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In a feat of rarely-realised and prescient self-awareness, the new-fangled MTV launched on 1 August 1981 with a premiere of The Buggles’ ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’. The one-hit wonder for the British band was - and remains to this day - a sharp and addictive hit: the new-wave nous, the cacophony of instruments, the swooning bridge all make for a truly timeless listen. Lest we forget the music video - filmed in one day - that the song hit with, a maximalist budget-breaker that became the first ever music video to air on MTV forty years ago this August.

It was, for all intents and purposes, the world’s first music video smash: a full-formed narrative visual that sat with the song’s themes and put the artists on a new kind of pedestal. Here, we start our investigation into some of the music videos we’ve gotten ever since: the ones that have burned our retinas; the ones that have made sex symbols of unknowns; the ones that changed the way the medium works completely.

On ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’, we join Trevor Horn in a high contrast effect as he leans in to sing those opening lines: “I heard you on the wireless back in ’52”. A young girl (who would now be about fifty years old) interacts with a comically-large radio while wearing a fetching pair of green socks paired with sandals. Soon, she evolves into a lurex-clad woman, who represents the scene-stealing television and its futuristic connotations.

There’s a hell of a lot going on in this shoot: surely part of the reason why the video was chosen as MTV’s first. While most songs of the era and before featured unfussy lip syncing on stage, this Russell Mulcahy-directed film goes well-in with nauseous hand-held zooming, glitzy costumes, early SFX and ramshackle set design. Consider, if you will, the scene at 2 minutes nine seconds, in which televisions fell a bunch of radios, revealing a paper-thin flooring covered in a hasty icing of rubble, which takes us out of the narrative with its flagrant slap-dash finish. Still, on the whole it’s a high-budget affair for the time, and one that reflects the new-fangled hedonism of the tune nicely. 

Horn called The Buggles "a robot Beatles" in an interview with The Guardian in 2018, and those influences can certainly be seen here in modish cyberman suits, alongside an apparently unconscious fetishism of everything Bowie. Some might dismiss the roughly tugged foil paper background, the less-than-smooth employent of fly harnessing and the goofy costumes worn by Horn and his bandmates. For all of these things and more, critciism would be fair. And yet very few moments of this landmark video can be said to be uncharming; only a true fun-sponge could level serious criticism with a straight face. 

Maximalism and hedonism are the keys here: precedents that seem to have informed the following forty years, in which we have had progressively more batshit, expensive and inventive music videos. 

Stick around for Video Stars: our new column reviewing some of the music videos that we have been gifted since MTV launched forty years ago.

More about: The BugglesVideo Stars