The nu millennium demands nu music. Twinkling neon keyboard and nebular swells of synth herald the cyberdelic overlord of compu-pop. What galactic visions have his mauve eyes witnessed? What secrets of the funk cosmic lie in his androgyne grasp? Cyborgs flex to hip-hop breaks as he begins his star-borne song, his voice pitched high, warped into alien tongues. Speak, voyager!
And then the actual song begins.
One version of the “Spaceman” story has Babylon Zoo playing – with the help of Levi’s Jeans – a mean and hilarious trick on the Great British Record Buying Public. Levi’s were now in the happy position, for an advertiser, of their every creative choice getting actual news coverage, and their sci-fi follow-up to the claymation shenanigans of “Boombastic” buzzed with adland confidence. Punky alien girl shocks the space-squares back home by returning from Earth – gasp! – with a pair of jeans. This cornball idea was gorgeously realised and its soundtrack played a huge part – a thrilling, helium-voiced nugget of breakbeat pop futurism. “Spaceman”, in other words, but only the first thirty seconds – spliced onto the track from its Arthur Baker remix. Viewers rushing to buy the single on the back of the ad had no idea the song was about to plunge into growly rock suet.
This story is backed up not just by the speed of sales but by the near-total indifference shown to anything Babylon Zoo did afterwards. But it’s not supported by the intensity of “Spaceman”’s popularity: five weeks at number one, over a million sold. The radio wasn’t just playing the first 30 seconds – so while some people bought “Spaceman” to recapture a commercial’s shiver of alien glamour, many more will have picked it up because they liked the whole song.
So what’s there to like? On paper, “Spaceman” looks like a hard hitting record. The first British Asian man at Number One, singing about homophobia, incipient fascism, media overload, and how “It’s time to terminate the great white world”. But that’s really not how it sounds. For one thing you have to squint selectively to pull any coherent reading out of dystopian boilerplate like “beyond the black horizon / trying to take control”. And the songwriting feels similar to the last time Levis deigned to pluck a band from obscurity – grunge soup, dynamic shifts taking the place of hooks. Behind the expensive makeover for “Spaceman”, this is no doubt what every fifth-rate indie rock band sounded like in the mid-90s.
But the main reason “Spaceman” fails is that Jas Mann is such a terrible vocalist. His performance on “Spaceman” is horribly overcooked – a nasal cyberpunk snarl distorted and amped up in ways that can’t hide how thin his voice is. It’s a crowded field, but there may well be no single sound on a 90s number one more viscerally annoying for me than Mann sneering “There’s a fire between us – so where is your God?”. Ultimately this dark-future mind bomb is a dud not because of its bait-and-switch, not because its harsh truths flew over listeners’ heads, but because its singer sounded like a tool.
Even then, “Spaceman” is a marker for a 90s current we’d otherwise miss. Babylon Zoo’s Bowie-esque playbook had been well thumbed over the last few years by Suede – a hubristic, big-talking frontman, borrowing from sci-fi and glam, teasing his audience with gender fluidity (“Saris are really comfortable to wear – and a lot of fun!”). And the sound – gothy, contemptuous, faintly industrial – would turn up independently and in a much beefier, more convincing way with Marilyn Manson’s glam rock turn.
Glam haunted the 90s, feeding into ideas, styles, and looks that were floating around pop culture, without ever really threatening a specific revival. I wouldn’t claim “Spaceman” for glam: the guitar textures and the poses fit, but glam rock’s power was in its rhythmic push, and without Arthur Baker ‘s help “Spaceman” gets stuck in its own sludge. But its success shows the appetite for theatre that’s always bubbling under British pop. You need a special talent to turn that urge into a career, though, and Jas Mann only looked the part.
Score: 4
[Logged in users can award their own score]
This a stupidly brilliant – or brilliantly stupid – record. The squeaky, dancy intro shifts into grinding rock, the lyrics combine politicised statements with cosmic mentalism, and it grooves harder than an awful lot of the things we’ve heard lately. It’s genuinely menacing (though not as much as a track we’ll come to in *thinks* a couple of entries time). Also, it’s a heck of a lot of fun to go “INTERGALACTIC CHRIST” at people.
