Buggles – Video Killed The Radio Star

Buggles – Video Killed The Radio Star

Buggles - Video Killed The Radio Star

Horn and Downes first met in 1976, at auditions for Tina Charles’ backing band, and worked with her producer, Biddu, whose backing tracks had an influence on their early work. After this stint they briefly went their separate ways, Horn playing bass guitar in the house band at Hammersmith Odeon for a while, where he met Bruce Woolley. During this period Horn yearned to become a record producer, but was frustrated by not being able to find ideal songs or artists to work with. As a result he reunited with Geoff Downes, and the trio of Horn, Downes and Woolley began writing their own songs to record themselves as a studio band.

The Buggles’ sound was characterised by a deliberately synthetic quality in keeping with the technological subject matter of their songs. Two different stories are claimed for the origin of the band’s name. Horn said he chose “The Buggles” because “It was the most disgusting name I could think of at that time while Downes claims that it arose out of a joke and was actually a pun on “The Beatles”:

It was originally called The Bugs. The Bugs were studio insects—imaginary creatures who lived in recording studios creating havoc. Then somebody said as a joke that The Bugs would never be as big as The Beatles. So we changed it to The Buggles.

A demo of the first song which they recorded, “Video Killed the Radio Star”, was sent to Island Records in the summer of 1979, who signed them immediately. This demo featured vocals by Tina Charles, who also helped fund the project. Although the song was chiefly a Woolley composition, he left shortly before its release to form a new band, The Camera Club, who would release their own version of the song.  Released in September 1979, “Video” was the 444th number one in the UK charts, spending one week at the top, as well as reaching number one on the singles charts of fifteen other countries The video, directed by Russell Mulcahy, was to be the first video ever aired on MTV two years later, at midnight on 1 August 1981.Award-winning film composer Hans Zimmer makes a brief appearance in the video.

At the time of “Video’s original release, the duo didn’t have an album’s worth of material to record, and so they wrote most of the other tracks for their 1980 debut album, The Age of Plastic, while travelling around Europe promoting their first song. Three subsequent singles were released from the album: “(Living in) The Plastic Age”, “Clean, Clean”, and “Elstree”, which also charted in the UK. Debi Doss and Linda Jardim (now Linda Allen), the female voices on “Video Killed the Radio Star”, contributed their vocals to other songs on the album. Read More….en.wikipedia.org

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