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A great 80s electronic album by Thomas Dolby A Golden Age Of Wireless head of it's time.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
Great product. Arrived swiftly. All as expected.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
This is a real old favourite LP (CD), I was a big fan of Dolby's in the '80s, initially after the release of She Blinded Me With Science, the album's opener. While this track may have appeared, on the face of it to be a novelty song, with its' Magnus Pike interjections (Good Heavens Miss Sakamoto, you're beautiful!), it is just a very clever pop song, very British. "Radio Silence" continues the pace before the album's first real gem is uncovered in "The Airwaves", a beautifully thoughtful song with a gorgeous chorus which outlines just what a brilliant songwriter TD can be. For m the othere stand out tracks are "Europa & The Pirate Twins", a tale of lost childhood love, "Windpower" which captures the zeitgeist even now with our concerns about alternative energy, "One of Our Submarines is Missing" which manages to evoke both the past and the future withon its' lyric. The album closes with "Cloudburst at Shingle Street", a really lovely song which should make everyone want to travel to that tiny hamlet on the Suffolk coast, and hope that, like I did, they do get caught up in a cloudburst. Dolby followed this up with the magnificent "Flat Earth" album, which has a more overall organic feel with longer songs and more jazz influenced pacing, before heading off to the States where he was always more successful as a result of good MTV civerage, but Golden Age is a great place to start.Read full review
When I saw Thomas Dolby perform Windpower on Top Of The Pops in 1982, I thought 'Wow, I haven't seen or heard anything like this before'. So unusual, so brilliant in his mad professor's outfit with all these weird props. I rushed off to buy the single and played it over and over. Even better was the b-side Flying North. I then rushed off to buy its parent album, The Golden Age Of Wireless and played nothing for about six months solid. Songs like Airwaves, Weightless and Commercial Breakup are quite simply timeless classics. The technology and gadgetry didn't obscure the music, only highlighted its brilliance. The original vinyl version contained The Wreck Of The Fairchild (track 1, side 2). This is the best version, later superseded by the version with more gimmicky She Blinded Me With Science and its superior b-side One Of Our Submarines which is the one re-released on CD. Thomas Dolby went on to record three more mainstream albums, the equally brilliant The Flat Earth and Aliens Ate My Buick and the more patchy Astronauts & Heretics, worth buying if only for Silk Pyjamas. Music like this should never be forgotten and introduced to new generations to show them what a real tune is. Snap up a copy of The Golden Age Of Wireless the moment you see it, I promise you won't be disappointed.Read full review
A favourite album of mine since I bought it on vinyl long ago (1982 I think), I'm thrilled to finally have this on CD. A lot of 80's pop for me was about the technology: everything sounded like it used the same keyboard sounds and drum machines, and pretty much anything would do as far as the lyrics were concerned. Thomas Dolby however was much more about the song. He's a clever storyteller, and these songs tell stories, about characters. Some of it is quite darkly humorous, ("her eyes so red, and her lips so blue"), but there's some fun in the lyrics too. The theme of the album as the title suggests is radio, and this is carried through many (though not all) of the songs. Dolby portrays himself as a kind of "mad scientist", older than his real self, and there's a nostalgic feel to some of the album, almost as if he's trying to understand this modern world he finds himself in. The album may sound very 80's, but it's not programmed and soulless: there's a real quality of musicianship in among the synths and sequencers, tubes and wires. Even after all this time, I keep coming back to this album. It just makes me smile.Read full review
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