Los Buggles saltaron a la fama con la canción Video Killed the Radio Star, cuyo video fue usado por la MTV para inaugurar sus transmisiones. Despúes de más de 20 años de haber oído dicha canción, me entero a través de una entrevista en The Guardian, que Trevor Horn se inspiró en un cuento de J. G. Ballard (uno de mis escritores favoritos) para componerla. Sorpresas que uno encuentra. El resto de la entrevista interesante también.
Horn is fascinated by technology partly for the dehumanising impact it has on society. «Me and my friends were obsessed with a song called Warm Leatherette by the Normal, which is based on [JG Ballard’s novel] Crash. The opening scene in the book features a head-on car crash where the guy is looking at a woman whose husband is between them, dead on the bonnet of the car. They are trapped in the smashed-up cars, facing each other, and that’s the most incredible image. Ballard was a big inspiration at the time – Video Killed the Radio Star came from a Ballard story called Sound Sweep in which a boy goes around old buildings with a vacuum cleaner that sucks up sound. I had a feeling that we were reflecting an age in the same way that he was.»