Levi's '95: Spaceman (aka Park In It, Man)

 

I've spoken a bit in the past about Levi's ads and their established history of doubling as covert marketing tools for chart hits in the making. So let's look at the most notorious example - that time at the dawn of 1996 when Bartle Bogle Hegarty tricked the pop-partial public into buying a single they appeared to find overwhelmingly repugnant. Welcome to the strange and infuriating world of "Spaceman" and Babylon Zoo.

So great is the song's notoriety that the anecdote has become something of a cliche - you caught the ad in late 1995 and dug the accompanying track with its kitschy blend of sci-fi infused electronica and Chipmunkese. At the very least, it was an off-centre enough combination that you just had to know more. When the single was released the following January, you raced out and bought it, raced back home and shoved it into your CD tray. You felt the adrenalin surging as the intro started up, knowing you were about to be transported to somewhere as euphoric and other-worldly as that Levi's ad had promised. You were, however, in for a heck of a come-down when, a mere 30 seconds into the track, the spacey synths and pitched up alien vocals came to an abrupt halt and were replaced by this lifeless, unlikeable dirge with some hack griping about the pungent smells consummating his home. Was this a pressing error, or just a sick joke? Where was the real track? Apparently this was it - said hack did eventually move on to regurgitating the track's familiar hook, but in such a leaden, joyless fashion as to appear to have arisen from a deliberately churlish cover of the song you were actually expecting to hear. You were so enraged that you threw the CD in the trash and swore off buying any more Levi's jeans for life - until that delightful Flat Eric character showed up three years down the line, and suddenly all was forgiven. (Actually, I have no data on how effective the ad was in its intended purpose of shifting jeans, but I am deeply conscious of the fact that this wasn't too far off the bleak cry of desperation that was Kevin the moribund hamster, so its powers were potentially more limited on that front.)

This story is not exactly my own Babylon Zoo story, although there is a degree of overlap. At the time, I don't recall ever seeing the ad in question and I did not buy the single - in part because I was just shy of 11 years old and I didn't get into buying singles until much closer to 12 (my conscious is clean with regard to this track occupying the top spot in the UK charts; I sure wish I could say the same about R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly"). I was, however, exposed to the song a lot via radio play, and the first time I heard it I remember being bemused by the intro and the way it reminded me of the singing mice from the recent movie Babe, if they'd become slightly weird and insomnic from one too many late night X-Files marathons. So bemused that I was definitely bummed when the song took its abrupt turn into the morose. The lyrics are sufficiently weird, but there's a kind of weighty humorlessness to the weirdness; a smidgen of the camp wit that enabled contemporary band Space to score a few hits with the sinister and eerie would certainly not have gone amiss here. All the same, I will admit that, sharing the popular dislike of the complete disconnect between the opening and the song itself, I cannot bring myself to wholeheartedly dislike "Spaceman". Perhaps some of that intrigue I felt upon first hearing the introduction has stayed with me, and it's enough to carry me through the rest of the track. Perhaps the beguiling evil that is nostalgia has re-coloured it; it might not take me anywhere particularly otherworldly, but it is, like magic, able to transport me back to that very specific point in my preadolescence, and that's just as valuable. Or perhaps there is a moment where that barrier between the churlishly incomprehensible and the freakishly unsettling is momentarily punctured and I feel like I'm getting a glimpse into this vaguely more dynamic track buried beneath its surface. More on that in due course. (Oh, and for the purposes of this piece I looked up the lyrics to "Spaceman" for the very first time and have noted that it's "Intergalactic Christ". I've been hearing it as "Intergalactic crime" for all these years. Whoopsie.)

The success of "Spaceman" is certainly nothing to be sneezed at. 383,000 copies were sold in its first week of release, making it the fastest-selling debut single in UK history. It was also a smash hit in numerous other countries, topping the charts in France, Germany and Denmark, among others. Zoo apologists like to point out that, despite the popular narrative that everyone went off the song the instant they'd heard it in its entirety, it spent a whopping five weeks at the UK number 1 spot. And true, I'm not sure what to make of that. Either people didn't hate it quite as much as all that back in early 96, they REALLY loved the track's opening, in spite of what it became, or they bought it because at the time everyone was buying it and they didn't want to be left out of a phenomenon. Whatever the reason, the Zoo sensation was not to last. As the "Spaceman" dust settled, it became increasingly apparent that the band were headed for the dreaded "one hit wonder" tag. Their follow-up single, "The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes", was a comparative flop, reaching no. 32 on the UK singles charts, while their album, also called "The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes", peaked at a respectable no. 6 position but rapidly lost momentum. Band frontman Jas Mann had, meanwhile, gained a reputation for having let the fleeting taste of success go directly to his head, prompting the music press to take a thoroughly unsympathetic view of the band's descent into oblivion - and if the quotes attributed to Mann in this article are accurate then I have to agree that that scorn and ridicule was very richly deserved. Babylon Zoo returned with a second album, King Kong Groover, in 1999, and a single "All The Money's Gone", a more conventional Britpop track, arriving a couple of years after the Britpop scene had already choked to death on the self-indulgence of Oasis (it would be wrong to imply that Mann was the only musician at the time who had an ego that could eat a whale). Neither made much of an impression. Mann's last real turn in the limelight was in an episode of faux current affairs show Brass Eye in 1997, where his apparent reluctance to dismiss the suggestion that he possessed more genes than your average human did little to reverse his fortunes.

