Slowly senses leaving me
Once the two are in 3D we play the game
I have a strange relationship with a lot of music. There are bands who are huge names, critically acclaimed cult favourites in the music literature; in many cases, these leave me cold. Or, I’ll find one or two of their songs – sometimes a single, sometimes an obscure track – which resonate with me, while the others fly completely over my head without leaving a mark. On the other hand, sometimes the only song I’ll like from a band will be the one which, in fact, was their chart hit, proving my tastes are solidly mainstream.
New Wave and Synthpop as genres are particularly fraught for me. There are giant names – Kraftwerk, Joy Division, Gary Numan, Siouxsie and the Banshees – to whom I have an almost physical allergy. Their sound is somehow too harsh for me, too bleak. There are plenty which are just too experimental: Art of Noise. Then there are ones which are too empty, too poppy: Duran Duran maybe. Then there are ones which are on the edge, but mostly too famous: Eurythmics, Rush, Thomas Dolby, Ultravox. (They may come up later).
The Buggles, sadly, fall for me mostly into a mix of ‘too experimental’ and yet ‘too famous’. There’s that one song which if you’re of a certain age you know by heart –
— you remember, of course you remember, you have to remember, it opened MTV in 1981–
They took the credit for your second symphony
Rewritten by machine with new technology
And now I understand the problems you can see
Video Killed The Radio Star. Man, does that ever get old? It does not, and it never will.
Sidebar: VKTRS was of course itself remade in 1998 by alt-rockers The Presidents of the United States of America, and in perhaps the single most terrifying stroke of genius of that entire sad benighted decade they rewrote those literal lines:
They took the credit for your second symphony
Rewritten by machine with new technology
And now I understand the supernova scene
So do we all. So do we all, now. I am in awe.
But everyone knows that one, did the Buggles do anything else worthwhile?
Well…
The band’s lifeforce Trevor Horn went on to start the before-mentioned avant-garde probably-geniuses-but-I-don’t-get-it The Art of Noise, became a world famous producer, pretty much produced every record in the UK ever, got Knighted by the Queen of England for it all… so yes?
(Literally. The Buggles duo did an album in 1980 with prog-rock group Yes.)
But music all comes down to taste and, well, most of this music simply doesn’t connect to me. There’s a couple of Buggles tracks I maybe half like, both from 1980’s The Age of Plastic:
Johnny On The Monorail:
Oh my my, you are so sci-fi
Please will you let me ride
and Elstree:
Elstree, remember me
I had a part in a B-movie
(Sidebar: There is actually no Elstree Studio! It’s a town in England with a bunch of different studios most of which are not actually in that town.)
But (there is of course a but). In that magic year 1982, Trevor Horn wrote several songs for an otherwise fairly undistinguished pop duo – Thereza Bazar and David Day, otherwise known as Dollar. And one of them was a haunting, wonderful half-remembered song that I was startled to discover wasn’t officially a Buggles after all: Videotheque.
There’s a twining set of themes in this early Trevor Horn work – of nostalgia, fashion, film, illusion. For me they all come together, echoing the spirit of the early 1980s, in this song. A retro-futuristic image of holographic virtual reality (that we didn’t even have the words for then); an imagined space somewhere between film noir, disco, and cyberpunk, constructed out of the romantic ruins of lost media and the dawn of a new glimmering machine age.
In 2015, we’re approaching that space for the first time, yet it feels like we’ve been here before. And we have.
When the VJ shoots the beam
I take my partner from the screen
And hold her close, I hold her close
One more chance to make it right
Holding hands in black and white
I’ll meet you there, I’ll meet you there
Leave my mind back in my room
Maybe I will blow it soon and fall in love
At the videotheque (the videotheque)
We can dance forever
At the videotheque (the videotheque)
We control it all
At the videotheque (the videotheque)
Ghosts are only lovers on the screen
Only pictures on the wall
They don’t mean a thing at all
And I don’t care
When the visions start to form
The same illusion takes us all
And you are there, and you are there
Slowly senses leaving me
Once the two are in 3D we play the game
At the videotheque (the videotheque)
We can dance forever
At the videotheque (the videotheque)
We can fall in love
At the videotheque (the videotheque)
Ghosts are only lovers on the screen
The videotheque
The videotheque
The videotheque
Only ghosts are lovers on the screen