A writer for the Guardian UK was forced to listen to every album released in October in a period of one week. He lost his mind.
But now it is the early hours of Monday morning, and I am listening to a CD reissue of The Age of Plastic, the debut album by Buggles. In case you don’t remember, Buggles were a duo featuring the famous producer Trevor Horn on vocals. They had a number one with Video Killed the Radio Star, then vanished. It isn’t so much the album itself that is the problem, although it has a song on it called Astroboy (and the Proles on Parade) and is awful beyond measure. It is the idea that someone, somewhere in a record company had bothered to reissue it. At 3am, that decision suddenly seems symbolic of everything bad that people say about the music industry: it’s wasteful, it’s stupid, it has no interest in actual music. (full story)