BUGGLES – “Video Killed The Radio Star”
A self-fulfilling prophecy: Buggles’ MTV-launching promo clip for “Video Killed The Radio Star” is as extraordinary is it had to be. Had to be not because of that particular historical coincidence, but because if they’d got it wrong they’d have turned the track into the novelty it almost sounds like. Instead the film – unlike a lot of music videos – enhances the song, stays true to its contradictions and tensions, threats and regrets. So, for once but I hope aptly, this is a review of a video not so much a record.
It starts before the beginning – a badly cut-out moon illuminating a bin-liner sea and a girl playing a cardboard wireless. The effect is a mockery of memory, undercutting the song’s apparent nostalgia: in Buggleland, everything is artificial, even your past – gummed together out of plastic and cheap glue. And then an antique microphone, a singer, 1952: we’ve been here before. Trevor Horn, this ghost-image in crooner drag and awkward perm, has treated and clipped his vocals to mimic the compressed range available to old-timey singers, giving his thin voice a genteel veneer as he sympathises with one of them.
Then the chorus – unshiftable earworm. The radio explodes, the girl turns into a space angel, and as Horn sighs “abandoned studio” we’re in a thoroughly busy one – reel-to-reels, banks of keyboards, and the angel-muse-superhero-whatever sealed inside a glass tube, as if at the whim of a sci-fi villain. And here one is! The crooner now revealed as a sinister gonk, the clipped voice unchanged but somehow more creepy and android coming from this capering figure. These inhumanoid creators of video pop can capture and plasticise anything in their evil factory: next to the scientist’s smirking accomplice is a TV on which dollybird clones mouth the creed of the pop that’s coming. At one point in the middle-eight the screen is filled with another screen on which an anonymous hand strikes a perspex drum: a half-minute after televisions rise up from the exploded rubble of the radio age and on one of them a mad-eyed Horn points accusingly into the blank distance – “Put the blame on VCR….” The whole thing is like an amazing mix of Orwell, Flash Gordon and Play School. The studio-laboratory is wheeled away – more artifice – to reveal its masters as a band, jamming in silver suits alongside their still-trapped superheroine. And fade to white.
Later commentators would accuse pop video of turning music into a fiesta of looks over talent, but Trevor Horn was no cutie and his performance is what makes this clip (and song) so compelling – who would have expected that this…. well, this geek would turn out to be one of the great winners from the 1979 beauty parade? The song on its own is in fact as much a tribute to radio power as an elegy – its jingle-bright hooks and gorgeously glossy production jump out at you with no visuals needed – but the gleefully inventive video not only shows how much imagery can add to a track, it turns the song into something a little darker: a mocking celebration of a triumph that’s already happened, and a manifesto for a new pop world which it freely admits not everybody’s going to like.
9
Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 2,302 views • Share/Save
my favourite mike read memory is his appearance on ‘i’m a celebrity..’. predictably his twuntishness saw him voted out first, whereupon his wife turned up for the traditional emotional reunion with a face like thunder and could clearly be heard hissing “it’s a FARCE!” as the couple made their triumphant exit over the firework and tickertape-spewing jungle bridge.
not got anything to say about it, but i’d like to put in a late vote for vktrs being great, by the way.
Well, I thought the bloke was alright, back in his 210 days he seemed somewhat more, um, pragmatic.
Actually, I tried to email him yesterday, via his current radio station, to see if I could get a listing of his “punk/new wave top 20″ that he ran as a one-off back in 1977.
Let you know what happens, if anything.
Send him a link to this thread Mark!!
Yeah, right. That’ll work!
Fuck no, do we have to have that cunt on here?
DEFINITELY send him the link, Mark.
Woo-Hoo!
He’d better not expect any special treatment from me if he comes on here, just saying like.
I know, it’s hard.
IS DJP really Joe Kinnear?
Roy Kinnear morelike.
#66 ‘Drive in Sunday’? uh…yeah…that would be the early demo for ‘Drive in Saturday’
the shit DJ debate is worthy of it’s own thread.
The whole psychology of these guys who can only communicate with an imaginary audience is pretty scary. I mentioned the guy I worked with at my local hospital radio station back in the Anita Ward thread who was full of bonhomie on air and blanked everyone off air.
I’d have to confess a morbid fascination with Terry Wogan, whose mixture of menopausal whimsy and barely suppressed rage I find oddly compelling on my journey to work each morning. I have to switch off during Children in Need week when the ego masturbation becomes unbearable
#30
Sorry about the ginormous xpost but…
My comment not necessarily aimed at just your review Tom, which would (typically) put any of my attempts at pop “criticism” to endless shame.
# 86 – Yep, I too avoid “Children in Need” now, not only to escape the non-stop wretched Tibetan prayer wheel pleadings from Wogan and his junior ministers but also because the army of phantom Tiny Tim’s one is urged to give money to, I suggest, is actually in most part a slush fund for those maggots, Evans and Ross to stop them fucking off, which I dearly wish they both would.
