TOP 40 DEBUT: BUBBLING UNDER
PEAK POSITION (1980): #84 (January 5, 1980)
[“BUBBLING UNDER” is an occasional column designed to highlight noteworthy singles that failed to reach the Top 40.]
Decades never turn over neatly. For all our natural tendency to separate history into easily digestible, ten-year chunks, that’s not how culture really works. Tastes don’t shift when the calendar does, just like “Eighties music” didn’t suddenly appear, fully formed, on January 1, 1980 (as this site will illustrate over and over). The ascendant strands of pop soon to dominate the decade—including new wave, synth-pop, and electro-funk—had already been percolating for years, and they’d still be forced to share space with various holdover variations of Seventies MOR and soft rock (not to mention the remnants of disco) well into 1981.
Ironically, two singles recorded and released earlier in 1979 wound up “announcing” the new decade almost to the day; neither lined up perfectly, because again, that’s not how decades work. But chart junkies can still fantasize about how close we almost came. “Pop Muzik,” a synth-heavy slice of robo-disco performed by one-hit wonders M, is arguably the first #1 single that truly encapsulates “The Eighties”—only it arrived nine weeks too soon, reaching the summit on November 3, 1979. Just over a month later, another one-hit wonder very nearly became the “first” song of the first Top 40 of the decade. But the Buggles missed by three weeks. “Video Killed The Radio Star,” one of the defining singles of the Eighties, actually peaked at #40 on December 15, 1979. By the time Billboard unveiled its first official chart of 1980, the Buggles were down to #84 and barely a footnote.
“Pop Muzik” deserves credit for proving synth-pop could be an actual commercial force; judged purely on merit, though, it often struggles to rise above the level of novelty tune. (It’s a 7.) By contrast, “Video Killed The Radio Star” barely registered as a blip on American radio at the time. But its cultural ripple eventually spread everywhere. The Buggles’ weird, wonderful record wound up inspiring imitators and influencers, laid the groundwork for several wildly different bands, and kick-started the career of the decade’s most quintessential producer. Oh yeah, and nineteen months later, a tiny cable network would unveil itself to the world via the strains of “Video Killed The Radio Star”—and almost immediately start turning that title into prophecy.
The Buggles were never supposed to be a “real” band. Trevor Horn had been playing bass in and around London since 1970, along with producing jingles and “unsuccessful punk groups” (his words) on the side. He first met keyboardist Geoff Downes while assembling a touring group for his girlfriend, Tina Charles, fresh off her U.K. #1 “I Love To Love (But My Baby Loves To Dance).” (“I Love To Love” failed to crack the Hot 100 but did peak at #2 on Billboard’s Disco Singles chart.) Downes showed up to the audition with a borrowed Minimoog synthesizer, a luxury at the time, and the two technophiles bonded instantly.
Horn and Downes went on to play session dates for Charles’ producer, Eurodisco legend Biddu, best known for the song he cut in ten minutes with Carl Douglas, “Kung Fu Fighting.” (“Kung Fu Fighting” hit #1 on December 7, 1974. It’s a 6.) Both men would later cite Biddu as a formative influence on their own work with the Buggles. As Horn stated in a 2012 interview, “Biddu knew what he was doing: the drum machine was tight, everyone played exactly what he told them to, it was all really well put together. And I played it all night, thinking that’s what I’m trying to get to: that coldness, that precision.”
Depending which source you read, guitarist Bruce Woolley either entered Horn’s orbit before, after, or at roughly the same time as Downes. (Also, he may or may not have played in Charles’ touring band for a time.) Woolley was a burgeoning songwriter who shared Trevor’s affinity for the avant-garde, and I suspect he inspired the young producer as much as anyone during those early years. Crucially, the pair’s mutual love for Kraftwerk (specifically, their 1978 album The Man-Machine) and the science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard (specifically, his 1973 novel Crash) directly inspired the concept of the Buggles as a group that didn’t actually exist.
