Table of Contents:
Why Video Killed the Radio Star is important to me: kicking off a life-long love of audio/visual technology.
Here’s a little (recently remembered) story that’ll entertain absolutely no-one.
It’s Saturday 22nd September 1979. Synth-pop group Buggles (later The Buggles) enter the British pop charts at no. 57 with their first single: Video Killed the Radio Star. I am blissfully unaware of this until Thursday 27th September 1979, when I clapped ears on that very single. Ears, because it was played (without any introduction) on that week’s Top of the Pops, but it was played right at the end credits. We didn’t get to hear who they were – it was just a piece of music played as the end credits rolled and then for about a minute or so more… and they didn’t even play all of it!
I was in luck the week after, however. Top of the Pops played the video for Video Killed the Radio Star, so at least I got to see who Buggles were. I was impressed. I loved the song, I loved the video. I loved the synths, the very catchy melody, the almost glam-rock of it all. A cracking tune, if you will.
Now…
I’ve had more than a lifelong interest with all things electronic, but particularly in terms of audio visual equipment. I’ve loved tape recorders\players, turntables, amplifiers all that kind of malarkey for a long time. Hence my interest in YouTube channels similar to Techmoan, who regularly features long forgotten or obscure audio formats and machines.
I’ve had more than a passing interest in synthesizers and electronic music too, having discovered Jean-Michel Jarre in 1978 and of course I am a Doctor Who fan (Delia’s theme tune is still the best!).
Speaking of YouTube, you know that YouTube offers up all manner of recommendations for you, thinly disguising advertising as “an algorithm”? One day recently, YouTube recommended Sophie Grey. Specifically a video of Sophie Grey. on tour in London, singing the single she’d recently released, which was: Video Killed the Radio Star. OK, just another cover, nothing special, you’d say, but this particular video featured Trevor Horn, the legendary music producer… and founding member of The Buggles.
As a quick aside: I've rapidly become a fan of Sophie Grey. She's styled herself as a "Retro Electro" performer, however she has quite a body of work behind her. Check out her album "Grise", for example: shades of Sade in amongst the synths.
That got me to thinking about Video Killed the Radio Star, how much I still like it and when I started to get this affinity for tape machines and radios etc. Then I remembered, I’d been interested in all that sort of thing since… oh! 1979.
Certainly, and especially, now that I can afford it, I’ve managed to accrue several of the tape machines and radios that I used to own in my youth – and some beyond that. Hours of endless fun, but what of 1979?
Then…
In my youth (i.e. as a child) I’d had radios and tape recorders as Christmas presents for a couple of years. I’d used them, recorded some stuff (in mono, I’ll have you know) and pretty much broken or lost (i.e. thrown away) most of them by the time I started work in 1978. The only stereo tape recorder I owned at that time was another WH Smith re-branded one, but it was stereo and I could listen to it with earphones. I had no radio to speak of, or could find.
By the time I first heard Video Killed the Radio Star, I’d been working for about a year and was earning my own money (money being the something that had been lacking beforehand). I had that WH Smith tape recorder that I played my Jean-Michel Jarre and Pink Floyd tapes on, but no real means of recording the radio (as I couldn’t find a working one). I also possessed a really old record player. And a few records.
I can’t recall exactly how the conversation went (or with whom), but somebody at work mentioned they had an old reel-to-reel tape recorder that they didn’t want. It was something like a Revox A77 or along those lines. I remember it being big and cumbersome, but it did come with one set of reels (one tape). I’d never seen anything like it (in the flesh so to speak) before, so I snapped up the chance to own this thing of great beauty and stature.
He dropped it off at my house for me and I duly plugged it in. I had absolutely no idea how to work it, or how to switch it on. There was no manual and of course no internet to look things up with. I had not a clue, however I was eager to find out.
I spent quite a while with that machine, hooking up an old FM radio that I’d rescued from the depths of my bedroom (I had to fix that first) to it and attempting to record music onto the only tape I possessed. What was that music? It was just the one track that I desperately wanted: Video Killed the Radio Star. I successfully managed to record it from the radio onto my reel-to-reel tape. Glorious day!
I learned a great deal from those weeks spent tinkering with the reel-to-reel. How to record music onto it, what the speeds meant, what VU meters were and… crucially… how not-very-portable it was.
It didn’t last very long. It was too unwieldy and such a big faff to set up. It was replaced by a better, more portable setup and then eventually in the early 1980’s with one of those new-fangled boomboxes that had radio, tape and speakers all in one (big) box.
But it did trigger my lifelong interest, my passion for electro/mechanical audio/visual equipment. It was in fact, the start of noise – and it was all down to The Buggles.
Postscript
I can’t remember exactly what happened to that reel-to-reel recorder. The radios that I’d had all got thrown away or recycled, I suspect that reel-to-reel met it’s fate quite early after my departing the premises for pastures new. A shame, as it would have been quite the vintage piece, had I kept it. Ah well.
And although I’ve owned quite a few tape recorders\players since then, I’ve never owned an actual reel-to-reel player since then. There is still time, however.
The post title: an explanation
I thought I’d better slip a line in here to explain why I called this post “Buggling: The Start of Noise”. I made up “Buggling” as a verb to describe the act of listening to music performed by The Buggles (or Buggles as they were known at the time). Their 1979 album The Age of Plastic was – and still is – magnificent. When you listen to it, you are said to be “Buggling”.
“The Start of Noise” is a pun on the band “The Art of Noise” (or Art of Noise), for whom Trevor Horn was producer and performer. The “Start” being the beginning of my passion for “of Noise”, meaning listening to (or having the ability to listen to) music through electro/mechanical means.
The electro/retro artist Sophie Grey. styles her name as “Sophie Grey.” with a full-stop at the end. I haven’t slipped with the full-stop key in the sentences in which I mention her name 😁
TL:DR
I bought a tape recorder in 1979 and spent an awful lot of time trying to record The Buggles single “Video Killed the Radio Star” onto it. I did succeed and was reminded of it recently by an artist called Sophie Grey., of whom I am also a fan.