The grand irony is that, for all of Mann's confidence in the lyrical and musical genius he'd exhibited in "Spaceman", the part of the song that everybody responded to - the Chipmunkese opening - had nothing to do with him and was rather the innovation of DJ Arthur Baker, who'd added it in while remixing the track. The original demo had instead begun with Mann hissing, "I killed your brother! I killed your sister! I killed your mother!" over and over, and obviously that had to go before the thing was going to receive mainstream radio play. Mann's subsequent cry of, "I killed you all! I killed you all! I killed you all!" still shows up in the released single's interlude, however. And it's here that I'll admit that the song achieves something slightly different for me. In that anguished, only semi-intelligible outburst "Spaceman" becomes momentarily unsettling, as if the veneer is peeling and a darker subliminal message nestled at the track's core is being tauntingly revealed. That message is but another example of the meaningless babble that characterises Mann's lyrics, but the animated anguish with which Mann howls out his inexplicable confession is at odds enough with the dreary nature of the song around it as to seem really disconcerting. It's a window into the "Spaceman" that could have been had the song trusted its own latent creep factor.

That's the lowdown on the song, anyway. But what of the ad itself? How does it hold up on its own merits? The 60 second spot, named "Planet" and directed by Vaughan Arnell and Anthea Benton, held significance other than giving a deceptive jump start to a baffling and much-derided grunge single. After the long line of ads focussing on male denim devotees, beginning with Nick Kamen's iconic laundrette trip in 1985, "Planet" was the first ad to feature a female lead (Russian model Kristina Semenovskaia), with the intention of promoting a new line of 501 jeans aimed at women. It's another premise centred around Levi's being a beacon of non-conformity amid life's daily mundaneness, the twist being that the "mundane", in scenario, is a futuristic suburbia, where our heroine arrives back home, having borrowed her father's space vehicle, and dazzles her slack-jawed neighbours with her denim affinity. It is a future that, while visually strange, exudes a convincing banality, with the emphasis on domestic gadgetry and vapid consumerism. The mid-90s computer effects will obviously look fairly primitive to modern eyes, but in a manner that enhances the retro-futuristic kitsch of the piece - it feels like a glimpse not merely in an alternate timeline where "Spaceman" morphed into a genuinely exciting slice of electronic pop, but a vision of the future that nowadays seems charmingly quaint. And there's just enough of the uncanny in there to make the ad sufficiently unsettling - for example, what is up with those purple contacts in all of our extraterrestrial suburbanites' peepers? Is this BBH's idea of space age fashion, or is the implication that the subjects aren't quite human and might in fact be an alien race or a colony of cyborgs?

What would fast become a cliche was this trend for closing out ads depicting futuristic scenarios with a shot of the Earth hanging hauntingly in the distance, the gob-smacking twist being that we were on some other planet all along. Orange Mobile did something very similar in a 1998 ad, in which they made some reasonably prescient predictions about the impact technology would have on our upcoming communicative habits (many of them no-brainers, at least one downright depressing to me). It's an image that carries the sensation of awe and trepidation at finding ourselves out in the vast unknown, coupled with the thrill and bittersweetness at the thought of having transcended our Earthly limitations, even if all we did was to go and replicate all of our Earthly consumerist tendencies elsewhere within the solar system. I guess that with the new millennium approaching this kind of lyrical hypothesising about what the future might hold seemed genuinely provocative to people. Now, we've seen more than a fifth of what the 21st century has to offer, and are possibly a mite too jaded to be looking to the stars for consolation - modern communications technology mostly has us going at one another's throats all day, and space just became a dick-measuring instrument for insufferable billionaires. #NotMyIntergalaticChrist