Spaceman (Babylon Zoo song)

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"Spaceman" is a song by the English rock band Babylon Zoo, released in January 1996 as the lead single from their debut album, The Boy with the X-Ray Eyes (1996). Featuring heavily distorted guitars and metallic, robotic sounding vocals, it entered the UK Singles Chart at number one on 21 January 1996, after being featured in a popular Levi's jeans television advertisement in December 1995, and became the fastest selling single in the United Kingdom in over 30 years, since "Can't Buy Me Love" by The Beatles.

"Spaceman" was the seventh song to reach number one in the UK after being featured in an advert for Levi's.

Video Spaceman (Babylon Zoo song)

Song history

Promotional copies of "Spaceman" had been distributed, and the Arthur Baker remix was chosen to tie in with the release on 1 December 1995, of a new United Kingdom Levi's advertisement titled "Planet", which was directed by Vaughan Arnell and Anthea Benton. The advertisement concentrated on Baker's speeded-up vocal section at the beginning and end of the song, featuring an alien neighbourhood inspired on the 50's years with an alien parents waiting the comeback of their teen daughter. Russian model Kristina Semenovskaya played the daughter, wearing Levi's jeans.

The initial intro to "Spaceman" on the promotional copies, before it was used for the advert, featured Mann's whispering vocals of "I killed your mother, I killed your sister, I killed you all." These lyrics were later taken out of the song and replaced with the more radio friendly Arthur Baker introduction; although, the "I killed you all" lyric is still buried in there. There was a lower budget video made for this version.

In 2006, "Spaceman" featured on trailers for Ant and Dec's film Alien Autopsy, the BBC's children's channel, CBeebies for the animated preschool series Lunar Jim, and Network Ten's advertisement for Battlestar Galactica. "Spaceman" is also used in Eesti otsib superstaari (Pop Idol Estonia). "Spaceman" is also featured in E4's My Mad Fat Diary, in the episode "Ladies and Gentlemen", during the scene where Rae and Finn begin their drive to Knebworth.

Maps Spaceman (Babylon Zoo song)

Music video

Following the release of the single, was produced a music video. It features a black-and-white prologue with Jas Mann as a night driver who has a close encounter of the third kind with an aliens appearing from a fog on the road, meanwhile the vocals are in speed-up. When vocals decelerates and turns normal, video alternates the band playing on a underground place full of young people dancing with the band playing alone on a blue-colored desert landscape, with Mann singing to camera. Finally vocals speed-up again, on a black-and-white epilogue where aliens go away missing in the fog, but one of them turns front of the camera pointing the night sky, showing in a brief shining that he's the night driver, turned himself in another alien.

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Critical reception

Writing in Select, Ian Harrison described the song as a "bin-lid dancey metal effort with a weakness for vintage Bowie-isms (done like Bauhaus with synths) and a suspected humour deficiency". Conversely, Chuck Eddy at Entertainment Weekly described the song's "futuristic kitsch" as "both funny and seductive."

Retrospectively, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic called the song a "bizarre, tuneless collage of hip-hop rhythms, techno keyboards and alternative guitars", that despite sounding distinctive, lacks "any tangible hook to make it memorable". A Scotsman journalist wrote that the Arthur Baker remix, which brought the track to public attention through its use in a Levi's commercial, was "much more fun to listen to than the dirgey original". Writer Tim Moore attributed the "rambling, dirge-like" song's success to the Baker remix and Levi's advert exposure, and wrote that "only failure and embarrassment" followed.

MTV UK ranked "Spaceman" as the #24 single of the 1990s. "Spaceman" was voted number 31 in a 2006 Channel 4 poll of the 50 best songs by one-hit wonders.

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Commercial performance

The single charted at No. 1 in the UK Singles Chart, selling 420,000 copies in its first week. It became the fastest selling single in the United Kingdom in over thirty years, since The Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love". "Spaceman" became a number one chart hit in 23 countries, including the United Kingdom. As of November 2012, "Spaceman" was the 74th best selling single in the history of the United Kingdom, selling 1.14 million copies.

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Cover versions

• Katie Melua has performed an acoustic version of this song live.
• Metal band The Kovenant covered this song in their album Animatronic.
• Cinema Bizarre covered this song both live and in a studio recorded track.
• DJ Kambel and MC Magika remixed and covered this song as Dream State (Spaceman) in the 2001 eurodance compilation Dancemania Speed 7.
• Romanian metalcore band Goodbye to Gravity recorded a cover of the song in 2015, originally intended for their album Mantras of War, although it was later removed. After the Colectiv nightclub fire killed four of the five band members, the cover version was included on the tribute album Back to Life - A Tribute to Goodbye to Gravity.
• Gothic rock band Rosetta Stone recorded a cover of the song - it is one of six hidden tracks on their 1998 album Chemical Emissions.

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Track listing

CD Promo Single 1995 WEA (YZ925CDDJ)

1. "Spaceman" (radio version) -- 3:50
2. "Spaceman" (Arthur meets the spaceman) -- 5:56

CD Promo 1995 EMI (CDEMDJ 416)

1. "Spaceman" (zupervarian mix) - 3:50

7" Single

1. "Spaceman" (zupervarian mix) - 3:50
2. "Spaceman" (the 5th dimension) -- 5:09

CD Single 1996 EMI (CDEM 416)

1. "Spaceman" (zupervarian mix) -- 3:50
2. "Metal Vision" -- 3:48
3. "Blue Nude" -- 2:09
4. "Spaceman" (the 5th dimension) -- 5:09

CD Single ('The Only Original Remixes') 1996 EMI (7243 8 82721 2 4)

1. "Spaceman" (zupervarian mix) -- 3:50
2. "Spaceman" (the 5th dimension) -- 5:09
3. "Spaceman" (Arthur meets the spaceman) -- 5:56
4. "Spaceman" (E before I) -- 6:37

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Charts

Chart successions

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References

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External links

• Lyrics of this song at MetroLyrics

Source of article : Wikipedia