Sunday, October 8, 2017

The Buggles - One of the most important british bands ever?

I have this theory. The Buggles are one of the most important bands that Great Britain has ever produced. Bear with me on this one, after all this is the great country that produced The Smiths, Black Sabbath, The Beatles, The Cure, The Sex Pistols, PJ Harvey, The Slits, and an endlessly long list of groups to follow on from that. Despite the one hit The Buggles are very much an anomaly. The reasons behind the name of the band and title of their first album alone are bizzare. The name coming from a strange vision of a mad scientist creating fake alternate versions of famous bands (The Buggles -The Beatles) and the album 'The age of plastic' a reference to the band being a 'plastic group'. The Buggles may have actually foreseen the modern era where interchangeable DJ's and talent show starts rule the airwaves. I'm not saying that The Buggles are not one of the most important British bands because of the incredible success Trevor Horn gained as a hit song producer since then or the fact that the duo's time in YES helped the prog giants survive during one of the odder periods of their history.
What made the Buggles special is the joyful silliness of many of their songs. The song titles on their début album alone are as gleefully deranged as the music with in. 'Johnny on the monorail', 'Kid Dynamo', 'I love you (miss robot)' and 'clean clean' are more than just pointless exercises in silliness but also subtly clever pop songs that take in elements of 'techno-pop', new wave, post punk and even progressive rock. 'Video killed the radio star' and one of the follow up singles 'Elstree' both share a nostalgia for a Britain that they may have barely remembered.
I'm saying that The Buggles are important and influential because there is an odd trend in the UK for bands who are as clever as they are silly. A trend which has peaked over the past decade with British bands such as Django Django, (early) Calvin Harris, Hot Chip, Metronomy, Glass Animals, Public Service Broadcasting, Teleman, Everything Everything, Alt-J, Dutch Uncles, Wild Beasts, LA Priest, Superfood, The 1975
and many more.
I see a similar mix of silliness, cleverness, genre mixing and Englishness in many of the bands I mentioned above. PSB's dancing spacemen, Glass Animals' pineapple fetish, Django Django's Hawaiian shirts, Metronomy's fake girl vocals, and pretty much everything about Hot Chip are reminiscent of what The Buggles started on their 1980 début. The bands I love most are those can be clever without being pretentious, fun yet self aware. I believe that more so than Talking Heads, or Sparks, this is something The Buggles have helped influence. The Buggles were so ahead of their time that they helped kill the radio star themselves. 'Video Killed The Radio Star' was famously the first music video to be played on MTV, scoring their only hit in the USA years after it was first released in the UK. It seems fitting that this slightly obscure band from the early 80's sound in far better company amongst today's indie bands than the new wave bands that succeeded them.

https://play.google.com/music/listen?hl=en&tab=wY#/album/B7cm2t7pa6jcngqkmy6z7eibtem/The+Buggles/The+Age+Of+Plastic+(Remastered)

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