Buggles
Entry updated 20 December 2011. Tagged: Music.
Also known as The Buggles. A UK synth-pop band comprising Trevor Horn (1949- ) and Geoff Downes (1952- ). Masters of bright and electro-pop that both mourned the passing of the old world and celebrated the colourful and plastic near-future, the career of The Buggles was appropriately shiny and transient. Their first single "Video Killed the Radio Star" was a number #1 hit; and the rush-released album, The Age of Plastic (1980) stands as one of the best examples of the decade's characteristically disposable pop. From its opening track (the deliberately synthetic and bouncy "Living in the Plastic Age") on it captures the sense of the instantaneity of the immanent future. Several other tracks on the album were cartoony sf, especially "I Love You (Miss Robot)" and "Astroboy (The Proles on Parade)". Downes left the band in 1981, and the follow-up album Adventures in Modern Recording (1982) was commercially unsuccessful; although it contains an interesting J G Ballard-inspired song, "Vermilion Sands". The band broke up soon after. [AR]
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