“We had this idea that at some future point there’d be a record label that didn’t really have any artists—just a computer in the basement and some mad Vincent Price-like figure making the records,” said Horn in that same interview. “And one of the groups this computer would make would be The Buggles, which was obviously a corruption of The Beatles, who would just be this inconsequential bunch of people with a hit song that the computer had written. And the Buggles would never be seen.” Horn wound up being half right. The Buggles would be seen, around the world, thanks to promotional television appearances and a groundbreaking video, but they would never undertake a proper tour. Their first true live performance didn’t occur until 1998.
“Video Killed The Radio Star” was one of the first songs written after the Buggles’ “official” formation in 1977, although again details vary based on the source. (Some cite the song’s creation year as 1978; most interviews suggest Downes only came on board once the basic arrangement was completed.) Horn had been toying with the opening line—“I heard you on the wireless back in ‘52”—for ages, without any idea how to progress further. Woolley suggested the lyric could reference the classic age of radio comedy; soon that idea expanded into a broader paean to the entire medium.
Horn finished his initial couplet—“Lying awake intently tuning in on you”—by drawing from childhood memories of listening to Radio Luxembourg before bedtime. From there, the rest of the song came together within an hour. Woolley landed on the chorus riff and finished the rest of the music himself, while Horn pulled further lyrical inspiration from a different Ballard work, “The Sound-Sweep.”
In that 1960 short story, advances in “ultrasonic music” techniques have rendered audible recordings obsolete, literally “rewritten by machine on new technology.” Horn’s second verse (“And now we meet in an abandoned studio/ We hear the playback and it seems so long ago”) comes straight from Ballard’s original manuscript, where a mute boy, tasked with vacuuming up stray sounds, stumbles upon a destitute opera singer squatting in a now useless recording studio. But you don’t need to know the backstory to pick up on the waves of nostalgia coursing through “Video Killed The Radio Star.” At its core, this is a song about obsolescence, the simple pleasures of a previous generation being swept aside in a rush to embrace newer and shinier innovations. The Buggles were romanticizing an earlier era even as they embraced the technology that would destroy it.
The first demo of “Video Killed The Radio Star” featured Horn’s still-girlfriend Tina Charles—rather than any actual Buggle—on lead vocals. Charles also agreed to fund the project and help the group secure a label deal, at which point Woolley would take over vocal duties for the album proper. But after months of shopping a demo tape, no deal materialized. And to complicate matters, Whoolley was now being courted by CBS for his own solo deal.
By the time the original “Video” demo landed on the desk of famed producer Chris Blackwell, Woolley had jumped ship. Blackwell still agreed to sign Horn and Downes to his Island Records label, and in early 1979, the Buggles—now reduced to a duo—entered a West London studio to begin work on their debut album. Across town, Whooley was recording with his new band, the Camera Club, featuring a young keyboard whiz named Tom Dolby. (Under the name Thomas, Dolby will have a hand in numerous entries on this site.) Both competing entities recognized the commercial potential of “Video Killed The Radio Star,” as Horn and Woolley each staked a claim to the song’s authorship. The Buggles’ version would take months to complete. So Woolley got to “Video” first.
If you’ve never heard the Camera Club version of “Video Killed The Radio Star” before, the first thing you’ll notice is how conventional it feels. Woolley has a decent rock ’n roll voice and a solid team of musicians backing him up, and together they turn “Video” into sprightly, shiny new wave. But that approach also makes the song nearly indistinguishable from every other piece of sprightly, shiny new wave bouncing around in ‘79. All the hooks remain in place; the chorus still connects immediately. But you can tell Woolley had no hand in writing the lyrics, because he treats the song’s entire emotional arc as an afterthought. His vocals easily outpace Horn’s from a technical standpoint while packing zero flesh-and-blood impact. If the Buggles were singing about loss, Woolley is singing nonsense.
Epic Records released Bruce Woolley’s take on “Video Killed The Radio Star” as a single months ahead of the Buggles’ own effort. It failed to chart. Naturally, once the latter became a worldwide hit, rock critics loudly expressed their preference for the Camera Club version. Not only was it the hipper option, but Woolley’s approach fit all their expectations of how a good pop song “should” sound; by comparison, the Buggles must’ve seemed like aliens attempting to replicate the music of earthlings and failing wildly. In their defense, said critics weren’t incorrect in their assessment of the Buggles’ version. They just didn’t realize that was the point all along.
