Buggles

In the year of our Lord 1978, Downes (future Asia member, who would later also work with Horn himself during the Yes' second act) and Woolley write the basic chords, and Horn fits them with a nostalgic lyric based on a short sci-fi-music story, complete with a simple, almost innocent refrain, the very essence of singability. The song is too explosive to be handed off to some lightweight singer with a fleeting hit. The three go their separate ways: on one side, Woolley will try, in vain, to find success in the States by recording his own version of the fledgling song (with a young Thomas Dolby on electronic keyboards), still somewhat rooted in glam; on the other, the Horn-Downes duo renames itself Buggles and records an infinitely more elaborate version, produced and post-produced, even ornate and baroque, destined to become a musical icon, full stop.

The motto "the man who invented the '80s" fits right here. Technically released as a single (complete with a cutting-edge video) in 1979, the track is the absolute spark of synth-pop, electro-pop and dance-pop, glimpsed in all its dazzling beauty a minute before detonation. But that's hardly the end of it.

First of all, there's the structure of the song, which is only partly pop. It opens with an enchanted, shimmering piano touch, electronically "treated"; the accompaniment literally blossoms without wasting any time: a proto-techno beat, oboe, strings, flourishes of colourful keyboards, orchestral synth. An icon within the icon is then the duet between Horn's gorgeously "radio-ready" voice (an effect that cost the producers long mixing sessions) and the female voice lost among operatic trills, ye-ye backing vocals — the famous "ouah-ouah" — siren-like vocalise, as well as, of course, the motto-refrain that gives the track its title.

After the first part of the chorus, the arrangement grows even richer, ramping up the tension until the second part arrives. From here on, modulations and variations take over. First a splendid bridge with a striking break, then the return of the opening, then the chorus again with a forceful modulation, a variation built on the key of the verse, and a swelling choral surge. There's barely time to register yet another layer added to the arrangement (a thread of a guitar solo) before everything cuts out, only to reappear in a new, almost pastoral chamber-music variation, perhaps the most moving of all.

The ever-shifting arrangement, the utterly consumable production, the elaborate structure: all of this makes it the most commanding of pop songs, a monument to the duplicity of commercial music — nostalgia for the past and longing for bygone days as its content, yet expressed through a high-definition technological language projected into the future as its form.

But it's the musical plane that is without doubt the most interesting. The pop song, besides making splendid use of song form, quietly and invisibly absorbs classical devices. There's a theme-and-variations structure, there's the operatic duet-dialogue re-translated into synthetic, alienated form, there's sonata form through the exposition of two themes and their development, there's a ternary minuet form. One could even glimpse a concerto form, complete with an improvised final cadenza, a free play with some of the track's key building blocks.

Add to that the fact that it was also the first modern hit, covered to exhaustion and hummed the world over ever since, even horribly mangled in TV commercials, the song that officially opened MTV's broadcasts in 1981 in an almost self-mocking way (the new generation of videos that would kill the good old days of radio, mutatis mutandis of real music), essentially the beginning of retronuevo before anyone had even approached or understood what the nuevo was. What more could you want from a song?