Jas’ voice isn’t that annoying – I can think of a lot more annoying sounds in nineties number ones – and good call on the nod to Mazza. There’s a strange similarity, when you think of it, although Antichrist Superstar (MM’s finest moment, which also came out in ’96) benefitted from a shithot production job by Laughing Boy Trent. The only flaw with it is that the helium bits – especially the one at the end – sound a touch bolted on.
This is the first of a trend of British Asian Number Ones In The Early Months Of The Year, but more on that later, obviously.
Where is your God, Tom? This is easily an eight, possibly a nine.
I CAN’T GET OFF THE CAROUSEL
Another comparison point – which Babylon Zoo come out well ahead in, even vocally – is “Zeroes And Ones” era Jesus Jones.
Tom you must not know how intensely amusing it is to play this to young adults (unfamiliar with the song except its intro) who
a) like dance music: who get really pissed off when it turns out to be WELL GOFF
b) don’t like dance music: who go “oh god no” and then look like idiots when it turns out to be WELL GOFF
which alone makes it worth 6
(I think it will take some more comments to decide whether it is WELL GOFF enough for a 7)
(I’m pretty sure I prefer “Slight Return” tho)
#4 this is played at almost every Club Popular for that reason. Well, the first 30 seconds are. And not that young adults unfamiliar with the song ever attend Club Popular.
Another ref point? Placebo’s first album came out in 96 (sa wikipedia)
i am the illest goff and i come among you to ask: ARE SCOOTER BUNNIED? Because surely here is where we celebrate them if not
viz “Endless Summer” july 1995 –> (= invented Fennesz as well as helium-speed BZoo)
they are not
Things you know that ain’t so: I had always believed that Bowie’s Hallo Spaceboy was a response to this, a sign that although his taste might not have been as impeccable as it once was, he was at least aware of the way his spirit and ideas were stil alive in the nineties.
Turns out that must be wrong: Hallo Spaceboy was released the year before.
I vividly remember the school discos at the time when everyone would beg the DJ to play this song, go wild when he relented, then stand around awkwardly not really knowing what to do when the first bit ended.
I actually think it’s entirely possible that most of those million people *did* only buy it for the first thirty seconds. It’s like wondering who took 16 weeks to get around to buying (Everything I Do) I Do It For You, or who was still buying LeAnn Rimes after nigh on six months of bouncing around the top 40 with How Do I Live. An element of the public can be very slow to respond to things they like, and the advert aired for a very long time as I recall.
Of course, I’m sure there were a few who really did like the goth element, but I reckon if you asked 99.9% of children, teens and young adults of the 90s to hum any other element of the song, they’d be completely stumped.
it’s entirely possible that most of those million people *did* only buy it for the first thirty seconds
Oh, totally. It’s certainly why I bought it. The rest is tolerable, but who’d buy it on its own? I’ve never come across the Arthur Baker remix, it sounds like that’s where I should’ve been heading.
On the principle that you mark a record by its high point: (8), though obviously as a whole it’s probably (4)
So about four minutes in to the 5.42 version I’m playing right now, they start background chants of “Babylon Zoo”, and it struck me that this is quite an unusual thing to be doing. Obviously there are acts who sing songs of the same name as themselves — cue Black Sabbath, cue ancient Monty Smith/Danny Baker joke review of Imagination’s eponymous first alb — but this is not that, and I don’t mean that. I’m trying to think of other songs where the act’s own name is used as a chant during a song of a different title — there must be some!
I’ve argued about this record so often online over the last ten years or so that I can barely summon up the will to do so again. But…
My relationship with “Spaceman” is slightly different to most people’s. The first time I heard it was in a local record shop, who were playing it over the sound system at least one month before the Levis ad was aired. I don’t know if they’d received a pre-release copy, acetate or a demo, but my first impressions were: “Is this Pop Will Eat Itself’s new direction? Seems like a leap forward for them if so!” A backhanded compliment to say the least, and I meant to talk to the cashier to see if my suspicions were correct, but I got distracted and forgot all about it until I heard the thirty second extract yet again on the Levi’s ad. So, unlike most of the UK, I already knew how the rest of the song went and had already made up my mind that I quite liked it. I’ve had this story challenged on a number of occasions and if someone can prove to me that I might have misremembered something along the way and I couldn’t possibly have heard the track so early on (it was a long time ago, after all) I’m happy to step down and admit I may be mistaken.
