Buggles: The Lost Gig

3 / 5 stars 3 out of 5 stars.
Supperclub, London

The last time Trevor Horn staged a charity gig, it was at Wembley Arena, Prince Charles was the guest of honour and virtually everyone Horn had produced – from Pet Shop Boys to Yes to Belle and Sebastian – was on stage. Tonight, fundraising for the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability, is more low-key: a small west London club, an audience paying up to £300 a ticket and the first full gig by Buggles, the band Horn briefly fronted in the 1980s.

Horn takes the stage not with a bang, but with a softly spoken rumination on the unavailability of electronic sequencers during Buggles' brief lifespan; with the best will in the world, you can see why he ultimately abandoned being a frontman for a life behind the mixing desk. Not even he and fellow Buggle Geoff Downes would contend that the band was the musical highlight of their respective careers. When their debut album, The Age of Plastic, was reissued a few years back, their admirably candid sleeve notes admitted "we did not have an album's worth of material". As they plough through the album in its entirety tonight, it's hard not to think: yeah, you can say that again.

Perhaps understandably, they shore up the performance with guest appearances, from 10CC's Lol Creme and Gary Barlow, the latter, for reasons not entirely clear, doing Otis Redding's Hard to Handle. Alison Moyet deputises for Grace Jones on Slave to the Rhythm, perhaps the best record Trevor Horn ever made: lissom and sumptuous, it certainly casts the lesser Buggles tracks in a rather unforgiving light. By the time Richard O'Brien appears and sings Let's Do the Timewarp, it starts to feel not unlike watching a band at a wedding, albeit a star-studded wedding. The audience love it, not least the guy who's won the auction to sing lead vocals on an encore of Video Killed the Radio Star.