Songs with Earlier Histories Than the Hit Version

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Tagged: The Buggles

Video Killed the Radio Star

First recorded by Bruce Wooley & the Camera Club (1978).
Hit version by The Buggles (US #40/UK #1/CAN #6/AUS #1/IRE #1/ITA #1/SWE #1/JPN #1 1980).

From the wiki: “‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ was written by Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes and Bruce Woolley in 1978, and was first recorded by Bruce Woolley & the Camera Club (with Thomas Dolby on keyboards) for the album English Garden.

“Horn, Downes and Woolley wrote ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ in an hour of one afternoon in 1978, six months before it was first recorded. 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, provided inspiration for ‘Video’, and he felt ‘an era was about to pass.’ Horn claimed that the German synth-group Kraftwerk was another influence of the song: ‘…It was like you could see the future when you heard Kraftwerk, something new is coming, something different. Different rhythm section, different mentality.’