Blurb:
"Video Killed the Radio Star" is a New Wave song released in 1979 by the British group The Buggles that celebrates the golden days of radio. With broadcast-quality vocals and a bouncy rhythm, the song plays like a jingle. It's a fitting sound, considering the song tells of a singer whose career is cut short by television. Group member Trevor Horn has said that his lyrics were inspired by the J.G. Ballard short story The Sound-Sweep, in which the title character, a deaf and dumb boy vacuuming up stray music in a world without it, comes upon an opera singer hiding in a sewer. He also felt "an era was about to pass."
Appropriately, considering its subject matter, the music video for the song, directed by Russell Mulcahy, was the first to be shown on MTV, when the ground-breaking music channel debuted on August 1, 1981, at 12:15 A.M. On February 27, 2000 it also became the millionth video to be aired on MTV.
"Video Killed the Radio Star" is a New Wave song released in 1979 by the British group The Buggles that celebrates the golden days of radio. With broadcast-quality vocals and a bouncy rhythm, the song plays like a jingle. It's a fitting sound, considering the song tells of a singer whose career is cut short by television. Group member Trevor Horn has said that his lyrics were inspired by the J.G. Ballard short story The Sound-Sweep, in which the title character, a deaf and dumb boy vacuuming up stray music in a world without it, comes upon an opera singer hiding in a sewer. He also felt "an era was about to pass."
Appropriately, considering its subject matter, the music video for the song, directed by Russell Mulcahy, was the first to be shown on MTV, when the ground-breaking music channel debuted on August 1, 1981, at 12:15 A.M. On February 27, 2000 it also became the millionth video to be aired on MTV.
Written by Trevor Horn, Geoffrey Downes, and Bruce Woolley, the song reached number one in the UK charts the week of October 20, 1979, the first-ever number one for label Island Records. It also would top the Australian charts, but only barely made the Billboard Top 40 in the U.S. It appears on the album The Age of Plastic. A different version was recorded by Woolley (with Thomas Dolby) for his album Bruce Woolley And The Camera Club, which was a hit in Canada. The complicated arrangement and production of the song, which includes a chorus sung by a group of very high-pitched backup singers, foreshadows Horn's later career as a producer.
Scroll and Sing:
I heard you on the wireless back in Fifty Two
Lying awake intent at tuning in on you.
If I was young it didn't stop you coming through.
Oh-a oh
They took the credit for your second symphony.
Rewritten by machine and new technology,
and now I understand the problems you can see.
Oh-a oh
I met your children
Oh-a oh
What did you tell them?
Video killed the radio star.
Video killed the radio star.
Pictures came and broke your heart.
Oh-a-a-a oh
And now we meet in an abandoned studio.
We hear the playback and it seems so long ago.
And you remember the jingles used to go.
Oh-a oh
You were the first one.
Oh-a oh
You were the last one.
Video killed the radio star.
Video killed the radio star.
In my mind and in my car, we can't rewind we've gone too far
Oh-a-aho oh,
Oh-a-aho oh
Video killed the radio star.
Video killed the radio star.
In my mind and in my car, we can't rewind we've gone too far.
Pictures came and broke your heart, look I'll play my VCR.
You are a radio star.
You are a radio star.
Video killed the radio star.
Video killed the radio star.
Video killed the radio star.
Video killed the radio star.
repeat
Video killed the radio star. (You are a radio star.)
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