Buggles

Buggles is best known for producing the song that launched MTV. In a wonderful bit of postmodern irony, the first video played on MTV when it debuted in 1981 was the Buggles’ lament to lost days of their youth, Video Killed the Radio Star. It is also the only song they did that anybody has ever heard of – although it is not the only worthwhile track in their catalogue. Far from it.

Buggles was the brainchild of producer extraordinaire Trevor Horn, who, in the late 1970, tired of producing punk songs for bands like The Snots and Smegma (not, to my knowledge, real bands, but you get the idea). He felt that he could certainly write better material than what he was producing and material that would show off his producing skills better than just sticking a microphone in front of a slashed amp turned up to 11. So he formed Buggles with his friend Geoff Downes – both of whom were involved with Bruce Wooley and the Camera Club, a band more important for what it begat than what it was (in addition to Trevor and Geoff, another early member of the group was Thomas Dolby).

The first Buggles album, The Plastic Age – from which both Video Killed the Radio Star and Elstree were plucked – was unlike anything I had ever heard. In the late 1970s, more was definitely too much as punk ripped pretense from the lumbering giant that rock had become and stripped it down to its three-minute, three-chord bursts-of-audio-dynamite roots. And here comes an album full of complicated musical passages, refined production techniques, orchestral instrumentation, and clearly enunciated lyrics not about alienation and rage, but a bittersweet elegy to times gone by. Sort of.

Perhaps it’s the fact that the sun did finally set, but it seems that nobody captures the nostalgia for the future better than the British. Nothing ages faster than visions of things to come, and the things that come always seem a little darker, dirtier, and more pessimistic than what was hoped for. The first Buggles album beautifully captures this world of lost possibilities, of brighter futures tarnished with age. Just look at the title of their one hit. Another slice of lost opportunities can be found in Elstree – an homage to the old British film studio system and the matinee features they cranked out. As the singer laments,

That last line is the key, the thesis, the hard-boiled nut at the core of this album.

The other reason the album was so revolutionary for the time was that it openly celebrated “the Plastic Age”, at least from a production standpoint. Everything has a shiny, impervious, seamless, waterproof sheen – the human element of actually playing an instrument seems entirely stripped away. So while they’re singing about the past, they’re producing the future, another element to this wonderful temporal juxtaposition. Buggles would take this plasticine shine to an extreme on their next, and last, album, the aptly titled Adventures in Modern Recording. This album was instantly dismissed by most as being a big shiny Mylar balloon – dazzling and bright on the surface, but crashingly hollow within, and that may be true, but that beautiful hollow shell is still a wonder to behold.