19 January 1996
Here’s how I remembered it. The jeans ad featured half a minute of ear-catching futuristic electronica. Everyone duly rushed out to buy the single, only for our collective jaws to drop when we realised that those opening thirty seconds turned into something entirely different. The next thing we dropped was the single itself, like a hot stone, out of our charts and our affections: suckered once again by the marketing shenanigans of Big Trousers.
In fact, ‘Spaceman’ by Babylon Zoo stayed at number one in Ireland and in the UK for five weeks. Clearly, people liked the rest of the record too. Were people right?
Well, I must say this is better than I remembered, though I should qualify that by saying I had thought it was terrible but it’s merely ‘meh’. Yes, the change from the techno opening to the sci-fi pseudo-glam main event still feels like a waiter bringing me something I hadn’t ordered. However, Jas Mann’s voice on this record isn’t as whiny as I recalled from his live TV appearances, though he veers close to being a glam James Blunt in the nasally pre-chorus of “There’s a fire between us / so where is your god?” The song certainly tries to pack in a lot of hooks and curios, but they just aren’t very good or memorable. Mann at the time came across as a try-hard rock star wannabe with Bowie notions who just didn’t have the stock to back up his aggressively garish shop window display. Posterity shows Babylon Zoo to be an unmissed one-hit wonder, but ‘Spaceman’ at least clears the admittedly low bar of being better than another Boyzone record. So, certainly not the Jean Genie, but not quite Major Tomfoolery either.
