Video Killed the Radio Star – The Buggles

“Video Killed the Radio Star” – Single by the Buggles from the album The Age of Plastic, with B-side “Kid Dynamo”
Released: 7 September 1979
Recorded: 1979
Songwriters: Geoff Downes, Trevor Horn, Bruce Woolley.

“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 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 song was a big hit in England in 1979, but pretty much unknown in America, where it peaked at #40 in December 1979. When MTV went on the air, it was on only a few cable systems, but record stores in those areas started selling lots of Buggles albums. Radio stations weren’t playing the song and almost no one in the US had heard of the Buggles, so it was clear that MTV was selling records – an early indication of the network’s influence. Billboard ran a story quoting a record store owner in Tulsa as saying he had 15 copies of the album sitting in a bin for eight months, but weeks after MTV launched, they were all gone.

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.

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The Buggles - Video Killed The Radio Star

The Buggles - Video Killed The Radio Star (Official Music Video)03:22

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-Allen, 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.

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