All I knew heading into Thomas Dolby [ tickets ]'s Thursday (3/15) night showcase at Elysium was that I didn't want to have "She Blinded Me With Science" stuck in my head for the next few days. Beyond that, I had no strong feelings either way ... so imagine my surprise when his set ended up being a total blast.

Dolby--who, until last year, had remained largely out of the spotlight since his '80s-era heyday--doesn't need to work for a living. Those ringtones everyone has on their cellphones these days? Yeah, that's his. During his downtime from the music industry, he started Beatnik, Inc.; the company created the ringtone technology now used on about a half-billion cellphones, according to a press release. Blinded me with science, indeed.

Unsurprisingly, the technological wiz is a gearhound. The stage at the Elysium looked like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, with only a small space left for The Jazz Mafia Trio, a horn section that spiced up Dolby's electronic soundscapes.

The bald, mad scientist-like Dolby was relaxed, personable and smiled from the start of his set to the finish. In between, he created off-the-cuff loops to back his vocals (both of which sounded great), danced, and managed a library of video imagery projected on a large movie screen; interspersed with canned video segments were live shots of the crowd, filmed via a cam mounted to Dolby's left headphone.

The performance exemplified the word "fun"--which makes perfect sense, since the presumably well-off Dolby isn't doing this for any other reason.