Lacking the resources needed to compete with the lavish studio productions of the era, Horn and Downes didn’t even try. “Video Killed The Radio Star” is synthetic on purpose, a mission statement from a fake band promoting an album entitled The Age Of Plastic. And that sound took ages to perfect. “Everything we’d learned in studios went into the recording,” Horn explained to The Guardian in 2018. “I once worked out it would take 26 people to re-create the single live.” Downes echoed his point in that same article: “We stayed up for nights experimenting with different sounds. We wanted to cram as many ideas as we could into a pop song.”
The Buggles spent more than three months on “Video” alone, experimenting with equipment and unorthodox recording techniques, all in an attempt to reshape pop music into something else entirely. Downes approximated orchestras and trumpet voluntaries using early polyphonic synthesizers. Session drummer Paul Robinson was instructed to avoid fills and play like a machine. His distinctive kick drum pound, recorded separately so it could be placed higher in the mix, anticipates an entire era of dance music to come. (Engineer Gary Langan later claimed it was the “loudest bass drum ever for its time.”) The whole thing is a towering monument to artificiality, created almost entirely out of organic elements.
“Video Killed The Radio Star” opens, quite literally, with an overture. Once the decision was made to overhaul and expand the original demo, Geoff Downes set to work composing additional elements—including a brand new, classically influenced introduction. It’s wistful and haunting, and the Buggles’ arrangement gives the piece the weight it deserves. Only after the final chord fades to nothingness does the first verse actually begin.
The initial voice you hear is Trevor Horn, but distant and tinny, an old-timey radio broadcast beamed into the future by mistake. Reluctantly forced into singing duty, Horn wanted to use the studio to disguise his perceived vocal shortcomings; Langan responded by applying a “telephone voice” filter—a combination of heavy EQ, extreme compression, and a Vox guitar amp—across the entirety of his performance. But the resulting effect didn’t just mask imperfections. It turned the lead vocal into a transmission from a bygone era, a sonic manifestation of Horn’s own backwards-glancing lyrics. You didn’t need to understand a word he was saying to feel the aching pang of nostalgia.
Contrast that anachronistic performance with the female background vocals entering moments later. They arrive like extraterrestrials, shimmering and otherworldly, crooning an “oh-a-oh” hook as nonsensical as it is genius. They sing the chorus, too, and really all the super-catchy bits. (Classic extraterrestrial move.) And their back-and-forth with Horn—the antiquated versus the modern, or to put it bluntly, past versus future—provides the tension upon which the entire song hinges.
Again, Horn and Downes play up the contrast in a number of subtle ways. Debi Doss (a backup vocalist for the Kinks and Hot Chocolate) and Linda Jardim (a member of the pre-Buggles side project Chromium) are panned hard left and right, their vocals initially mixed bone-dry. They deliver the chorus in modern, Americanized fashion, a nice juxtaposition to Horn’s Transatlantic accent (an affected, upper-crust dialect that fell out of fashion after World War II). The late refrain of “you aaaaare/ a radio star-ah-ar-ah-ar-ah-ar” gets swamped in reverb to sound slightly more alien. Even the finale reinforces the song’s lyrical theme; amid a sea of women repeating the final choruses, Horn remains conspicuously absent, another radio star winked out of existence.
Nowadays, it’s tempting to write the Buggles off as a goof and reduce their ubiquitous single to the quirky legacy of yet another one-hit wonder. Years of jokey covers, memes, and promotional campaigns only served to dilute the song’s impact; even worse, they made it easy to miss the rich vein of melancholy buried just beneath the surface. “Video Killed The Radio Star” is a deeply sad song delivered like an advertising jingle, a triumph of technological wizardry bemoaning our obsession with technology. Coating the shell in plastic couldn’t hide the single’s true intentions, any more than studio filters could erase the undeniably human imperfections in Trevor Horn’s voice as he takes his parting shot: “Pictures came and broke your heart/ Put all the blame on VTR.” The Buggles predicted the future at the same time they warned us against it. It’s not their fault we weren’t listening.
