn't go out and buy an electric guitar. I'd get myself a personal computer.

She blinded me with science and failed me in geometry.

Smother me in your hot sauce woman until smoke comes from your thighs.

It's poetry in motion, when she turned her tender eyes to me.

She'd like to model or maybe act or star in a magazine. Before she signs any big contracts, she better learn how to read.

While I'm impressed with the length of those legs, she's not an intellectual giant.

When the polar ice caps melt, my recording studio will rise up like an ark, and I'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a J.G. Ballard novel.

Etch out the future on your own design.