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| A visual of the production equipment. |
The Hit
MTV didn’t have to think too hard about the first video it aired for its August 1, 1981, launch; the song they chose even handed them a gauntlet to throw down. Released over a year earlier (January 1980), The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” had already topped the charts in 16 countries, giving it title/tune recognition for plenty of people across the Western world. Perhaps even more fittingly, everything about it screamed, “FUTURE.”
With all the bells ‘n’ whistles in its production, Trevor Horn, one of the song’s three co-authors, once estimated that it would take 26 musicians to recreate live. You have to listen real close to hear that; I mostly get the piano, the (theme-appropriate) compression on the vocals, a couple layers of keys, plus the usual accoutrements of your modern (or even post-modern) rock band, aka, the rhythm section; call in a couple back-up singers, and you’d feel like you’ve got it…then again, it goes without saying that some kid with sufficient motivation could recreate the same song on a modern laptop with the right software (and maybe top-line audio equipment). That only increases the “wow-factor” of Horn, guitarist named Bruce Woolley and keyboardist Geoffrey Downes pulling all that together with pre-1980 technology - i.e., before the Commodore 64 was even a glimmer in the consumer computer market’s eye.
Hearing a song that future-drenched reference “tuning into” someone one 1952 a wireless goes a little way to helping place it in time; it feels like the further back you go, the futurists of the time seem to have bigger, brighter, even happier dreams. (while those of us living in the future they imagined know it ain’t all it’s cut out to be). The Buggles composed a nice, bouncy, trebly tune around all that, with a chorus you can sing along to for days, and it parks in your head like any good pop-tune should. That belies the lightly dystopian theme, of course, something inspired by something Horn and Woolley had been reading:
“It was a nod towards technology. Trevor and Bruce were the other two writers of the song, and came up with the initial ideas. They had been reading some very obscure science fiction novels, and then I came in and did all the orchestrations and the intro, the bridge section. Once we got it into that shape, we felt it had some potential, and that was it. It just came about like that.”
That’s Downes describing the song’s creative arc. And, based on what I’ve read, that’s a fair description of the timing. And now…
The Rest of the Story
Call it a tale of comings and goings, if with some slips in the narrative. Horn met Woolley either playing in the house band at the Hammersmith Odeon, or when someone recommended him for the backing band of Horn’s then-girlfriend, Tina Charles. They met, they clicked, they bonded over a mutual love of Kraftwerk (who I’ve heard) and Daniel Miller (who I have not), they started reading the “obscure science fiction” mentioned by Downes, J. G. Ballard’s Crash, specifically, which gave them the foundational concept for The Buggles for their debut album, 1980’s The Age of Plastic. As Horn explained (quote from Wikipedia), they might have seen the future better than anyone imagined:
“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 ... 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 would never be seen.”
The Buggles, renamed from The Bugs to fit the theme, recorded a couple demos - “Video Killed,” but also “Clean, Clean” and “On TV” - and shopped them around. They had so little luck that Horn’s next girlfriend and co-founder of Sarm East Studios, Jill Sinclair, started to pull some things together…only to get outbid by Island Records, a label that had already refused on the first pass (and the second, and the third). That’s Wikipedia’s account, but in a 2018 retrospective on the single for The Guardian, Downes padded the story on how Island finally came around:
“We were northern boys trying to break into the music scene, but were initially rejected by all the record companies. By chance, my girlfriend worked for Island Records and got them to hear our demo, and suddenly they wanted to sign us as producers, artists and writers. We went from nothing to this terrific deal.”
Because Horn had already done some producing (punk bands, but also wrote jingles for ads), Island set he and Downes loose in the studio and let them go wild. Woolley checked out before the final recording to start his own project, The Camera Club, but the other two spent months playing around with sampling and generally geeking out on the latest production tricks and techniques, searching for the right mix to recreate the “magic” of the original demos. The hard work paid off: the album sold well, they had a literal international hit, and they sent something into the zeitgeist. Oddly, though, they did not tour. What little promotion they did came with pre-recorded (“playback”) appearances on Top of the Pops. That happened for a couple reasons - needing to hire 24 musicians, among them - but something else happened as well.
With a hit and/or a breeze at their back, Horn and Downes started working up material for a follow-up album, one titled Adventures in Modern Recording. The material became more eccentric (“left field,” as Horn put it) - e.g., they’d recreated some big-band era elements for “Vermillion Sands”- but they also so the outlines of a hit in “I Am a Camera,” or Horn did at least. Then fate, their manager, and shared studio space intervened. Brian Lane, the manager in question, also managed Yes. The latter had just lost Jon Anderson and Rick Wakefield over creative differences, so Lane suggested that Horn and Downes go next door to sit in with the rest of Yes to see what happened. The bigger, more established band wound up swallowing the smaller one. Horn and Downes co-wrote Yes’s next album, 1980s’s Drama, and joined the tour to support it - a change received with mixed reactions, all the way to some booing of the new line-up. Yes folded (for a bit) after the tour, and The Buggles lined up a return to the studio and Adventures in Modern Recording…but only Horn made the trip.
