One of the great things that my workplace does is the Outside In series, bringing extraordinary people to campus to give a talk and, quite often, peddle a book.
Thomas Dolby visited recently. His talk was funny and fascinating. And this is the book he was peddling.
- He was a pioneer of electronic music in the 1980s.
- He played keyboards for David Bowie at Live Aid and on Roger Waters’ performance of The Wall in Berlin in 1990.
- He played keyboards on Foreigner 4 and Def Leppard’s Pyromania.
- He produced the great album Steve McQueen by Prefab Sprout.
- He is the musical director of the TED conference.
- He pioneered digital music on the web and on mobile phones.
- He created the polyphonic ringtone for the Nokia signature theme (which at one point was estimated to play 1.8 billion times a day).
- And his brother, Stephen Robertson, contributed heavily to Bing’s core search algorithms while at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.