So, before the ad I’d already decided that the track stood a chance as a minor breakaway indie hit – a high top twenty or low top ten placing, maybe. What I wasn’t prepared for was the sheer force of the record’s popularity, which does admittedly seem inexplicable. “Spaceman” is a bit over-the-top and silly, and actually sounds rather dated for 1996. As posters have pointed out above, it has echoes of Jesus Jones about it, whose moment had long passed. My initial comparison with Pop Will Eat Itself seems slightly inaccurate in retrospect, but the vocals do have that slight Black Country grebo whine to them which were prevalent in the early nineties as well. Mann’s roots were also in a Brum trad-indie act The Sandkings (http://youtu.be/oHC0ejrLTbI) of whom I was aware, and were passable and unobjectionable and clearly operating in the shadow of their region’s bigger brothers.
Whatever I originally supposed, “Spaceman” initially seemed as unlikely a number one as Eat suddenly having a glam-tinged million seller. But I think in its own way the track also shines a searchlight over a wide demographic – the dance kids who probably wanted the Arthur Baker remix, the Suede fans, the goth kids who enjoyed the doomy aspects, the less picky Bowie fans, and any unreformed grebos who might happen to have been listening. Couple that with enormously wide exposure on an advert, and you’ve clearly got a smash, although I actually doubt the construction of the track was as cynical as that.
And while it’s a strange number one in retrospect, I’ll still maintain that it is a good single. The central hooks are incredibly powerful, the verses theatrical enough to be enjoyable if you tell yourself that Mann knows he’s being ridiculous. I didn’t buy it in the end, but I always find myself enjoying it if it comes on the radio, which happens very infrequently these days. And of course, everything else Babylon Zoo released was total rubbish, which is why they faded from view so quickly – they were complete one-trick ponies. But it’s an interesting 7-out-of-10 trick to my ears.
#13 – The Sweet did it at the start of “Teenage Rampage” with the chant “We want Sweet/ We want Sweet”.
The KLF/ Justified Ancients of Mu Mu also did it more times than I can possibly count.
There’s a Fall track – I forget which – that begins “Fall Ad-Vance! Fall Ad-Vance!” chant style.
#13 – Utah Saints
@13, Mark. Ugh, at least half the tracks on Madonna’s 1987 remix album, You Can Dance, broke down to chants of “Madonna! Madonna!….” over just a beat at various points. As far as I can recall, however, M. never chanted her own name in the principal/original, non-extended mix of any track until the recent, uninspiring,’Gimme All Your Luvin which chanted ‘L U V Madonna, Y O U you wanna’ right from the outset. Gaga, of course, chants her name everywhere in original versions of lots of her songs.
My first thought was that the chant was a kind of a tell: indicating that this was a stunt single rather than the first move in a “routine rocky chart-pop career” (whatever that might be). Of course the KLF/JAMMS link — very good call — doesn’t really disprove this. As KLFish first move, this should have been a corker! So did Jas Mann’s nerve fail, did he not see the opportunities open to him, or did he really think that the Levi’s ad was merely a door-opener and now he would shake off such stuff and get back to his “real” music? (The second single of the second LP was a cover of Mott the Hoople’s Honaloochie Boogie, released only as a promo, in France…)
Hmmm, isn’t the Sweet chant more the invocation of the audience that loves you — the presence of their voices on your record — and thus a slightly different thing again? It disrupts the more classic social-vocal geometry of protagonist — or sometimes protagonist-antagonist — vs the implied Greek Chorus of the “coloured girls go doo de doo de doodedoo” etc.
