The Buggles
The Age Of Plastic

The Buggles - "The age of plastic" (1980)

The evening before the first time I saw "Video killed the radio star" is still vividly in my mind: I had watched a killer striptease on GBR. Those were years of music and songs that captivated: from the radio, from the television, from the cinema, with hot records, program themes, overdosed charts, and soundtracks... They wanted to create robotic slackers... always into looks, music, movies, and girls, just as long as they stayed away from politics: well, in part they succeeded.
The generation of those born in the '60s and early '70s was the first generation of TV-bound children who grew up with thousands of hours of television, of all kinds, hours and hours of radio, jukeboxes, record players, and therefore with several megabytes of media memories.

But plastic was lurking.

The first time I saw "Video killed the radio star" is still vividly in my mind: it was winter, or autumn, who knows, but the era of synth-pop had begun: I don't remember well the dates, the places; the signs had already been there, oh yes, from the glorious Brionvega Tesi, I already had several little flashes that at that pubescent age would shock you: zap, and from an improbable private TV station after the M with POP muzik, and another zap, the fake childhood moon appeared over the dark waters of Vidiokild's intro. Maybe it was during the hit parade show, after they had introduced the talking ball of dj.super x, but that tune and that music video imprinted themselves in the minds of many during that time. The single shot to the top of the charts around the world. Watched again today, that clip still holds a certain relevance: but back then its apocalyptic meaning wasn't well understood. But who were these Buggles, and the bespectacled protagonist Trevor Horn?

In this clip there are various symbolisms spread out that highlight the image cult that would become the hallmark of the '80s. In fact, the video is from 1980, the year MTV was born in the USA, the first TV station that aired only music videos, and this one by the Buggles was the first to be broadcast.
The moral SMS is this: technology will dominate the approaching future, and this process won't be painless, we will miss the old analog media... the radio, the cinema -Elstree, Kid Dynamo- and with the new media imagination and fantasy will gradually go down the drain, machines will think for us. The video, or rather TV, killed the radio that the little girl protagonist listened to, captivated under the moon while the singer appears, a sort of ghost from the '50s; the radio explodes and takes the girl on a sort of journey into the future, reaching a high-tech recording studio - "Alabama studios" as the song says - among Revox tape recorders, color TVs, video cameras, and other gadgets; the girl sees herself as a woman - a space angel, trapped in plexiglass while the band plays the song in a white, sterile TV studio. The director is Russell Mulcahy, future director of videos that contributed to the success of Duran Duran. And the computer will kill TV, peace.

The album? Well, in its own way, it is a concept album, technopop with amazing arrangements for the time: it plays for fans of the genre... it's futuristic, but at heart, it's full of sadness for a vanished world seen through the lenses of a Camera. Behind the cartoonish electronic tunes of the Buggles lies a deep melancholy and a wistful glance at the past. The souls of many from that period have remained frozen but intact in the plastic tube of that video. Ahu-a, ahu-a.