Video Killed The Radio Star – The Best of The Buggles

For a one-hit wonder, Trevor Horn has had an awful lot of hits. One half of late 70’s new wave studio band The Buggles, Horn might be the only artist in our series who was actually *trying* to have just one hit – after all, he only needed one.

As he told the Independent in 2004, the aspiring producer was in a catch-22: “I couldn’t have a hit without a decent artist, and I couldn’t work with any decent artists without having had a hit.” So he took matters into his own hands.

Studying the backing track of his then-girlfriend Tina Charles’ no. 1 hit single I Love To Love for production tips, Horn enlisted keyboardist Geoff Downes and went to work on his dystopian vision of a future in which record companies manufacture artists on computers.

The Buggles were conceived as a kind of robot Beatles and were meant to remain anonymous, a proto-Daft Punk if you will. But as Horn told the Guardian in 2018: “Once we had a hit we were as anonymous as an explosion.”

Job done. VKTRS went to number one in 16 countries, holding the title of best-selling single in Australia for an astonishing 27 years. Despite only reaching no. 40 in the US, the music video was famously the first to be played on MTV when it launched in 1981, a pitch-perfect statement of intent that the nascent music channel thankfully never delivered on:

With that all-important hit under his belt, Horn then set to work defining the sound of an entire decade of pop music. If that sounds like hyperbole, take a look at the list of artists he worked with – ABC, Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Grace Jones, Malcolm McLaren to name just a few – and you’ll see why he is commonly referred to as ‘the man who invented the eighties’.

And in case you’re wondering, Horn is categorical about the outcome of the video/radio star clash. Asked by a Guardian reader in 2019 whether, 40 years on, he would conclude that video really did kill the radio star, he proclaimed: “Video did not kill the radio star. Maybe he had him down for a couple of minutes, but he came back up swinging and he’s still healthy.”

So that’s that then.