MTV opened with a song about the radio star

To watch their new music channel’s first broadcast, the people who created it crossed the river. It was the night leading into August 1, 1981. Their offices were in New York, but the channel was not yet available there, so staff gathered at a New Jersey bar that could receive MTV. Before they could show music to the world, they needed to find a television showing their own channel. ¹

The first music video was the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Music television began with a song declaring that video had killed its predecessor. The title sounds like a confident slogan for a new era. Yet behind it were musicians who loved technology while worrying about the people its advances might leave forgotten.

The Buggles — Video Killed the Radio StarOfficial music video from 1979

This song wasn't made for MTV

The song had already become a British hit almost two years before MTV launched. A new station in 1981 chose a hit from 1979 to open its broadcast. ² It had neither commissioned the song nor inspired its writing. Knowing what came later can make it sound destined for that night, but the two stories began separately.

Trevor Horn was a session bassist. He played covers for budget hit compilations and worked in Tina Charles’s band. Listening repeatedly to backing tracks she brought home taught him when instruments should enter and when leaving something out could make a song clearer. ³ Even while watching a popular singer perform up close, his interest increasingly turned to shaping sound in the studio.

Horn wrote “Video Killed the Radio Star” with Bruce Woolley, and Geoff Downes helped develop it. Woolley recorded the same song separately with his band, the Camera Club, and released that version first. The version later heard most widely was Horn and Downes’s recording as the Buggles. ⁴ The familiar voice was not the only way the song had taken shape.

A futuristic sound that missed the old radio

Horn and Woolley read science fiction and listened to new electronic music. To Horn, Kraftwerk sounded like an unfamiliar future. But they did not have unrestricted access to the equipment that might realize their ideas. The future imagined in the song and the resources of the studio were some distance apart. ³

Listen again and the opening male vocal sounds confined, as though coming from an old radio. The voices and keyboards that follow feel wider and brighter. Nostalgia for an older sound and excitement about new technology share the same track. Recording engineer Gary Langan recalled that Horn wanted the sound to leap toward the listener. Vocal texture and instrumental placement were carefully shaped to create that effect. ⁵

The title announces an ending, but the song is not simply triumphant. Its melody seems to miss a voice once heard often. It can be heard as welcoming musical change while looking back at the people that change leaves behind. That made it both an opening for a new channel and a song of longing for an earlier era.

People kept playing to sound like machines

That futuristic recording was made by people playing instruments. ¹⁰ Horn recalled borrowing a sequencer he could not get to work properly. Without a machine to repeat the notes as intended, the musicians played them and added echo to achieve a similar effect. ³ Behind passages that sound effortlessly computer-controlled were hands on keyboards and players holding the beat.

Recording the backing track took a long time. Horn remembered persuading an exhausted drummer to try one more take. ³ While making a song about technology changing music, the players were trying to get through the same passage without mistakes. Little of that effort is audible in the finished recording’s precision.

Hans Zimmer appears behind the keyboards

Video director Russell Mulcahy imagined a strange laboratory for the song. A woman descends into a transparent tube, and an old radio shares the screen with an unfamiliar future. Mulcahy later described the tube sequence himself. ⁶ Rather than merely filming a performance, the video tried to turn the song’s changing eras into a short film.

One of the people briefly visible behind the keyboards is Hans Zimmer, later famous as a film composer. ⁷ Appearing in the video and contributing to the recording are not the same thing. Horn described Zimmer’s skill at creating synthesizer sounds, while Downes was already an accomplished keyboard player. ¹⁰ The two musicians seen together had different roles in making music.

Recognizing a familiar face leads back to the studio of that period. People who would become famous in different fields were still listening to one another and working with equipment. One played keyboards, another shaped sounds, and another filmed them. Even working on the same song involved very different tasks.

Music television borrowed from radio

Something similar happened at MTV. The aim was to put music on screen, but people developing the format drew on radio experience. Videos followed one another like records in a radio schedule, with presenters linking the songs. People from radio also helped develop promotional clips and the logo. ⁸ A new habit of watching music borrowed from the older practice of listening to it.

The Buggles’ song did open the channel. It was not, however, the world’s first music video: its distinction was being the first shown on MTV. ² Placing an existing song and video at the start of a new channel gave them another meaning. The moment a recording is played can shape its history as much as its original release.

The song stayed as its makers moved on

Neither Buggles member necessarily wanted a lifelong career as a video star. Downes recalled that he and Horn were more studio people than natural pop stars. They joined Yes and later continued making music in their own ways. ⁹ Becoming the new channel’s first faces did not mean choosing the kind of stardom it represented.

Watching “Video Killed the Radio Star” brings together the staff waiting in a New Jersey bar and the musicians repeating a backing track in a London studio. Their future was not yet settled history. Someone had to finish the song; someone had to get the broadcast on air. The night now remembered as the beginning of music television opened with the work of people trying to finish those tasks.