Yes’s Steve Howe asked Downes to join him in a new project, Asia, which left Horn as the only active Buggle. It was a pretty brutal stranding by most accounts, and a thorough one. As Horn recounts on his personal webpage, Horniculture:
“[Downes] went the day that we were meant to start! And then I remember the publisher from Island Music, our publisher, coming over on a Sunday and it was one of those strange things where you’re having a conversation and I suddenly realised this guy thought that was the end of it for me. He thought I was all washed up, career-wise. Because of Yes and because of Geoff going to Asia. And so this guy - who’s still a friend of mine actually - renegotiated Geoff’s publishing but never renegotiated mine because he thought there was nothing to be gained!”
With an assist from Sinclair (who later became Horn’s wife) - she had a French connection, a guy named Claude Carrere who ran a label by the same surname - Horn produced Adventures effectively as a solo album, but under The Buggles name. I think I remember seeing a video for “I Am A Camera” (yep, link above! Also, Yes has a reworked version of the same song on Drama, “Into the Lens,” and there's Downes and Horn performing it), so it had a single, but the album didn’t move many units after its 1981 release and, over time, Horn took the sum of his experience as a sign he was a better producer than he was a musician (this from a man who picked up the recorder over a weekend as a schoolboy), so he tried his hand at that for a while. Or a decade…
Asia did very well for itself, obviously - see “Heat of the Moment” (which originally had a country chorus, apparently) and “Only Time Will Tell,” (speaking of MTV, they could not get enough of Asia) - but Horn might have done a bit better from the producer’s chair. How much better? He’s been called “The Man Who Invented the Eighties,” for one (and fer crissakes), but his producing credits are…well, fucking crazy. From Wikipedia:
“The end result was the first in an exclusive line of Trevor Horn albums where the production is centre stage, rather than supporting cast. Adventures In Modern Recording would lead directly to Grace Jones’ Slave To The Rhythm, Art of Noise’s Who’s Afraid? and The Seduction of Claude Debussy and whole chunks of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome.”
His production credits continued with ABC’s Lexicon of Love, and material for Paul McCartney, Tom Jones, Cher, Tina Turner, Lisa Stansfield, Pet Shop Boys, Seal, Simple Minds, Eros Ramazzotti, Mike Oldfield, Marc Almond, Charlotte Church, t.A.T.u., LeAnn Rimes, Genesis and Robbie Williams. So, yeah, just a few. Horn credits Sinclair (again; how smart/supportive was she?) for helping him arrive at his better calling during the recording of Lexicon of Love when she told him (in Horn’s recollection): “as an artist I only think you’re gong to be second or third rate, but as a producer you could be the best producer in the world.”
Surprisingly, the bitterness didn’t seem to linger. Downes and Horn reunited for a live-ish show in 1998 to support the launch of Horn’s new label, ZTT Records. They got together once again in 2004, this time with some of the session players from the original recording, for a concert at Wembley for The Prince’s Charity Trust to celebrate Horn’s producing career. It would take until 2010, though, for The Buggles first, actual live concert, a fundraiser for the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability.
It's nice they made up and all, but it does seem worth asking…weren’t they better off apart?
About the Sampler
Given the history, it’s perhaps appropriate that Spotify has only The Age of Plastic. There aren’t a ton of tracks, so why not list them: “The Plastic Age,” “Video Killed the Radio Star,” “Kid Dynamo,” “I Love You (Miss Robot),” “Clean, Clean,” “Elstree” (fwiw, my favorite on Age of Plastic), “Astroboy (and the Proles on Parade),” and “Johnny on the Monorail.”
Happily, I was able to find the full album of Adventures on Modern Recording on Youtube (which looks more and more like a miracle with each chapter I write), so maybe think of the following bonus tracks for people who read the post (also, thanks!): “Adventures in Modern Recording,” “Vermillion Sands” (my overall favorite), “On TV,” “Lenny,” “Beatnik,” “I Am a Camera,” “Inner City,” and “Rainbow Warrior.”
For what it’s worth, I didn’t like most 80s mainstream music when I was growing up and that relationship has not improved with time. That said, knowing that Horn and Downes pioneered some of the innovations in sampling and production helped me appreciate both them and the era quite a bit more. I like the songs I like (noted above), and “Video Killed the Radio Star” really is both good and quite a bit smarter than your average pop song. And it’s more than a little incredible that Woolley, Horn and Downes came up with something that good and impactful right off the bat.
Anyway, till the next one…which involves another impressive name.
