Babylon Zoo smashed all records for the fastest-selling single of all time when their novelty song Spaceman shot them straight to the top of the charts.

Here’s another song I’d forgotten from the mid-90s, probably because I had two small children at the time. It sounded fabulously futuristic back then – and still does, in a cheesier retro-futurist sort of way.

With its shuffling hip-hop beats, mangled guitars, varispeed vocal trickery, and synthy undertones of Bowie and Numan, it caught the zeitgeist on its release and went straight to No.1. 

At the time it was the fastest-selling single in history, shifting a staggering 383,000 copies in its first week to give Babylon Zoo – Black Country boy Jas Mann – a place in pop history; albeit as one-hit wonders.

Babylon Zoo’s meteoric rise, mirroring the space-age theme of the song, was due in large part to the song being used in a Levi jeans TV ad, and was followed by an equally meteoric fall, leaving them to be remembered – if at all – as a novelty act.

The version used in the ad was a remix by Arthur Baker, the American producer and DJ who had brought Afrika Bambaata and New Order to new audiences with his interventions (Kraftwerk ‘samples’ in Planet Rock; dance beats in Confusion).

It was his idea to speed up the vocals – arguably the song’s USP, because without the trickery it’s quite a dull fusion of glam and grunge, without any real hooks after that attention-grabbing intro.

In fact the single’s promo copies, sent out before the ad was broadcast, had a very different intro to the song, with Jas Mann whispering: “I killed  your mother. I killed your sister. I killed you all” – wisely removed for its commercial release.

It was the perfect soundtrack to the ad, which featured an alien neighbourhood inspired by the 1950s with alien parents awaiting the return of their teen daughter, played by Russian model Kristina Semenovskaya, wearing Levi’s jeans.

Spaceman, produced by Steve Power, was the debut single by Babylon Zoo. Jas Mann was a sci-fi nut, who named his first group The Sandkings after a short story by future Game Of Thrones author George R.R. Martin; though they never broke big, they did support Stone Roses and Happy Mondays in the early ’90s.

After Babylon Zoo’s follow-up singles and second album flopped – though second single Animal Army sneaked into the Top 40 – Mann called time on his brief pop career in 1999 and moved to India to work for an aid agency.