Upon its release in September 1979, “Video Killed The Radio Star” topped charts in sixteen different countries. It was #1 in England, Japan, and most of Europe, while hitting the Top 10 in Canada and South Africa. The single broke sales records in Australia that wouldn’t be topped for twenty-seven years. In nearly every country but America, the Buggles were a phenomenon. But it would be a short-lived success.
The Age Of Plastic debuted in January 1980 to modest sales, even in countries where “Video” had been massive. Three follow-up singles each charted worse than the previous one. And by the middle of 1980, the Buggles no longer existed. In one of the weirdest lateral moves in pop music history, Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes joined the progressive-rock band Yes, replacing lead vocalist Jon Anderson and keyboardist Rick Wakeman, respectively. To say that long-term Yes fans reacted badly is putting it mildly. The Horn-and-Downes incarnation lasted exactly one album (1980’s better-than-you-remember Drama), followed by a combative U.K. tour that resulted in the dissolution of one of prog’s longest-running outfits. That should’ve been the end for all parties involved. History had other plans.
After Yes broke up, Downes formed a new group with the band’s guitarist, Steve Howe, and two other prog-rock luminaries. Their debut release, Asia, would be the biggest-selling album in the U.S. in 1982. (Asia will be appearing on this site.) Horn began work on a second Buggles album in 1981, where he fell in love with a new sampling synthesizer called the Fairlight CMI. The Fairlight would later feature prominently in his work with ABC, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and a reformed version of Yes. (ABC, Frankie, and Yes will all be appearing on this site with various Horn-produced singles.) In 1983, he formed the visionary collective Art Of Noise with members of his production team. (The Art Of Noise will also be appearing on this site.) By the end of the decade, Trevor Horn’s influence was so widespread that music journalists bequeathed him an unofficial title: “The Man Who Invented The Eighties.”
The song that started everything turned out to have its own impressive second life, too. On August 1, 1981, a fledgling cable channel called MTV debuted in a handful of New Jersey households with a catalog of approximately 160 music videos. “Music Television” was both the network’s official title and long-term philosophy, but its unspoken, upstart attitude? That was better summarized by the first clip MTV ever aired: “Video Killed The Radio Star” by the Buggles.
Nineteen years later, MTV had transformed into a true global entity, boasting an audience of over 400 million in more than 150 different countries. Its 24-hour slate of music programming, once so effective at killing radio’s industry dominance, was now a casualty itself, long since dismantled to better accommodate reality shows and lifestyle programming. But on February 27th, 2000, the network returned to its roots, spotlighting a song as synonymous with the rise of promotional video clips as Music Television itself. That Sunday afternoon, “Video Killed The Radio Star” became the one millionth video shown on MTV. It hadn’t aged a day.
GRADE: 10/10
I WANT MY MTV: So here it is: the first one of these entries where the video is more iconic than the song itself. Every single element of the Buggles’ groundbreaking promotional clip has been copied, parodied, analyzed, and copied some more: The advanced (for the time) chroma-key effects. The overlit white room. The “futuristic-on-the-cheap” costumes. The random explosion for no reason. “Video Killed The Radio Star” was nearly two years old when it premiered on MTV and still became the template for the channel’s entire aesthetic, at least until Michael Jackson came along. That’s the definition of groundbreaking. I could honestly write an entirely separate entry on the video itself, but instead, I’ll just include my favorite random fact: At 2:51, look for an additional keyboardist dressed entirely in black. That’s Hans Zimmer, the Grammy- and Oscar-winning composer behind The Dark Knight, The Lion King, Gladiator, and about two hundred other film soundtracks. He would compose his first score (for the television series Moonlighting) three years after appearing in this clip. So yes, the Buggles basically connect back to everything.
BONUS BITS: Covering this song became a concert rite of passage in the Nineties, as evidenced by a partial list of bands—Radiohead, Pixies, Violent Femmes, The Offspring—who paid homage to the Buggles over the years. My favorite released cover version is from Ben Folds Five, who were doing “Video” live in ’95 (I saw them perform it in person, it was fantastic) and planned to release their studio take until the Presidents of The U.S.A. beat them to it. Consequently, this ragged-but-right recording remained in the vault until the 2005 release of an expanded edition of Whatever And Ever Amen. The Presidents’ version is fine; this is better.