“Video Killed The Radio Star” by The Buggles

"Video Killed the Radio Star" was the debut single by the Buggles, the duo of Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, and it later landed on their album The Age of Plastic. Horn and Downes wrote it with Bruce Woolley, an early third Buggle, and Woolley recorded his own version at the same time with Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club, Thomas Dolby on keyboards.

It's a wistful little paradox: a gleaming, futuristic synth-pop confection, all glossy keyboards and bright hooks, that frets over the old world the machines were sweeping away. The song worries at what the new media inventions of the century do to the art and artists that came before them, and it does so with a grin you can hear.

Island Records put it out, and it topped the charts in sixteen countries, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan among them, though America only let it get as high as number 40. It has sold 5,000,000 copies worldwide. Then came its second life. Russell Mulcahy wrote, directed and edited the video, and when MTV flipped the switch in America in the first minute of 1 August 1981, this was the clip that went out first, a bit of history no chart run could buy. VH1 later counted it among the great one-hit wonders of the '80s.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.