Thomas Dolby -- She Blinded Me With Science

 

SCIENCE!

When I was in elementary school, I had actually thought about becoming a biologist since I loved and still love animals. For that matter, I also coddled an interest in astronomy (I collected newspaper articles on the planets and the International Space Station's ancestor, Skylab) and meteorology. Sometime in the 1970s, I ended up watching a science-based variety show, "Don't Ask Me", originally from the UK's ITV network on our local educational channel, OECA (later known as TV Ontario).

There was one elderly fellow on "Don't Ask Me" named Magnus Pyke (incredible name, by the way) who was this nutritional scientist, government scientific advisor and television presenter that pretty much stole every scene although there were other hosts and presenters. The very British Pyke may have already been close to around 70 years of age when I first saw him, but he was this ball of energy that flapped his arms about and very excitedly talked about various scientific matters as if he had just discovered them himself. He almost cemented my resolve into becoming a scientist but a certain country got in the way permanently some years later. The above video has Pyke in the sequel to "Don't Ask Me", "Don't Just Sit There" in the late 1970s.

It did make me wonder whether Matt Smith had partially based his own interpretation of The Doctor ("Doctor Who") on Pyke with his manic energy and flappy arms. And the good Doctor was also a governmental scientific advisor as well back in one of his earlier selves.

Several years after Pyke and "Don't Ask Me" had left my brain, the former suddenly appeared again and throughout pop culture once more when he showed up in Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science", a single released in October 1982 in the UK. And though, according to the Wikipedia article for the song, it didn't do all that well in the home nation, it certainly made its mark in the United States and Canada by scoring No. 5 and No. 1 respectively.

For a guy like me who was not only a geek but a guy who was also getting into the synthpop side of things, "She Blinded Me With Science" was musical manna from heaven. It certainly didn't hurt having Pyke's cachet as the mad scientist and director of the Rest Home for Deranged Scientists yelling "SCIENCE!" and the title all throughout the music video. Dolby's magnum opus is so catchy with the two melodic sides of funky/cheerful and ominous that I think of it as one of the representative songs of the 1980s. It was indeed poetry in motion.

I think Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science" will be one of the juicier ROY articles that I've written up for the blog because not only does it have the Magnus Pyke angle, but there is also another angle involving Japanese popular music. More than ten years ago in the early days of "Kayo Kyoku Plus", when I wrote up about Akiko Yano's（矢野顕子）super-happy "Harusaki Kobeni"（春咲小紅）, I mentioned that there was a rumour regarding the singer-songwriter's connection with Dolby in that she had been in the recording studio when "She Blinded Me With Science" was being made, and so the following famous lyric came about:

Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto! You're beautiful! 

(for years, I'd assumed that Pyke cried "Good heavens, Miss South America!")

At the time, Yano had provided backing vocals to Dolby's song "Radio Silence", a track on his May 1982 debut album "The Golden Age of Wireless", and at the time, she had been married to Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）of Yellow Magic Orchestra fame. The site "TV Tropes" has mentioned the rumour in its file on Dolby (scroll down to "Shout-Out") and in "Harusaki Kobeni", I also wrote that this came out in Yano's own J-Wiki profile although it could have also actually been referring to the Sakamotos' daughter Miyu who was only one year old at the time. What the J-Wiki profile additionally stated was that Yano had also helped with the backing vocals, and I think that I did hear that distinctive voice of hers in the song, although according to Discogs, Miriam Stockley and Mutt Lange were the only people on backup chorus.

Having said all that, I did find a 2011 interview at the "Songfacts" website where Dolby said at the end that he'd written the Sakamoto line simply because he wanted to get a Japanese woman in the video. He also cheekily said that he had been ahead of the times in fetishizing Asian women. Not sure how tongue-in-cheek he was about that, though. Speaking about that femme fatale in the video, I did come across a Reddit conversation which mistakenly identified the lady as Yano. As someone who has a number of her albums, I can categorically say that the lady in the video and Yano are two different people.

Whew! That was quite a reminiscing of youth there. Anyways, what were the Top 3 singles on Oricon for October 1982?

1. Aming -- Matsu wa (待つわ）

2. Ippu-Do -- Sumire September Love (すみれ September Love)

3. Masahiko Kondo -- Horeta ze! Kanpai（ホレたぜ!乾杯）