Buggles Bonanza!

June 8th, 2008

Yeah, I know—I’ve missed to Friday Fiveheads in the past two weeks. I’ve been so busy trying to fix my fiction site, Footnotes to the Human Species, that I haven’t even thought about music…other than as a soundtrack to my endless hours of trying to debug PHP code and MySQL functions. However, all of my problems with Footnotes just disappeared yesterday—don’t ask me how, because I haven’t a clue: they just stopped, and I’m not gonna jinx myself by enquiring too deeply.

Anyway, YouTube. YouTube is the greatest thing in the world for old New Wavers like myself: just about every obscure old Gary Numan, Tenpole Tudor, Landscape, etc. video in the world has been posted to YouTube for crabby old post-punks like myself to watch and wistfully mourn the days when MTV actually played music videos…and the videos were good (if cheesy and oftimes ridiculous). YouTube, in fact, has even provided me with access to videos I’ve never seen before—videos that I’ve heard rumours about but did not think I would ever actually see…such as The Buggles’ video for “I Am A Camera.”

Well, just the other day, I went looking for Buggles videos…and lo! Witness the awesomeness!

Dear gods, how I love that song. The video somewhat cheapens it—I mean, what’s up with Trevor Horn just lying on the floor and taking his glasses off and putting them back on?—but isn’t it great to finally see the video from one of your alltime favorite songs?

I still regard The Age of Plastic as one of the most perfect albums of all time. There simply isn’t one track on the album that isn’t epic and incredible. Whereas the video for “I Am A Camera,” just doesn’t seem to fit the song, the video for “Living in the Plastic Age” is just perfect: it complements the song’s frantic, plasticine futurism so well I can’t now listen to the song without envisioning the video. I simply must get a plastic jumpsuit now. You know…to go with my Hammer pants.

“Clean, Clean” is one of my favorite Buggles tracks, and seeing them playing it live on British TV is an interesting experience, even if the audio and the video don’t quite sync up. Ohwell, it’s still the Buggles, and they’re still live! While we’re at it…here’s another live video, featuring the band playing their greatest hit, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” again for the BBC:

And finally…this is just amazing. In 2004, for a charity show in Britain, Trevor Horn assembled the entire original crew with whom he’d recorded “Video Killed the Radio Star” and performed this incredible live version of the song. It’s the closest I believe I will ever get to seeing The Buggles live—but, of course, everytime I’ve said that about a band, they reassemble and go on tour within a year or two, so let’s hope my mojo is still working on that front. Anyway, here’s the video: