The Buggles were an English new wave band formed in London, England in 1977 by singer and bassist Trevor Horn and keyboardist Geoffrey Downes. They are best known for their 1979 debut single "Video Killed the Radio Star" that topped the UK Singles Chart and reached number one in 15 other countries. The duo released their first album, The Age of Plastic, in January 1980 with "Video Killed the Radio Star" as its lead single. Soon after the album's release, Horn and Downes joined the progressive rock band

In early 1981, following the disbanding of Yes, Downes and Horn reconvened at Sarm East Studios to record The Buggles' second studio album, Adventures in Modern Recording. However, Downes left the group on the day the recording of the album was meant to begin to help form Asia with Howe citing musical differences. Horn was angry that Island Records renegotiated publishing terms for Downes to join Asia, but never did for Horn since, in his words, he was "washed up, career-wise". To fix this problem, Jill Sinclair made a deal with the French label Carrere, whose leader Claude Carrere, whom Horn described as a "very nice man", helped fund the album. Horn was now left to complete much of the album with several additional personnel.  Released in November 1981, Adventures in Modern Recording involved Horn experimenting with numerous production techniques, especially with the heavy use of sampling with the Fairlight CMI, with instruments from the computer such as the drums on "Inner City" and the big band jazz sounds on "Vermillion Sands". These same sampling techniques would later be used in records he produced such as Slave To The Rhythm by Grace Jones, Yes's 90125, Art of Noise's The Seduction of Claude Debussy and Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Welcome to the Pleasuredome. While the album garnered little attention in the United Kingdom, Horn recalled in 2010 that the album was a commercial success in France, and in the United States the album peaked at number 161 on the American Billboard 200. By the time of the album's release, when Horn was also producing ABC's album The Lexicon of Love, he decided to take Sinclair's advice that he always was meant to be a producer rather than a performer or songwriter, thus the performance of "Lenny" on a TV show in the Netherlands, with ABC as the backing band, marked the end of the Buggles. As Horn recalled when he was interviewed after the show:  "I'll never forget it because the guy said to me, 'well, things are not looking so good for you', and I said 'how do you mean?' And he said 'well, you know, your first record was a big hit now this record is number eleven, so your career is going downhill'. And I said 'well you know what? You see these guys, this is a band called ABC and I'm a producer now I don't really care about this stuff, I'm just doing it to promote the record. And I may be on the skids as an artist but things are looking up in other areas. End of interview. Fuck off.'"

Ask a question about this article.
What was their experience with Sarm East?