1979 – Ready, VSHN Player One?

Trevor Horn had spent four years working as a producer for other bands making no money at all when he finally decided to just do it himself instead and formed The Buggles with Geoff Downes. It took them more than three months to record “Video Killed The Radio Star”, a song lamenting the impact of technology on the media arts over the last decades leading up to it’s 1979 release. As the song was quite successful in their native UK and they couldn’t make time for an appearance on “Top Of The Pops” they decided to create a video instead. Now, at the time most music videos were just a few shots of the band playing, so the fact that they hired Australian director Russell Mulcahy (who would later direct Highlander) and had an actual plot made it stand apart.

Then in 1980 both members of The Buggles replaced personnel in the hugely popular progressive rock band Yes, and when touring with them in the US Horn did not quite understand why the kids in the crowd appeared to recognize him, especially given that The Buggles were not known at all in the states. He found out only later that it was because MTV, who went on air on August 1st, 1981, had chosen their video to be the first one to be emitted and with it’s elaborate content it was on heavy rotation. The fact that sales of The Buggles in the US went through the roof quite prominently soon after proofed that MTV, initially only shown on a select few cable networks, was reaching audiences very quickly and successfully.

As Horn’s wife agreed with his assessment that he was looking rather dumb in the video she convinced him to change back to the production side of music – luckily for us, as he was so good at it that he ended up with the nickname “The Man Who Invented The Eighties”.

Climate Change, Covid-19, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine – we live in trying times and the four horsemen of the apocalypse are easy enough to assign. But then, they have been time and again. We’ve already covered a song handling the theme on a quite fictional basis; back in 1979 the Clash, key players in the original British punk rock movement, had done it much more literally. “London Calling” is all about the many different ways the world was going down the drain, from nuclear destruction over literal drowning in floods to police brutality. It’s somewhat disconcerting how many of these themes are just as much of an issue today.

The band very much lived up to their credo of punk rock, as demonstrated by their refusal to play for a seated audience when they were finally admitted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but also when they were tricking their own label into selling “London Calling” – the album, not the titular song – to their loyal, but often poor fans for a much lower price by proposing to the label to add a “free 12 inch single” – which they recorded at 33rpm, packed with ultimately nine songs and thus created a double-album for the price of a normal one. Considering they were quite opposed to commercial events it’s a bit dispiriting in just how many commercials, soundtracks and promotions the song has been used over the years.

The video, filmed on the Thames near Chelsea was directed by a close friend of the band, who was very much a landlubber. He could neither swim nor was he aware that the Thames has a tide – so when they started rolling the cameras were 5 meters lower than what he anticipated. And then the boat would start to float – who ever would have thought there was a current! Next thing you know it started raining… Well, the song is about the end of the world.

The album was released in December 1979 in the UK, but only in January 1980 in the US – where the Rolling Stone magazine would name it “best album of the 80ies” a decade later to the dismay of pedants.

a primer to music pop culture from the eighties to the noughties

Category: 1979

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