The Golden Age of Wireless

The Golden Age of Wireless
Studio album by Thomas Dolby
Released	March 1982
Recorded	1981
Genre	New wave
Length	42:29
Label	Venice in Peril, EMI
Producer	Thomas Dolby, Tim Friese-Greene
Thomas Dolby chronology
The Golden Age of Wireless (1982) The Flat Earth (1984)
Alternative cover
US release album cover

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	link
Rolling Stone	link
Trouser Press	(not rated)

The Golden Age of Wireless is the debut album by Thomas Dolby. Released in 1982, the album contains the pop hit "She Blinded Me with Science" in its later resequencings (see below). Following the album's overall theme of radio are the songs "Airwaves", "Commercial Breakup", and "Radio Silence," along with songs about the modern world ("Windpower", "Flying North", "Europa and the Pirate Twins"). At the time of the original US release, the moody and cinematic tone—a major departure for most synthesizer-driven records—prompted Musician magazine's reviewer to declare it "The best damned synth-pop record ever, period."

The music of "Europa and the Pirate Twins" is a deliberate merging of past and present, combining modern synthesizers with blues harmonica playing and electronic percussion with handclaps. The central character in "Radio Silence" is a personification of Radio Caroline, a 1960s British pirate radio station.

The album was released a total of five separate times. All five releases appeared on vinyl and cassette (though the cassette release for the fifth version is unconfirmed), but only the third and fifth resequencings appeared on CD, with each changing the order of the songs, replacing the album mixes with extended or single mixes and even adding and removing entire songs. In the case of "Radio Silence", a completely different recording with prominent guitars was the version used on the early US incarnations.

The first US version, issued by Capitol-EMI's Harvest imprint, excised the instrumental "The Wreck of the Fairchild" (loosely based on the 1972 Uruguayan plane crash) and added the two sides of Dolby's first single, "Leipzig" and "Urges". Additionally, Capitol swapped the original synthpop version of "Radio Silence" for a much more rock-oriented version that had previously only been available as a single B-side in the UK. Capitol also opted for the single edit of "Airwaves" and abandoned the original UK "comic book" cover in favour of a shot of Dolby on a stage during the production of Bertholt Brecht's "Galileo". This image had previously been used as the cover of the "Europa and the Pirate Twins" single in the UK.