'Video Killed The Radio Star' by The Buggles: The making of the era-defining MTV hit

21 January 2026, 14:05 | Updated: 21 January 2026, 14:07

The internet may have killed the video star, but before then...

When MTV launched in 1981, there was only one song that really could have kicked things off - 'Video Killed The Radio Star' by The Buggles.

Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes' electronic masterpiece heralded the dawn of the visual age and seemed to foretell the death of radio and the rise of the music TV era.

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By the end of 2025, it was very much fair to say that the rise of the World Wide Web and streaming in particular had pretty much done for music television (or certainly Music Television).

MTV still exists as a brand and series of TV channels, but in the UK and Ireland the main music video channels MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV, and MTV Live all stopped broadcasting on December 31.

The last song played? 'Video Killed The Radio Star', of course.

The Buggles' massive hit has its own incredible life before and after MTV got its paws on it, which we take a deep diver into below.

Who wrote 'Video Killed The Radio Star'?

The Buggles - Video Killed The Radio Star (Official Music Video)

'Video Killed The Radio Star' is credited to the Buggles trio of Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes and Bruce Woolley.

"Trevor and Bruce had already written the bulk of 'Video Killed the Radio Star' when I joined," Downes told The Guardian. "I worked on the final version."

Downes added his jingling magic to the song in the intro and middle eight, and you can feel his additions by playing both versions back to back.

It was an epic production, taking over three months to put together.

What is 'Video Killed The Radio Star' actually about?

With Music TeleVision not yet in existence, it's not really about music videos taking over from the radio, but something more broad about the burgeoning electronic age and the shifting of eras.

Like the contemporaneous Kraftwerk, both the music and the lyrics explore the impacts – both positive and negative – of the rise of technology

It's also informed, like many songs of the time, of the memories of the young artists coming of age listening to teh first wave of rock 'n' roll on the radio ("I heard you on the wireless back in '52").

There's also a healthy bit of influence from JG Ballard's short story The Sound Sweep, which tells the story of a mute boy in a world with no music hoovering up bits who happens across an opera singer in a sewer.

Who played on and produced 'Video Killed The Radio Star'?

*THE VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR* - THE BUGGLES - 1979

Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes are both accomplished multi-instrumentalists but they had a bit of help putting 'Video Killed The Radio Star' together.

So joining Geoff (keyboards and percussion) and Trevor (lead vocals and bass guitar), you had the backing vocals of Debi Doss and Linda Jardim-Allen.

Depending on who you listen to, the guitars came from Horn and some old tape from Woolley, or maybe from Dave Birch. Drums came from Downes or were added by Phil Towner.

And while Horn was to become of the most in-demand producers of the decade, 'Video Killed The Radio Star' wasn't entirely his baby.

The production credits have gone to The Buggles as a whole (so Horn, Downes and possibly Woolley too), with an apparent bit of assistance from legend Thomas Dolby.

John Dent mastered the song, while ZTT's co-founder Gary Langan and another 1980s production superstar in waiting Hugh Padgham, also were involved in mixing or engineering.

When did 'Video Killed The Radio Star' get released and where did it get in the charts?

The Buggles' 'Video Killed The Radio Star' was released on September 7, 1979, backed by 'Kid Dynamo'.

It only scraped to number 40 on the Billboard Hot 100, but went all the way to number one in the UK.

It's worth mentioning that ex-Buggles man Bruce Woolley actually released a version of 'Video Killed The Radio Star' around the same time as his former bandmates.

Video Killed the Radio Star (US Version)

Credited to Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club with 'Get Away William' on the flip, Woolley's version was (depending on your source, and it'd hard to be sure after all these years), released either just before The Buggles in June 1979, or just after in October 1979.

"Bruce tried to stop our version of Video and released his more straightforward version before ours, but it wasn’t a hit," said Downes. "Ours is a more complex, modern-sounding pop song."

There was crossover in the records, with Buggles co-producer Thomas Dolby and guitarist Dave Birch playing keyboards and guitars respectively on the Camera Club version.

Who has covered 'Video Killed The Radio Star'?

Ben Folds - Video Killed The Radio Star | New Year's Eve, Sydney 2018

With apologies to Bruce Woolley (and the Camera Club), we think it's more than fair to call The Buggles version of 'Video Killed The Radio Star' the definitive one, whether or not it was actually the "original".

And most of the covers since then have clearly taken a lead from Horn and Downes version of the track.

There haven't been as many high profile reworks as you might think, perhaps because the song is just so distinctive.

But it's worth a shout out to Erasure, Ben Folds Five, The Presidents of the United States of America, Asia and Pentatonix.

Robbie Williams- Video Killed The Radio Star - live at Electric Proms 2009

Robbie Williams performed it with Trevor Horn at the Electric Proms in 2009, the same year he released his Horn-produced album Reality Killed The Video Star.

The song was sampled by Will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas and Nicki Minaj for their single 'Check It Out' and Lil Tecca's 'Owa Owa'.

And we've also got a horror film coming soon called Video Killed the Radio Star, a Brit chiller set in 1979 starring Luke Brandon Field and Harriet Cains.