Of course the class Greek Chorus generally stands for the authors idea of the rest-of-us observing (“Yes, we see!” or indeed “WHAT ABOUT US!?”), where recordings of the actual audience — even when introduced as a faux verité element by the producer-as-author — surely stands for something less universal. Justified fandom, for example.
^^^ps author’s actual-real best paper in his finals was non-euclidean geometry and he should probably be discouraged whenever his speculations amble in a similar direction
And then there’s always the infamous track A To Z from ABC’s third album.
listening to this now, it sounds like a palatable if unmemorable racket – The chipmunk vocals reminded me of The Prodigy’s Out of Space at the time but they’re the nearest thing the song has to a hook. 5 for me.
‘Spaceman’ is new to me. At first few listens, then, it seems like a pretty flimsy construction, owing a lot to Filter, Monster Magnet, maybe Placebo, but never quite punching things home. The guitars are loud enough to be irritating but somehow don’t ever deliver anything truly grunty and rifftastic. I dare say that Muse could probably play and sing the hell out of this track so that it’d deliver more in the ways it clearly wants to. Instead, BZ would seem to be the glam/industrial Stiltskin which is not a thing to be (although ‘Spaceman’ transferred a lot better down under than ‘Inside’ did: in New Zealand, BZ peaked at #4 and spent 5 weeks in the top 10 whereas Stitskin peaked for 1 week at #20). Agree with:
4
That anyone in the decade of Corgan could complain about anyone else’s nasal whine is astonishing to me. (Though it occurs to me that I have no idea how Smashing Pumpkins did in the UK.)
I’ve had some nostalgic affection for “Spaceman,” perhaps because I only heard it once or twice on the radio at the time, so it retained an aura of mystery until websearching came into my life. (Although sometimes I still confuse it with 4 Non Blondes’ “Spaceman,” which got played about as often on English-language Guatemalan radio.) It’s all tied up with the mix of emotions that was graduating from high school and preparing to leave Guatemala where I’d been a teenager for a largely unknown “home” in the US; early 1996 was the last time I would listen to the radio in quite the same solitary, uncritical way ever again.
#6: I can’t really remember but I think at the last one we followed aforementioned 30 seconds with Cliff Richard’s ‘Congratulations’…
One thing I’ve only just realised is that Spaceman was pretty much the only million selling single by a rock band in 90s (Bohemian Rhapsody, sixteen years old, was the only other). I remember I didn’t particularly like it at the time and it’s not really stood the test of time either – when was the last time you heard it on the radio? Previous Levi’s chart toppers had really been stopgap number ones so that doesn’t explain why this record broke so big.
During the five weeks this held the top spot the number two spot was occupied by the well remembered `Slight Return` (yet another Britpop number two) and the completely forgotten Anything by 3T (Tito Jackson’s sons).
This is sort of all 808 State’s fault. Apparently the ad was originally to feature the intro to a piece of music by Graham Massey (which eventually became their single ‘Bond’) fresh off his success producing Bjork’s ‘Post’ but this was rejected in favour of the Baker ‘remix’ (afaik this really was just the whole song sped up?) of ‘Spaceman’ from a tape of the trio’s radio show. Conf: http://www.mdmarchive.co.uk/archive/showartefact.php?aid=1956&bid=4537
What the huge fuss over the intro suggested so strongly to me was that Happy Hardcore would’ve been far more popular (chart-wise at least) but the obstacle was not chipmunk vocals but the tempo. There was to be no floodgate breach for HH in the wake of BZ despite being championed by John Peel (who did enable significantly the high-pitched horror of the Cuban Boys a few years on from ‘Spaceman’) on R1 (you could hear HH on Peel but NEVER on Tong’s show and I don’t think the latter played the Baker mix of ‘Spaceman’ either despite its more practical Big Beat compatibility).
Still we can always savour Jas Mann’s jib-jab with Chris Morris on Brass Eye. “Do you think you’ll ever write a spherical song?” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3XgouVH9-Y
Re the five weeks at number one and not falling for the ‘trick’: The CD single had the version we had all heard, and three remixes of the same track. I bought it with my sister, convinced – CONVINCED – that one of them had to be the dance remix that the first thirty seconds had promised. (The ‘Fifth Dimension’ one promised much.) And we, and a few others that we spoke to on that holiday who had made the same mistake, were astonished – ASTONISHED – to find that they were all awful.
This may be unfair, but I recall Jas Mann coming across at the time as resentful of the way his song had become famous, and doggedly refusing to give the public what they wanted was his way of insisting that his talents were not further sullied.
Jas Mann seems to me the first 90’s pop comedy touchstone since Candy Flip, but he’s indirectly responsible for Fischerspooner (image) and Enter Shikari (dance-rock kludge). I’m willing to cut him some slack and give BZ a 7.
Sample watch: contains a sample of “DMT” by deee-lite
#28 I remember hearing that JM was pretty cross Levi’s only used the sped up bit, dunno if this is true – Wikipedia claims the original has a ‘creepy’ spoken intro.
Sun Ra, anybody?
For those wanting “the proper version”, if you can track down a copy of the CD single of ‘The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes’ (third single from the album and a minor #32 hit) one of the tracks is called ‘Spaceman (Zupervarian remix)’ which is a special mix Arthur Baker did keeping all the full track’s vocals but speeding the whole thing up to sound like the ad.
My only memories of this are from the advert, and the big “Yay it’s…wait what?!” moment for me only came in about 2004 when I heard the full thing for the first time. Interesting that the official Youtube version takes out the Levi’s bit altogether, and has instead the said-creepy intro.
#27 – Early 1996 does indeed to be the closest gabber/happy hardcore ever came to being a UK chart force. Technohead’s ‘I Wanna Be A Hippy’ is surely the biggest selling example in this country, peaking at #6 around the same time, while Scooter got a #19 with ‘Back in the UK’ and Interactive #28 with ‘Forever Young’ – a slower, housier Red Jerry remix was the lead mix on the UK single but it included the faster hardcore radio edit as seen elsewhere in Europe.
Then out of nowhere, Nakatomi’s ‘Children of the Night’ suddenly appears at #29 in late 2002, despite being originally a #149 hit in 1996. Possibly a more up-to-date ‘clubland’ remix than the hardcore original?
#10 – true sign of Bowie’s awareness of his legacy (and willingness to fk with people’s awareness) = appearing with Placebo at the ’99 Brits!
The advert sold me and I wasn’t on my own. I had it my head it would sell out so went to my local “Badlands” store on the Saturday before release to order it. They had all the new releases on a shelf behind the counter. They had a couple of copies of the Chemical Brothers single with the skier on, two others I don’t know -one copy each – and at least 50 copies of “Spaceman”. It was always going to be massive.
I don’t quite get the idea that on mass, people were ‘tricked’ into buying it and then disappointed when playing the whole track. I’m not saying it never happened but think it may be over egged. As Tom points out this wouldn’t have sustained five weeks at number one.
Career wise they were on a hiding to nothing after this. Animal Army with the Kravitz guitar and the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds sounding “The Boy with the X-ray Eyes” were IMO pretty good. I don’t mind “Diamond Dogs” I mean “All the Money’s Gone” either. I think they would have all faired better fronting a massive Levi’s tv advert on heavy rotation.
8 from me.
#27, #34 – This has reminded me of one of my strongest memories of early 1996. In March of that year I went on an outward bound trip with the school to the Brecon Beacons, and there was an outing to the local swimming pool. On the minibus the popular choice of music was a happy hardcore tape played at ear-splitting volume. At the time I would’ve preferred to hear the new Terrorvision album.
17 years later and I’m pretty sure I’d rather have the happy hardcore.
For a song that never charted in the US, and that I’ve heard maybe 4-5 times in my life, three of which were in the past two days, I have a lot to comment on. Somehow there’s a lot more going on here than just your typical one hit wonder…
First, from a US perspective, the phenomenon of advertisements spawning hit singles is a bit odd. I’m not saying it never happens here, but I can’t think of anything as big as this or any of the other ad-inspired #1’s I’ve read about on this blog. In fact, outside of the Super Bowl, individual ads rarely become pop culture phenomenons at the level being described here. Ad *campaigns* do, but not individual commercials so much. Perhaps this is a result of the US being so much bigger and geographically diverse (and with more TV viewing options)? Again, the Super Bowl exception would seem to support this theory.
