1979 Buggles: Video Killed The Radio Star

Although not quite a common household fixture in 1979, video was marching relentlessly over the horizon as the 'next big thing' in technology and, in the eyes of some, it's arrival was something to be feared rather than celebrated. Not feared by everyone, but by those who saw it as erasing the comfort of the past with the shock of the new. By people like Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, the duo who made up Buggles. Both were professional musicians from disparate backgrounds who would go on to forge disparate careers in music. As Buggles, they weren't one hit wonders but they should have been, though I don't mean that sarcastically; Buggles should have come, made their statement with this song and then departed. Perfect.

Perfect because,as a single, 'Video Killed The Radio Star' is a fully formed creation making a stand alone statement that needs no follow ups or a hastily recorded (and very patchy) album (can you name either)? And that's because it's a multi-faceted song that exists both concurrently and independently on a variety of plains. On one hand it's an elegy for the passing of what Thomas Dolby would soon term 'The Golden Age of Wireless', while on another it's a simple, catchy pop song. Either way, impossible to ignore it's cusp of the eighties setting and the context in which it was operating:

"I heard you on the wireless back in Fifty Two
Lying awake intent at tuning in on you".

Lyricist Horn would have been three in 1952 so there's every chance he's writing from memory, and that use of 'wireless' instead of radio is a clever device that ages his own experience and separates it from (for example) my own contemporary exposure to the likes of Tony Blackburn and the gang. In 1979, only my parents still called radio the 'wireless' and Horn is merely pointing out that the ignorance of my generation was part of the problem. And as far as problems go, I'm not sure what can be read into the title refrain of the song being sung in a broad and comically obnoxious American accent, but it all contrasts with Horn's olde tyme vocal compressed to a mono whine that powers the glow of nostalgia that he's celebrating/mourning.

Neither am I sure whether the fact that the song's video was the first ever shown on the then new MTV is ironic or not; was MTV meant to be the 'bad guy' in all this? A similar song could have been written circa 1927 to mark the passing of silent films with the emergence of sound ('Talkies Killed The Silent Film Star' maybe), while today there's every chance the young girl dialling up the old valve radio in that striking video is now a woman baffled by MP3 players. My point is that times change, they always will yet the people who get most hung up on it are always those who refuse to change with them.

Hindsight has shown that video no more killed the radio star than home taping killed music. It may have prolonged the careers of those where innate talent took second place to image, but in our brave new world of downloads and virtual music that we can never hold, the very concept of 'video' seems as quaint and distant as rationing (in fact, the "put the blame on VTR" line had almost become obsolete as an acronym before the song was even released).

Which is what music effectively was in 1979, by modern standards anyway - if you wanted to hear this song then your choices were to either buy the single, the album or else wait till it came on the radio. In the course of typing this I've found no less than nineteen different sources where I can stream or download (legal or otherwise) this tune and that's without really trying. "We can't rewind we've gone to far" - that's a lesson that record companies need to learn now that the genie is out of the bottle, but 'Downloads Killed The Video Star'? I doubt it. Music is as alive as it ever was and by that analysis Messers Horn and Downes are a pair of old and in the way party poopers peddling a woefully misguided song.

But isn't all this just a teeny bit pretentious though? On another plain, isn't 'Video Killed The Radio Star' just a novelty song by two jokers with funny hair and big spectacles? Maybe. There was something insanely catchy and comforting in Buggles, something that showed the those keyboard things could be a good laugh in the right hands. M had hit number 2 with 'Pop Muzik' in April and this was just something out of the same mould. Again, maybe.

And ok, if we're taking it on that level then the song has aged well. Any tricks and traces of late seventies electronica are largely absent and the track is straight, gimmick free with an unforgettable chorus that nags in the brain with the faintest hint of a statement of unrest the way Pink Floyd's 'We don't need no education' shortly would too. But I think there's more to it than that and that such analysis does both Horn and Downes an injustice.

Because let's not forget, 'Video Killed The Radio Star' was co-written by Bruce Wooley who recorded the song first with his band Camera Club (with Thomas Dolby on keyboards, to square this particular circle). In their hands it's an unremarkable, typically 'eighties' synth drenched mess that drives a coach and horses through everything I've highlighted Buggles as achieving. So rather than the song itself having any innate power, it's by their re-recording that Horn and Downes made it remarkable and gave it a new dimension the way, say, Jimi Hendrix turned Bob Dylan's lyrical apocalypse of 'All Along The Watchtower' into an aural one.

I think for me, the key has always been in that video. I've always found something faintly disturbing in the blank yet accusing stare of the young girl after she climbs the mound of junked radios, a kind of 'how DARE you fuck all this up for me?' look which has always conveyed (to me anyway) an intent that this isn't just a camp singalong - "I met your children, what did you tell them'? What indeed?

But as I said, times change and, ironically, it's the exact opposite look to the one I get from today's twenty somethings when I try to explain the past joys of buying a seven inch single like this one on a Saturday morning trip to town when nowadays they can listen to it from nineteen different sources without leaving their bed. That's how I understand the song anyway.

But you, of course, can take it anyway you want.