PICTURES CAME AND BROKE YOUR HEART

Trouser Press, May 1982
The Buggles
Fade Away/On TV



There are one-hit wonders, and then there are one-hit wonders...

The Buggles are of course best known for Video Killed the Radio Star.

I've always thought of fellow one-hit wonder Pop Muzik by M as an aural twin of Video Killed the Radio Star.

Both songs burble along with bleeps, bloops, bubbles, and highly processed vocals.

They are crisp, cool New Wave Lite in colorful aluminum cans.

But where Pop Muzik is a reverie, Video Killed the Radio Star is a lament. It is Helen Twelvetrees cursing the dawn of the talkies...

Another key point of divergence for the two songs is their performance on the 1979 US charts. Pop Muzik made it all the way to number 1, while Video Killed the Radio Star just scraped into the top 40.

But two years later, the iconic status of the latter song would be sealed when it became the first video played on MTV. (And somewhat shockingly, Pop Muzik was not even among the first 200 videos aired by the station.)

This clear flexi contains two songs by the Buggles that are not Video Killed the Radio Star: Fade Away and On TV. Both tracks play like the intersection of synth-pop and prog that they are-- kind of like Heaven 17, if Heaven 17 were unconcerned with making you shake your groove thang...

TRYING TO TAKE THIS ALL IN

Trouser Press, April 1982
XTC
Blame the Weather/Tissue Tigers (The Arguers)



What better way to start 2012 than ecstatically...

This flexi is a plumb pretty piece of clear red plastic.

Both Blame the Weather and Tissue Tigers (The Arguers) saw the light of commercial day as B-sides of Senses Working Overtime. They are very strong tracks, and only when measured against something as transcendently great as their A-side do they sound like B-sides.

Back in the summer of '83, I took a job doing landscaping work. I was truly awful at it-- I had none of the practical sense to clean a yard efficiently, nor the strong back and clear lungs to do it for any meaningful stretch of time.

I drove my '73 Ford Maverick to the job each morning. The car didn't have a radio, so I'd sling my boombox across the back seat and let it suck down D batteries. I wore out a copy of XTC's Waxworks cassette that summer, many times reaching over the seat to hit auto-reverse so that I could hear Senses Working Overtime again.

The foreman kept me on the job for a month or so as a favor to my brother, but ultimately we all came to our senses and I moved on...

COLUMN INCHES

Saw a headline today that Scorpions are calling it quits, which reminded me of my '05 interview with the band's Rudolf Schenker...

Halten rocking, mein dudes. Halten rocking.