Also, I’ve never been aware of any specific following regarding Levi’s ads. The brand is certainly well-known and successful in its homeland, but if there were any memorable ads, I must’ve missed them.
As for Babylon Zoo, I was still following the UK chart from afar via James Masterton’s blog in 1996. So I was aware of the massive sales, the massive press, and (I think) the 7-record deal surrounding this potential new megagroup, and I eagerly awaited the appearance of the mystery song “Spaceman” on US radio. That of course never happened. I think I did manage to download a short clip of remixed version in question, but that’s as much as I ever heard at the time. Then the album flopped, followups flopped, and within a few months the entire music world acted like Babylon Zoo had never existed. It was like an entire music career had been compressed into a few months, making the likes of Vanilla Ice look like a multi-decade long runner by comparison. Again, this was all from my US perspective of never hearing more than that 30 second remix, but it just seemed very, very odd to me.
So, finally the song itself. I finally listened to it a couple years ago on Youtube. And again a few times in the past couple days because of this blog. And I gotta say…I actually LIKE it. It’s strange that it never got promoted on these shores since I think it would have been right at home on US MTV or modern rock radio of 1996. Maybe the bait-and-switch remix controversy killed it. Too bad. 9/10 for me.
OK, now that I wrote the above, I thought of one sort-of example of an ad spawning a US #1. The bunny prevents me from naming the song directly, but there was a six week #1 in 2012 that got major exposure from a Super Bowl ad that year, and propelled it overnight into the Top 3 before radio had taken notice yet. Still though, I say “sort of” because it quickly got disconnected culturally from the ad to the point where I’d forgotten it was in an ad. And the group has become self-sustaining with some other hit singles since then. So an ad can certainly give a huge lift to a song in the US, but I don’t think it get a song to #1 all by itself.
BTW since nobody else has said it, this record has the best sleeve we’ve seen for ages.
#38
“First, from a US perspective, the phenomenon of advertisements spawning hit singles is a bit odd. I’m not saying it never happens here, but I can’t think of anything as big as this or any of the other ad-inspired #1′s I’ve read about on this blog. In fact, outside of the Super Bowl, individual ads rarely become pop culture phenomenons at the level being described here. Ad *campaigns* do, but not individual commercials so much. Perhaps this is a result of the US being so much bigger and geographically diverse (and with more TV viewing options)? Again, the Super Bowl exception would seem to support this theory.”
Yes, the Super Bowl is the only time it would happen – though US advertisers are now starting to make commercials for the web as much as for TV, which might mean more coast-to-coast exposure for a featured song. American commercials are also generally very different in style from the kind of campaigns which launched hit songs in the UK. Here, the brand would generally get out of the way of the story/imagery/song – in the Levis’ campaign, product information tends to be left very implicit or only featured right at the end. In America, voiceovers, testimonials and product claims are a LOT more common. A voiceover would have ruined the “Spaceman” ad (or any of the others). Again, the Super Bowl is something of an exception – it’s when US advertisers get let off the leash and produce more creative, less product-focused work.
I note that an overexcited Tanya Headon forgot about the “hating music” part of their brief and called the intro “an excitingly skittery five second advert tune“.
I had some fun speeding up my walkman and hearing the song as it should be heard! Now, it’s easier: just get a speedup plugin for Winamp and listen to Spaceman in the cool sense!
#40 Hadn’t thought of the voiceover effect, but that’s an excellent point. Isn’t it true that many of the imagery-based ads, especially the Levi’s ones, are made for a Pan-European audience? Of course, voiceovers could be recorded in multiple languages, but I guess they don’t want to do that for reasons of cost or consistent brand identity.
They do seem to be, and I’ve never understood why. It doesn’t make sense to me to sell mundane consumer goods to the UK using cycling families, sun-baked cities, or those apartment buildings with neat rows of aluminium letter-boxes in the foyer. Let alone tiny bits of footage with woeful dubbing. How doesn’t this harm the campaign?
