The Age of Plastic

Throughout 1979, The Buggles, which by 1979-1980 would be a duo of future-record producer Trevor Horn and keyboardist Geoff Downes, spent all their time writing, recording, and mixing for their first studio LP, titled The Age of Plastic. It was made on a budget of £60,000, with mixing done by Gary Langan.

While there are many electronic albums obviously having lyrical themes of the greatness of technology, there have been very few albums that often concern this type of automation, and The Age of Plastic, named after the concerning use of credit cards and other plastic objects at the time the album was released, which was early in 1980, is no exception.

Therefore, how video caused people to have nostalgia trips of the great old days such as 1952 tuning in to the wireless isn’t the only technology and media-related concerns this album commentates on; there are also the failures of plastic surgery and deaths from fossil fumes from the half-track while fighting a war, as covered in “Clean, Clean” and “Living in the Plastic Age”, and the overdominance and extreme obsession of people and objects controlled by machine that is sung about on the appropriately-titled songs “I Love You (Miss Robot)” and “Astroboy (and the Poles of Parade)”, as well as even more nostalgia sadness about an actor who misses playing the heros in low-budget films on the track named after the film studio “Elstree”.