It will be interesting to see how much this year’s campaign realizes, what with most people fucking potless just now. I’ll just be lobbing a goldie into a bucket at Sainsbury’s and that will be it. That’s 40p each for Wossy and Ginger Bollocks, 18p for Mr Badger at Number 11 and twopence for the little bastards.
Have no memory of Wogan´s barely suppressed rage prior to his TV show. I can´t stick him now – every time I tune in he seems to be whining about the bus lane on his way in to work being empty while his lane is chocka (quite incredible that he doesn´t see the reason for this). And I wish we had the option of losing his ´commentary´on the Eurovision.
In the early/mid 80s, I loved the run of Wogan, Ray Moore (before) and Ken Bruce (after) – always preferable to the Radio 1 morning djs for me. But I have to stick up for Mike Read here, sorry DJP. He´s always available for a quote, and is at least partly responsible for the Guinness book which for good or bad had a big influence on my life.
I did have his mobile number until this afternoon, but some cunt in Barcelona stole my phone and now I don´t have anyone´s number. Spain, eh? Last time it was my wallet.
(sound of sulking)
I have to at least partially come out in defence of Mike Read too(never thought i’d be typing that sentance when i woke up this morning)- His playlist on his early-to-mid80’s Radio 1 show regulalry included- alongside the obligitary Owen Paul and Falco hits-the likes of “My Friend Jack” by the Smoke, “Days of Pearly Spencer” by David Mcwilliams, and a bunch of Byrds, T Rex and Floyd obscurities which otherwise i wouldnt have heard so soon-def not what u normally get on the Radio before lunch on a Sunday!As such his show was a big part of my musical education in those pre-Peel days….
Point taken but I would have preferred it if he’d played “obscurities” from the time rather than from 20 years previously since one of the major problems with R1 in the eighties was its inability to extract itself from the sixties.
There is that, yes.
However, no obscurities from any time at all are now played. (tracks maximum age five years old tops now?)
“No heavy metal rock & roll music from the past… Who needs Pink Floyd, Dire Straits? That’s not our music – it’s out of date! … Golden oldies, Rolling Stones, we don’t want them back. I’d rather jack! than Fleetwood Mac!”
How right those Reynolds Girls were…
I played that song a few years ago to a certain member of Fleetwood Mac who (a) loved it and (b) was in total agreement with its sentiments.
Although the impact was rather dulled by (a) the twee video and (b) the Simon Reynolds Girls admitting in Smash Hits that they “quite liked Fleetwood Mac.”
They should totally do a new version, aimed at the aging Matthew Bannister Generation:
“I’d rather jack, than Steve Lamacq…”
Welll…. I do remember Mike Read playing The Farmers Boys´ More Than A Dream a fair bit on the breakfast show. And he REALLY tried to push Don McLean´s Jim-Webb-in-1982 Castles In The Air into the Top 40. Probably more obscurities too.
But, Beat The Jock, point taken. Can anyone cite an example of Mike R refusing to accept he was wrong?
DJP, don´t hide your light under a bushel, man! Which member of Fleetwood Mac? That´s a great story.
I´d rather jack than Nickelback, myself.
I see that next Sunday “Dale Winton counts down the charts from this week in 1987 and 1993, with music from Fleetwood Mac, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Meat Loaf and M People’ – incorporating both the Reynolds Girls and Fleetwood Mac- liking demographics…
Thanks for the warning Bill; I’ll use the time to catch up with this week’s Bottom To The Top – 19 Nov ’66, Mike d’Abo Out Of Manfred Mann in the studio and at #2 with the brilliant, Blur-inventing “Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James.”
(I’m already getting a headache from looking at that list of POTP “attractions”…)
#96: the same member who currently appears on the cover of their new solo album with an expression which reads “yeah I’m ageing, you wanna make something of it?”
TOTP Watch: Buggles only performance of this song on Top of the Pops was on the 25th of December 1979 edition. See ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ for the full stellar lineup.
What’s with moving Bottom To The Top anyway? It used to be a really good fit in its old timeslot.
Er, oh yeah, Buggles. Don’t really like it. Don’t really like Trevor Horn’s productions generally.
Gold really have shot their bolt. Not only have they moved Bottom To The Top (WITHOUT updating their Web Player settings so if you want to hear it retrospectively you have to click on the Tuesday repeat option – and ffs Gold improve your crappy Web Player with rewind and forward buttons that don’t work) but they’ve got rid of Greg Edwards, whose retro-soul and dance shows were fantastic listening when winding down of a Friday evening, and even Nicky Horne. Definitely looks like they’re moving to 100% automated Robot Dean Martin programming which is a total bullet to their own head. As current events are proving, it’s not all about pleasing the shareholders.
I can’t find anything unpleasant to say about this. It has everything a classic pop song should have and seems timeless.
I thought the Buggles were superb as a duo and bought all of their singles. (I don’t buy LPs as 7″ was always enough for me).
Hadn’t realised that there was a Bollywood version (of sorts) until just now. Featuring the irrepressible Usha Uthup, it penetrates the absolute outer limits of Camp: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=wFyIq9gm9KY
“bang! bang!”
K-Tel watch: side one of Night Moves, sandwiched between Blondie’s Dreaming and Every Day Hurts by Sad Cafe.