Levi’s not really of this ilk though – they feel more British in humour, and depend on music and fantastical scenarios anyway.
#38 #44 You also have to take into effect that in that in 1996 the UK only had two commercial terrestrial TV channels. I think this is why British adverts try to go out their way to entertain as the biggest rival doesn’t have them.
The explanation to why the sitcom Police Squad! was cancelled by ABC suggests in the US it is more about what you hear than what you see, which would explain the voiceovers.
At last, a cover I recognise (and I agree, it’s a good one; I love the insect-like effect of the arching goggles). I picked up a second-hand copy of “Spaceman” on CD single a few months after it peaked at number 3 in Australia, but it didn’t last long in my collection; my two dollars’ worth of interest was exhausted within a year. (Yes, I can tell this from an archived spreadsheet of my past music purchases. Sad, I know.) Off it went to Revolution CD in Canberra, the same way as a couple of other one-hit wonders I mentally lump with this one, EMF’s “Unbelievable” and Spacehog’s “In the Meantime” (both on their parent albums, no less; at least I didn’t fall for that with Babylon Zoo). Unlike those two, though, “Spaceman” hadn’t enjoyed a slight return in Fraunhofer form.
I wish I hadn’t ditched it now; not least because the only versions I can find online aren’t the one I remember, the shorter radio edit, which didn’t have the distracting “Babylon Zoo” chant. At least EMF had the good sense to break up their eponymous chanting with the mother of all obscenities. But that silly touch aside, I feel unexpectedly warm towards this. The slide from dancing chipmunks to cod glam doesn’t bother me, and didn’t bother me back then; I would have found it hard to take a whole single of the sped-up vocals, as a listen to the Zupervarian mix has confirmed. I wasn’t introduced to the song by a 30-second snippet on an advert, so there was no bait and switch. No, I liked that sort of doom-laden rock plod back in the mid-’90s, with the synth touches to make it feel appropriately fin de siecle. A few Aussie bands at the time traded in the same, and I liked them too.
All of which means that “Spaceman” now has a remarkable ability to take me back in Time as well as Space, to see 1996 in all its OK Computer-is-just-around-the-corner glory. Perhaps not coincidentally, after OK Computer was released the following year was when I ditched this CD single; Jas Mann couldn’t compete with the real rock-n-bits thing. I was being a bit harsh on it, though. As taking-themselves-too-seriously one-hit wonders go, this is as memorable and goofy as any, and I’m now inclined to give it… oh, go on then, 7.
(Eye-opening tidbit encountered while reading around the tracks I’ve mentioned here: Spacehog’s lead singer Royston Langdon was married to Liv Tyler for five years.)
#13: “Who Are You” (Who, Who… Who, Who)
#46 Hadn’t noticed until now, but “Spaceman” does bear a resemblance to “In the Meantime” (which I also owned, and still do, via its parent album).
More Spacehog trivia: I couldn’t remember if they were American or British. Apparently the answer is Yes: all originally from Leeds, but met and formed in New York. Never would’ve guessed the Liv Tyler thing though.
@Rory, 46. Glad you mentioned Spacehog’s ‘In The Meantime’ (I almost did): that’s not only another one-hit-wonder from the time, but like ‘Spaceman’ it struck some vaguely glam/Bowie-ish notes. Note that Bowie had an early 1996 single from his Outside album, ‘Hallo Spaceboy’, so there was definitely a bit of space-rock in the air.
US vs UK advertizing: I’m pretty sure it’s widely understood that the norm in the US is to offer a list of reasons for purchase whereas the norm in the UK is to go for more nebulous branding, positive assocation-building, etc.. There are plenty of exceptions on both sides, but, for example, you very rarely have the experience with US advertising of not knowing what the ad’s for, whereas that’s not at all uncommon in the UK or down under (which broadly follows the UK tradition in this).
I too associate this with “In the Meantime,” which I heard just as often, and as context-free, around the same time. When I want to be nostalgic, however, Spacehog is on Spotify (in the US) and Babylon Zoo is not.