This Day in Music History: The Buggles/Adventures in Modern Recording (11/11)

Adventures in Modern Recording is the second and final studio album by British synthpop duo The Buggles, released on this day in 1981. Made one year after their stint as members of Yes, the album contains nine tracks, including a stripped-down version of Yes's "Into the Lens", here entitled, "I Am a Camera". The album as released was mostly a Trevor Horn solo effort, Geoffrey Downes having joined Asia before recording began. Bruce Woolley assisted in completing the tracks.

Although the album suffered commercial failure in the United Kingdom, it did get chart performance in the United States, reaching #161 on the Billboard 200. Like The Age of Plastic it was positively received by critics. 

In 1989, Sincer Records Re-Released the album on CD. It only held the songs from the original LP. In 1997 it was reissued with three bonus tracks, this time on a Japanese label. A new reissue was released by Salvo Records/ZTT in 2010, which included 10 bonus tracks. Those 10 bonus tracks are of particular interest to fans of the group Yes. Both "We Can Fly from Here" and "Riding a Tide" were rerecorded (30 years later!) by Yes, with Horn as producer and Downes on keyboards, for their 2011 studio album Fly from Here.

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Music Monday (Adventures in Modern Recording)

The whole point of covering The Age of Plastic by The Buggles in my last post, was to introduce what happened next, and also how it reverberated more than 30 years later.


In 1980, Horn and Downes began work on a second album, working in a studio next door to Yes, who had recently lost vocalist Jon Anderson and keyboardist Rick Wakeman. Both members of The Buggles, and Horn in particular, had been long-standing fans of Yes. The Buggles offered a song to Yes, We Can Fly from Here, but at the suggestion of Brian Lane, manager of both bands, Yes' bassist Chris Squire invited them to actually replace Anderson and Wakeman as members of Yes. Horn and Downes accepted the offer, and joined Squire, Steve Howe, and Alan White to record the Drama album which I covered here and here.