Why did Yes want…The Buggles – Part 1 – 552

Hi everyone. Thanks for using my photo of my Drama promo display. Kevin, surprise-I don’t have a signed copy of The Buggles first album! But I do have a pre-Buggles vinyl album that I’ve never heard discussed anywhere, is rarely listed under Geoff’s or Trevor’s names, and only read about once. It has Geoff & Trevor and was produced by Trevor, in ’78. The band was called Chromium, and it also included Anne Dudley & Hans Zimmer! The album is called Star to Star. It’s worth finding & listening to it. You can hear some of the sounds that are part of The Buggles album. Geoff signed my copy in 2012. Geoff said he hadn’t seen it in many years! I’ll take a photo & post it on the Facebook page.

I do have the Buggles first album & do love it. In fact I played it all on my then radio show upon release. It was considered a bit avant-garde and new waveish in ’79.

Like you, Kevin, I’ve sung for Queen Elizabeth II, and I’ve also seen Yes play to her successor. That was in 2004, and Geoff Downes and Trevor Horn were part of the ensemble and played as Buggles earlier in the evening. Which brings us to…
As a Tormato-loving 13-year-old, I was listening to BBC Radio One’s “Friday Rock Show” in 1980 when Tommy Vance announced that Jon and Rick had left Yes and that Trevor and Geoff had joined, sounding as though he was reading from a press release. I was intrigued. I’d definitely heard “Video” and somehow knew of the “heart police / cardiac arrest” line from “Plastic Age”.
My adolescent budget didn’t extend to actually buying “The Age of Plastic” the minute I heard the news so it wasn’t until the release of “Drama” that I heard a long-player with the new guys on. I never heard their own album.
In fact, it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I eventually came into possession of an illicit C90 containing both “The Age of Plastic” and “Adventures In Modern Recording”. I think the two albums complement each other beautifully, with the latter pointing to subsequent work by Horn, but the first one having perhaps a more consistent manifesto.
What I can hear on that first album that fed into Yes is Horn’s distinct lyrical style. Yes’ lyrics had begun to concern the modern and dystopian in small parts of “Tormato”, but Horn brought to Yes his influence from new-wave SF author JG Ballard. His words have a different kind of abstraction to Jon Anderson’s more spiritual formations. There is no more Ballardian a setting for a song than the deserted airfield of “Fly From Here”!
The other confessed Ballard reader to release an album in 1980 was John Foxx, whose “Metamatic” that year shows even more of the influence than the two albums Trevor Horn sang lyrics on.
I didn’t know any of this at the time. I would discover Foxx, Buggles and Ballard as my world later expanded. I saw Yes on the “Drama” tour and heard Geoff deliver “Video Killed the Radio Star” in the same grandiose way Rick Wakeman had played Handel the previous decade.
And then, many years later, having replaced my dodgy C90 (which was taken in a burglary of my student house – how’s that for poetic justice?) with revenue-raising CDs, I actually saw Buggles live in Notting Hill in 2010 and they played all of “The Age of Plastic”.
It was worth the wait.