One-Hit Wonders: Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science”
Thomas Dolby - She Blinded Me With Science" (Capitol, 1983)
“I think it’s the most meaningless song I’ve ever written,” Thomas Dolby is quoted as saying about his one tune to make the US Top 40, “She Blinded Me With Science.”
“It’s about a sort of fuddy-duddy old scientist who gets obsessed with his lab assistant,” Dolby said to Creem magazine. “When I made that song,” he continued, “it was with the thought in my head that people were finding my music too demanding.”
I thought “maybe I should let loose and make a record that was basically nonsense like everything else on the charts. And it’s just a sad reflection on the state of things that it was successful.”
What Dolby didn’t note at the time is that “She Blinded Me With Science” is no sillier than a thousand other tunes that were successful on the pop chart. But it was a far bigger hit than many, a #5 charter in 1983.
As for Dolby, there is certainly a lot more to his career than his one hit song: he guested on Foreigner 4 and Def Leppard‘s Pyromania, played the Grammys with Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock and Howard Jones, has appeared on stage with Roger Waters in a charity reading of The Wall and produced discs by Joni Mitchell and Prefab Sprout.
More recently he has been involved in a number of technology ventures and last year released his first album in nearly 20 years called A Map of the Floating City.
She turned her tender eyes to me
As deep as any ocean
As sweet as any harmony
Mmm - but she blinded me with science
<em>Gone but not forgotten, at least not at WNEW, <a href=”http://wnew.radio.com/category/one-hit-wonders/”>find more tales of One-Hit Wonders here</a> …
camille
February 2, 2012 12:26 pm
I’m such a dork, man! When I was failing science in junior high school I would sing that song during class.