The Buggles - Video Killed the Radio Star (1979): history of the song and music video!

The song "Video Killed the Radio Star" was born in the early 80s, as sunny and bright as it was... It would seem that The Buggles wrote it especially for the launch of MTV! But... in fact the hit was born long before that, when the trio - Trevor Horn, Geoffrey Downes and Bruce Woolley - decided to launch their own project!

History of Creation

The song was written back in 1978! It took the trio no more than an hour to create the future hit. Curiously enough, the demo version was performed by Tina Charles, the singer whom Horne and Downs were accompanying at the time.

Horne was inspired by James Ballard's fantastic short story "The Sound Cleaner". The book tells the story of a boy who lives in a world where there is no music at all... Every day he explores abandoned buildings with a hoover, thus "cleaning" the sounds. And one day in the ruins he meets an opera singer whose talent has been devalued by the advent of modern "ultrasonic music".

Unsurprisingly, "Video Killed the Radio Star" is filled with a really warm nostalgia and regret that new technology is slowly taking over...

The Buggles were based on an idea - a desire to show how artificial everything in this world is... And music included. The song became a kind of irony: Horn sings in a robotic voice, the sound of all the instruments was deliberately processed to enhance the computerised feel... "Video Killed the Radio Star" is a sad truth about the introduction of technology into every aspect of our lives.

In the book I Want My MTV, Horne recounted:

"...At that time, tape recorders had just entered our lives... However, it was already a signal that absolutely all technologies were on the verge of innovation! New technologies fundamentally changed people's lives and ideas about the familiar... And we felt it first-hand. We were excited about it, and we started making music videos... At that time it seemed that radio was in the distant past, while video was the beginning of a new future! A shift was coming..."

Music video for Video Killed the Radio Star!

And now for the best part - the music video for Video Killed the Radio Star!

Filming took place in the South of London. The interesting girl from the clip was the girlfriend of director Russell Mulcahy, who dreamed of conquering cinema... Well - she coped with her role in the music video very well! True... for the scene where she is lowered into a test tube, 30 takes were filmed! As a result, the "defective" one was used!

In celebration of a new era, music television, which successfully replaced radio, the music video opened the debut broadcast of MTV! The event was recorded in music history on 1 August 1981 at 00:01am.

Director Russell Mulcahy himself (the same one who later gave us "Highlander", "The Scorpion King" and many other great films), became the most successful music video maker of the 1980s! His work made famous such maestros as Duran Duran, Billy Joel, Ultravox,...

Two years later (in 1983) the song performed by Stars On 45 appeared in the Soviet Union! It was released on a Melodiya gramophone record - "The Sun of a Good Day", and was called "Television has ruined a radio star"!

By the way, this song can be heard in the Indian film "Disco Dancer"! Of course, it has undergone the Bollywood treatment and got a new name "Auva Auva Koi Yahan Nache".

Unfortunately, the band practically did not give live concerts, because of which their subsequent works were not crowned with success... In 1981 The Buggles broke up, although each of the members subsequently built quite a successful musical and production career.