Monday Music "Video Killed The Radio Star" By The Buggles

I remembered seeing this song on assorted late night video music channels in the early 1980's like 1980, it was a precursor of the "new Wave" that would be coming from England part of the 2nd British Invasion and it set the tone of the music of the 1980's.  Then MTV, remember them...back when they played Music Video's, Rather than reality shows....This video was their first video played....I thought it was making a statement, but after the formation of MTV, the music bands and records started making music video's to push soundtracks, and songs and it to me revitalized the industry and set the tone for the decade.

 

"Video Killed the Radio Star" is a song written by Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes and Bruce Woolley in 1979. It was recorded concurrently by Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club (with Thomas Dolby on keyboards) for their album English Garden and by British new wave/synth-pop group the Buggles, which consisted of Horn and Downes (and initially Woolley). 

 

The Buggles' version of the track was recorded and mixed in 1979, released as their debut single on 7 September 1979 by Island Records, and included on their first album The Age of Plastic. The backing track was recorded at Virgin's Town House in West London, and mixing and vocal recording was done at Sarm East Studios.

The song relates to concerns about, and mixed attitudes toward 20th-century inventions and machines for the media arts. Musically, the song performs like an extended jingle and the composition plays in the key of D-flat major in common time at a tempo of 132 beats per minute. The track has been positively received, with reviewers praising its unusual musical pop elements. Although the song includes several common pop characteristics and six basic chords are used in its structure, Downes and writer Timothy Warner described the piece as musically complicated, due to its use of suspended and minor ninth chords for enhancement that gave the song a "slightly different feel."

On release, the single topped sixteen international music charts, including those in the UK, Australia, and Japan. It also peaked in the top 10 in Canada, Germany, New Zealand and South Africa, but only reached number 40 in the US. The accompanying music video was written, directed, and edited by Russell Mulcahy. It was the first music video shown on MTV in the US, airing at 12:01 a.m. on 1 August 1981, and the first video shown on MTV Classic in the UK on 1 March 2010. The song has received several critical accolades, such as being ranked number 40 on VH1's 100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders of the '80s. It has also been covered by many recording artists. 

All the tracks of The Age of Plastic deal with positives and concerns of the impact of modern technology. The theme of "Video Killed the Radio Star" is thus nostalgia, with the lyrics referring to a period of technological change in the 1960s, the desire to remember the past and the disappointment that children of the current generation would not appreciate the past. The lyrics relate to concerns of the varied behaviours towards 20th-century technical inventions and machines used and changed in media arts such as photography, cinema, radio, television, audio recording and record production. According to Horn, the band initially struggled to come up with a line to follow the song's opening ("I heard you on the wireless back in '52"): he eventually came up with "Lying awake intent at tuning in on you", inspired by memories of listening to Radio Luxembourg at night as a child. Woolley worried about the song's name, given the existence of a band with the name Radio Stars and a song titled "Video King" by singer Snips

"Video Killed the Radio Star" was a huge commercial success, reaching number one on 16 national charts. The song made its debut on the UK Singles Chart in the top 40 at number 24, on the issue dated 29 September 1979. The next week, the track entered into the chart's top ten at number six before topping the chart on the week of 20 October. It was the 444th UK number-one hit in the chart's entire archive.  In 2022, the single was certified platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) for UK sales and streams of 600,000 units. 

In Australia, "Video Killed the Radio Star" reached number one, and for 27 years it held the country's record for best-selling single.  In late 1979, while the single was still in an eight-week run at Number one in the charts, the single was awarded a platinum disc by Festival Records, the record's distributing company, for sales of over 100,000 copies in Australia.  The song also made a number-one peak in France and Spain,  where it was certified gold and platinum, respectively, as well as Austria, Ireland, Sweden  and Switzerland.  In other parts of Europe and Oceania, "Video Killed the Radio Star" was a number-two hit in Germany and New Zealand,  and also charted in Flanders on the Ultratop 50 and in the Netherlands, on the Nationale Hitparade Top 50 (now the Single Top 100) and Dutch Top 40.

"Video Killed the Radio Star" did not start charting in North America, however, until November 1979. In the United States, the song appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 and Cash Box Top 100, barely breaking into the top 40 on both charts. In a 2015 list from Billboard, it tied with Marvin Gaye's recording of "The End of Our Road" as the "Biggest Hot 100 Hit" at the peak of number 40. "Video Killed the Radio Star" debuted at number 86 on the Billboard Hot 100 on the week of 10 November 1979, while on the Cash Box Top 100 it debuted at number 83 that same week. It started also at number 83 on the Canadian RPM Top Single Chart.y January 1980, it entered the top 40 at number 31, and on 2 February made it into the top 20 at number 11. Two weeks later, the song earned its peak in the top 10 at number 6 and issue dated 16 February 1980.

 

The music video for "Video Killed the Radio Star", written, directed and edited by Australian Russell Mulcahy, was produced on a budget of $50,000. It was filmed in only a day in South London, and was edited in a couple of days.

The video starts with a young girl sitting in front of a radio. A black-and-white shot of Trevor Horn singing into an early radio-era microphone is superimposed over the young girl by the radio. The radio blows up by the time of the first chorus, then in the second verse, she is seen transported into the future, where she meets Horn and a silver-jumpsuited woman in a clear plastic tube. Shots of Horn and Geoff Downes are shown during the remainder of the video.

There were about 30 takes required for shots of the actress in the tube. The tube falls over in the video, although Mulcahy claims it was not intended to be shown in the final edit. Hans Zimmer can be briefly seen wearing black playing a keyboard,and Debi Doss and Linda Jardim, who provided the female vocals for the song, are also seen.

The video was first released in 1979, when it originally aired on the BBC's Top of the Pops for promotion of the single, in lieu of doing live performances. Zimmer recalled in 2001 that the video drew criticism from some viewers who watched it before it aired on MTV, due to being "'too violent' because we blew up a television." The video is best known as marking the debut of MTV, when the US channel started broadcasting at 12:01 AM on 1 August 1981. On 27 February 2000, it became the one-millionth video to be aired on MTV.It also opened MTV Classic in the UK and Ireland. The video marked the closing of MTV Philippines before its shutdown on 15 February 2010 at 11:49 PM. MTV co-founder Bob Pittman said the video "made an aspirational statement. We didn't expect to be competitive with radio, but it was certainly a sea-change kind of video."In July 2013, multiple independent artists covered the song for the launch of the TV channel Pivot, which launched with the music video of the cover on 1 August at 6 am