Development
Buggles member Trevor Horn has said that the short story "The Sound-Sweep", in which the title character—a mute boy vacuuming up stray music in a world without it—comes upon an opera singer hiding in a sewer. He also felt "an era was about to pass." The theme of the song is thus nostalgia, which is also echoed in the tone of the music. (The vocals are initially limited in bandwidth, giving a "telephone" effect typical of early broadcasts.) The lyrics refer to a period of technological change in the 1960s, the desire to remember the past and the disappointment that children of the current generation would not appreciate the past. In the 1950s and early 1960s, radio was an important medium for many, through which "stars" were created.
The song was written by Horn, Geoff Downes and Bruce Woolley above a monumental stonemason's in Wimbledon Park London in 1978. Horn has claimed that Woolley was primarily responsible for the musical content, while Horn wrote most of the words. Woolley was responsible for the addition of the words 'put the blame on VTR'.
Since Horn wasn’t the world’s best singer, he wanted a sort of telephone voice to help disguise his lead vocal of the song. He worked with Gary Langan to put the recording of the vocal through some graphics and lots of compression. Without any dynamics left by the time it had been recorded, the vocal was played through a Vox AC30, and then was compressed and EQ’ed again. The two also had tried using a bullhorn, but they found it to be really harsh, in the task of making, as Langan recalls, "the vocal loud without cutting your head off. It still had to retain some softness to it, and it was the AC30 that really gave it that quality."
Gary Langan stated, “My work on ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ seemed to go on forever. I must have mixed that track four or five times. Remember, there was no total recall, so we just used to start again. We’d do a mix and three or four days later Trevor would go, ‘It’s not happening. We need to do this and we need to do that.’ The sound of the bass drum was one of his main concerns, along with his vocal and the backing vocals. It was all about how dry and how loud they should be in the mix without the whole thing sounding ridiculous. As it turned out, that record still had the loudest bass drum ever for its time."
The first version of the song was recorded by Woolley & the Camera Club (with Thomas Dolby on keyboards) for his album English Garden, and later by The Buggles.
Read more about this topic: Video Killed The Radio Star
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