Day 87: The Buggles – The Age of Plastic

I read up on this a bit because I realized aside from the usual “First video on MTV” thing I didn’t know anything else about The Buggles, including but not limited to: what the rest of their music sounded like, what country they were from, how many albums they put out, etc. MTV did not invent the one-hit-wonder, right? Surely this was a band and not some kind of single-function apparatus?

I can only imagine the befuddlement of the citizen of the 1980s who fell in love with “Video Killed The Radio Star” and bought The Plastic Age on the strength of that. Instead of that charming hit (in not my opinion, that song is a pustule on my brain that refuses to stop secreting), people get a nearly-conceptual album of synth-charged progressive pop/rock. In fact, after their first album came out, the two principal members of The Buggles would join Yes for an album. But how does something like that happen? In my opinion, “Video…” does not accurately represent the style of the album proper. “Video” was fun, damn near ebullient, with its gratingly high tones and sweet-on-the-cusp-of-irritating vocal hook, but move past it and you have the exciting, dramatic “Kid Dynamo” and “I Love You (Miss Robot)”. They are both much more straight-faced than their hit-single predecessors “Video…” and “Living in the Plastic Age”, and seem to reject its immediacy. From there the album settles into a slower pace. Even when the tempo ratchets up, as in “Clean, Clean”, the songs seem less intended to delight the proles, and more for introspection and analysis. The songwriting throughout is rich and detailed, and rewards close listening.

It’s clear from a listen that “Video…” and “Clean, Clean” are the two most immediate, accessible songs on the album, aside from maybe the title track. The Buggles originally were a trio of songwriters. Bruce Woolley wrote most of “Video…”, at which point they submitted a demo to Island Records without any other material ready to record. Island signed them immediately, and it combusted. They got to work on writing an actual album, but Woolley didn’t end up with songwriting credits for anything but those two very tracks.

While the band sound is consistent between those two tracks and the rest of the album, it’s clear that the two consistent members of The Buggles had their own ideas about what to do with it. Woolley gave the album its two hits, freeing them to write a very self-serious series of meditations on life in a futuristic age. It introduces a whole new undertone to “Video…” to know that rather than being kind of cute and winky, the sentiment of the song was actually probably rather serious. They were clearly a closet prog band. Prog bands are never not serious.