MTV didn’t have to think too hard about the first video it aired for its August 1, 1981, launch; the song they chose even handed them a gauntlet to throw down. Released over a year earlier (January 1980), The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” had already topped the charts in 16 countries, giving it title/tune recognition for plenty of people across the Western world. Perhaps even more fittingly, everything about it screamed, “FUTURE.”
With all the bells ‘n’ whistles in its production, Trevor Horn, one of the song’s three co-authors, once estimated that it would take 26 musicians to recreate live. You have to listen real close to hear that; I mostly get the piano, the (theme-appropriate) compression on the vocals, a couple layers of keys, plus the usual accoutrements of your modern (or even post-modern) rock band, aka, the rhythm section; call in a couple back-up singers, and you’d feel like you’ve got it…then again, it goes without saying that some kid with sufficient motivation could recreate the same song on a modern laptop with the right software (and maybe top-line audio equipment). That only increases the “wow-factor” of Horn, guitarist named Bruce Woolley and keyboardist Geoffrey Downes pulling all that together with pre-1980 technology - i.e., before the Commodore 64 was even a glimmer in the consumer computer market’s eye.
Hearing a song that future-drenched reference “tuning into” someone one 1952 a wireless goes a little way to helping place it in time; it feels like the further back you go, the futurists of the time seem to have bigger, brighter, even happier dreams. (while those of us living in the future they imagined know it ain’t all it’s cut out to be). The Buggles composed a nice, bouncy, trebly tune around all that, with a chorus you can sing along to for days, and it parks in your head like any good pop-tune should. That belies the lightly dystopian theme, of course, something inspired by something Horn and Woolley had been reading:
“It was a nod towards technology. Trevor and Bruce were the other two writers of the song, and came up with the initial ideas. They had been reading some very obscure science fiction novels, and then I came in and did all the orchestrations and the intro, the bridge section. Once we got it into that shape, we felt it had some potential, and that was it. It just came about like that.”
That’s Downes describing the song’s creative arc. And, based on what I’ve read, that’s a fair description of the timing. And now…
The Rest of the Story
Call it a tale of comings and goings, if with some slips in the narrative. Horn met Woolley either playing in the house band at the Hammersmith Odeon, or when someone recommended him for the backing band of Horn’s then-girlfriend, Tina Charles. They met, they clicked, they bonded over a mutual love of Kraftwerk (who I’ve heard) and Daniel Miller (who I have not), they started reading the “obscure science fiction” mentioned by Downes, J. G. Ballard’s Crash, specifically, which gave them the foundational concept for The Buggles for their debut album, 1980’s The Age of Plastic. As Horn explained (quote from Wikipedia), they might have seen the future better than anyone imagined:
“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 ... 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 would never be seen.”
The Buggles, renamed from The Bugs to fit the theme, recorded a couple demos - “Video Killed,” but also “Clean, Clean” and “On TV” - and shopped them around. They had so little luck that Horn’s next girlfriend and co-founder of Sarm East Studios, Jill Sinclair, started to pull some things together…only to get outbid by Island Records, a label that had already refused on the first pass (and the second, and the third). That’s Wikipedia’s account, but in a 2018 retrospective on the single for The Guardian, Downes padded the story on how Island finally came around:
“We were northern boys trying to break into the music scene, but were initially rejected by all the record companies. By chance, my girlfriend worked for Island Records and got them to hear our demo, and suddenly they wanted to sign us as producers, artists and writers. We went from nothing to this terrific deal.”
Because Horn had already done some producing (punk bands, but also wrote jingles for ads), Island set he and Downes loose in the studio and let them go wild. Woolley checked out before the final recording to start his own project, The Camera Club, but the other two spent months playing around with sampling and generally geeking out on the latest production tricks and techniques, searching for the right mix to recreate the “magic” of the original demos. The hard work paid off: the album sold well, they had a literal international hit, and they sent something into the zeitgeist. Oddly, though, they did not tour. What little promotion they did came with pre-recorded (“playback”) appearances on Top of the Pops. That happened for a couple reasons - needing to hire 24 musicians, among them - but something else happened as well.
With a hit and/or a breeze at their back, Horn and Downes started working up material for a follow-up album, one titled Adventures in Modern Recording. The material became more eccentric (“left field,” as Horn put it) - e.g., they’d recreated some big-band era elements for “Vermillion Sands”- but they also so the outlines of a hit in “I Am a Camera,” or Horn did at least. Then fate, their manager, and shared studio space intervened. Brian Lane, the manager in question, also managed Yes. The latter had just lost Jon Anderson and Rick Wakefield over creative differences, so Lane suggested that Horn and Downes go next door to sit in with the rest of Yes to see what happened. The bigger, more established band wound up swallowing the smaller one. Horn and Downes co-wrote Yes’s next album, 1980s’s Drama, and joined the tour to support it - a change received with mixed reactions, all the way to some booing of the new line-up. Yes folded (for a bit) after the tour, and The Buggles lined up a return to the studio and Adventures in Modern Recording…but only Horn made the trip.
