Thomas Dolby – New Wave hitmaker (‘Hyperactive!’, ‘She Blinded Me With Science’), musical director at TED Conferences from 2001-2012, producer and session musician for Def Leppard, Foreigner, Bowie and more, synth pioneer (you’ll find his work in your old Nokia phone) – is in possession of an astonishing creativity. His latest venture is film-making, and his chosen topic a condemned lighthouse near his childhood home, which elicits a sentimental reaction.

With a budget in the £1,500-2,000 range, this half-hour elegy-doc was filmed over a year and is still a work-in-progress (“more or less finished”); evolving as he adds new narrative quips and effects on the road. This is much more than a motion picture. With Dolby performing live alongside his footage, it is a transmedia performance dedicated to the gradual amplification of memory. It’s a grief story leavened with anecdotes and self-reflection, much like 2009 comeback record ‘A Map Of The Floating City’, inspired by life on the East Anglian coast. Dolby grew up with the incessant flash of the Orford Ness lighthouse, which was switched off for the last time in June this year. Dolby was devastated to hear of its demise, and this is his tribute.

Props feature heavily: sheets, a war siren, battle helmets, and of course, synths and a MacBook.

Immediately, we get the sense that Dolby loves his gizmos. Starting out on iPhone, he later progresses to affordable handhelds like the GoPro action camera and the boys’ toy Quadrocopter, editing everything on Final Cut and iMovie Pro. With these as tools, he ties many threads together in the film’s narrative, mixing live narration with pre-recorded, News Bulletin-like speech. Topics covered are Dolby’s life story; musical highs and lows;the background of the barren district (from anti-invasion war preparations through UFO sightings to nuclear power bases and wind farms); and even the construction of his home-made lifeboat studio, wittily labeled ‘The Nutmeg of Consolation’. There are whiffs of humour and whiffs of self-indulgence, but nothing is overdone. In fact, the DIY feel creates something spontaneous and gripping. Props feature heavily: sheets, a war siren, battle helmets, and of course, synths and a MacBook. The audience flips focus between Dolby at the side, and the footage on screen.

The shows comprise the film and a Q&A, finishing with a stripped back set of ‘the hits’. For the latter, he gets his Logic Pro software projected onto the screen and builds intricate loops of keyboard twinks, slap bass parps, and brilliantly titled effects (‘live gobble’ and ‘leipzig vocoder’). The trombone and flute solos on the aforementioned ‘Hyperactive!’ come across gloriously, living up to the title, whilst the beautiful ‘Oceanea’, performed twice, wrenches the heart. But not as powerfully as the film.

Told with a blend of heartfelt emotion and sentimentality, the overriding message is to think about which of our memories actually stick, then to consider our brain’s unreliability. For Dolby, the lighthouse became an emblem of his childhood, and he didn’t want that to disappear. Naturally, he floated around the surrounding swamps in a dinghy to capture its story and tell it to auditoriums. Oh-so British and oh-so quaint, the last flash provides a moment of true affection.

httpvh://youtu.be/y_vGHqIvoHg