It contains more of the artist’s hobby horses: old-style radio technology and the glamour and fashion of the 1930s and 1940s. The “Radio Silence” video was directed by Dolby, like most of his early efforts. The station’s first broadcasts went out between 19, providing a venue for rock music well before BBC Radio 1 (1967) took to the airwaves, copying much of Radio Caroline’s style and even hiring away some of their DJs. “Radio Silence,” the first single off the album proper (international mega-hit “She Blinded Me With Science” was not on the initial pressings of The Golden Age of Wireless), is sung to a “Caroline,” a name which, for any British fan of pop music, would clearly evoke the massively famous and successful pirate radio station Radio Caroline. Dolby’s first single, “ Europa and the Pirate Twins” (1981), evoked a wartime narrative, while the video combined 1940s radio technology and mass media (in the form of 1940s motion picture glamour) with cutting-edge 1981 synths and personal computers.ĭolby’s first LP, The Golden Age of Wireless (1982), was even more explicit in its evocation of nostalgia for interwar culture and technology, especially the titular invention and popularization of broadcast radio. Unlike synth bands such as Human League, whose members were influenced by both the science fiction and science fact of the postwar period, Dolby’s on-stage and video aesthetic was consciously older, hearkening back to the visual cues of an interwar period between World War I and World War II. Thomas Dolby (born Thomas Morgan Robertson, he took the stage name Dolby from a nickname he received as a studio recording obsessive) burst onto the music scene in 1981 at the forefront of the new wave of post-punk bands using electronic instrumentation in the U.K. Video Source: YouTube/softlad telly visual Maker and Year: Thomas Dolby, performer and director, 1982 Object Name: “Radio Silence” by Thomas Dolby (music video)

Meaning of radio silence