Yes’s Steve Howe asked Downes to join him in a new project, Asia, which left Horn as the only active Buggle. It was a pretty brutal stranding by most accounts, and a thorough one. As Horn recounts on his personal webpage, Horniculture:
“[Downes] went the day that we were meant to start! And then I remember the publisher from Island Music, our publisher, coming over on a Sunday and it was one of those strange things where you’re having a conversation and I suddenly realised this guy thought that was the end of it for me. He thought I was all washed up, career-wise. Because of Yes and because of Geoff going to Asia. And so this guy - who’s still a friend of mine actually - renegotiated Geoff’s publishing but never renegotiated mine because he thought there was nothing to be gained!”
With an assist from Sinclair (who later became Horn’s wife) - she had a French connection, a guy named Claude Carrere who ran a label by the same surname - Horn produced Adventures effectively as a solo album, but under The Buggles name. I think I remember seeing a video for “I Am A Camera” (yep, link above! Also, Yes has a reworked version of the same song on Drama, “Into the Lens,” and there's Downes and Horn performing it), so it had a single, but the album didn’t move many units after its 1981 release and, over time, Horn took the sum of his experience as a sign he was a better producer than he was a musician (this from a man who picked up the recorder over a weekend as a schoolboy), so he tried his hand at that for a while. Or a decade…
Asia did very well for itself, obviously - see “Heat of the Moment” (which originally had a country chorus, apparently) and “Only Time Will Tell,” (speaking of MTV, they could not get enough of Asia) - but Horn might have done a bit better from the producer’s chair. How much better? He’s been called “The Man Who Invented the Eighties,” for one (and fer crissakes), but his producing credits are…well, fucking crazy. From Wikipedia:
“The end result was the first in an exclusive line of Trevor Horn albums where the production is centre stage, rather than supporting cast. Adventures In Modern Recording would lead directly to Grace Jones’ Slave To The Rhythm, Art of Noise’s Who’s Afraid? and The Seduction of Claude Debussy and whole chunks of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome.”
His production credits continued with ABC’s Lexicon of Love, and material for Paul McCartney, Tom Jones, Cher, Tina Turner, Lisa Stansfield, Pet Shop Boys, Seal, Simple Minds, Eros Ramazzotti, Mike Oldfield, Marc Almond, Charlotte Church, t.A.T.u., LeAnn Rimes, Genesis and Robbie Williams. So, yeah, just a few. Horn credits Sinclair (again; how smart/supportive was she?) for helping him arrive at his better calling during the recording of Lexicon of Love when she told him (in Horn’s recollection): “as an artist I only think you’re gong to be second or third rate, but as a producer you could be the best producer in the world.”
Surprisingly, the bitterness didn’t seem to linger. Downes and Horn reunited for a live-ish show in 1998 to support the launch of Horn’s new label, ZTT Records. They got together once again in 2004, this time with some of the session players from the original recording, for a concert at Wembley for The Prince’s Charity Trust to celebrate Horn’s producing career. It would take until 2010, though, for The Buggles first, actual live concert, a fundraiser for the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability.
It's nice they made up and all, but it does seem worth asking…weren’t they better off apart?
About the Sampler
Given the history, it’s perhaps appropriate that Spotify has only The Age of Plastic. There aren’t a ton of tracks, so why not list them: “The Plastic Age,” “Video Killed the Radio Star,” “Kid Dynamo,” “I Love You (Miss Robot),” “Clean, Clean,” “Elstree” (fwiw, my favorite on Age of Plastic), “Astroboy (and the Proles on Parade),” and “Johnny on the Monorail.”
Happily, I was able to find the full album of Adventures on Modern Recording on Youtube (which looks more and more like a miracle with each chapter I write), so maybe think of the following bonus tracks for people who read the post (also, thanks!): “Adventures in Modern Recording,” “Vermillion Sands” (my overall favorite), “On TV,” “Lenny,” “Beatnik,” “I Am a Camera,” “Inner City,” and “Rainbow Warrior.”
For what it’s worth, I didn’t like most 80s mainstream music when I was growing up and that relationship has not improved with time. That said, knowing that Horn and Downes pioneered some of the innovations in sampling and production helped me appreciate both them and the era quite a bit more. I like the songs I like (noted above), and “Video Killed the Radio Star” really is both good and quite a bit smarter than your average pop song. And it’s more than a little incredible that Woolley, Horn and Downes came up with something that good and impactful right off the bat.
Anyway, till the next one…which involves another impressive name.
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