I hope everyone had a good holiday season and is staying as safe as possible.

I apologize for the lack of posts recently. As I had been saying in many of my previous posts, I was moving to a new apartment last month, which kind of took up all my time. Things are finally settling down now. I got new record shelves built! They’re pretty. Take a look.

These are the first record shelves I’ve had in nearly a decade that allow me to shelve titles without having to sit on the ground or bend over for most of them. As a giant with a bad back, you have no idea how happy that makes me.

I finally got the turntable hooked up to the computer yesterday, but I still don’t have all that much to play on it since we’re on a near lockdown here in Tokyo and I haven’t made my way to a record store in over a month. I’ve been buying lots of new music online, but I haven’t been able to find any used and out-of-print items that I want to snag yet. I do feel a drunken night of Discogs browsing coming on soon though, maybe I’ll try to clean up on 80s and 90s maxi-singles, and stupid European electronic prog rock. Anyone know of any killer weird tracks that are on old singles but have yet to be re-issued? I’m looking for some good 80s and 90s stuff, I haven’t been on a binge of that stuff for a while now and I’m jonesing.

I also got some other plans for content this year. Not on this site, but I’m in the initial stages of setting up another podcast. This one focused on movies. I really don’t want to say more than that, and it’s definitely months away, but I’m excited about it.

In the meantime, here are some B-sides by an utterly forgotten one-hit wonder.

Babylon Zoo
Metal Vision
Blue Nude
Babylon Zoo were a one-hit wonder in both their native UK and Australia with their debut single “Spaceman,” which rocketed up the charts thanks to its inclusion in a Levi’s jeans commercial. The next time someone bemoans that TikTok is killing pop music by promoting forgettable tracks by mediocre artists, bring up that.

While a lot of one-hit wonders can at least claim a modicum of interest in their follow-up singles, Babylon Zoo are not nearly as lucky. From what I can gather, no one bought their second single. And while the group’s debut album got decent enough reviews, their 1999 follow-up, King Kong Groover, was absolutely savaged by the press and sank like a stone the second it came out. Checking up on Discogs, it appears that some members went on to do other things. One of them joined Alphaville for a bit, another one worked with Primal Scream for a while, and their original drummer was in a Celtic group of some regard. Singer Jas Mann hasn’t done much of anything though. He has a Twitter account that he hasn’t updated in more than a year, and despite teasing further Babylon Zoo material several times, nothing has materialized.

Is Babylon Zoo criminally underrated and unfairly maligned? Maybe. Shit. I don’t know. My knowledge of Babylon Zoo begins and ends with songs that were on singles to “Spaceman.” I had a 12″ single for this track eons ago, and even featured tracks from it here at some point. In the many years since then, most of those tracks have fallen back into print, including all the remixes of “Spaceman.” These b-sides are still out of print, however.

Based on these tracks, I’m gonna say that Babylon Zoo were…not bad! Maybe the entire album is dogshit on fire, I dunno, but I dig these a lot. “Metal Vision” rips off Gary Numan’s “Metal” for sure, but it’s a good rip-off and not many people in the 90s were ripping off Gary Numan, so points for originality. There isn’t much to “Blue Nude,” but it has a good groove and a glam, T. Rex type vibe.