Hooray for the one-click purchase. Reading one of the music monthlies, I saw that the Buggles’s second album from 1981, Adventures in Modern Recording, had been released on CD, digitally remastered, with ten extra tracks I clearly had to hear. A mere week or so later, the package came through the letterbox, slightly battered but still just about recognisable as a CD. Anyone who suggests that Amazon has taken away the joy of shopping simply has no soul.
I did have the album, once, long ago. When you lend someone an album that you don’t much like or that is easy to replace, they always return it promptly and in good order. I’m not sure who had Adventures in Modern Recording but if they aren’t dead by now they bloody well should be. If I didn’t make much fuss at the time it’s probably because, during the brief period of their existence, Buggles were painfully unfashionable. ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ was the first song ever played on MTV, and in the long run may have been proved wrong. Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, who had met while auditioning for Tina Charles’s band (the shame!), wrote the rest of their first album, The Age of Plastic, while promoting that single. But what an album! I bought it and played it a thousand times. Everybody else was going on about some dreary northern group called Joy Division. They’ll never come to anything, I thought. Give me the Buggles any day, with their great tunes and their studio trickery and their curious amalgam of silly science fiction and nostalgia, so that every song sounded simultaneously of the minute and timelessly old-fashioned. This was studio-built clever-clever British pop, working from a template set by side two of Abbey Road and refined by 10cc, the Electric Light Orchestra and Paul McCartney himself with Wings. This was the sort of music I liked (and still like) more than any other. But 10cc were in decline by 1979, ELO had gone disco and McCartney was worn out. The Buggles were their obvious heirs. The problem is that not many people bought The Age of Plastic, so Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes went and joined Yes.
I was a little put out, to say the least.
The one album they made with the gnarled old progsters was called Drama, and featured the usual daft Roger Dean painting on the cover of an imaginary landscape with icebergs and the shadow of a cheetah (because you get a lot of them in the Arctic). Horn replaced Jon Anderson and did a decent vocal impersonation; Downes, the keyboard player, came in for Rick Wakeman, who I believe has left Yes more times than any other person alive. Pop sensibilities had to be left at the door: this was prog at its most uncompromising. I hated Drama more than any album released before or since by anyone.
But it didn’t last, fortunately, and soon the Buggles were back, writing the songs for Adventures in Modern Recording. On day one in the studio, Downes told Horn he was off to form Asia, the fearlessly tedious AOR behemoth he has led ever since. Horn used their demos for three or four songs and wrote and recorded the remainder with other collaborators. It’s much more electronic and machine-tooled than The Age of Plastic, there isn’t a single there, and the album died a thousand commercial deaths. But it’s astoundingly inventive and its shiny new mix sounds glorious. (The extra tracks are, as you’d expect, wholly redundant.) The album is almost a manifesto for Horn’s later production career, which gave us ABC’s The Lexicon of Love, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Yes’s ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ and much more. It’s dated, but not in a bad way. And whatever happened to Joy Division, eh? Who gives a monkey’s about them any more?
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