What's happened to Babylon Zoo?

IF YOU must be a one-hit wonder, it's perhaps best to do it the Babylon Zoo way. Few people would now remember much about this slightly dull electro rock band other than their 1996 debut single Spaceman, part of which was used in a Levi's jeans ad (in a ridiculously speeded up version that was much more fun to listen to than the dirgey original) but at least the ad helped make the song a huge, record-breaking, international number one hit.

At least, too, it shifted lots of copies of their debut album, The Boy With the X-Ray Eyes. And, best of all, at least the song had a novelty title that people would remember for years to come, meaning that Babylon Zoo still pick up royalties every time Spaceman is used to advertise a kids' TV show called Lunar Jim, or Ant and Dec's film Alien Autopsy, or Battlestar Galactica, and so on …

But still, does anyone remember what their second album was called? Or even their second single? (The answers are, respectively, King Kong Groover and Animal Army, in case you were wondering). It was no great surprise, then, when frontman Jas Mann abandoned the cause after the release of the aforementioned second album, in 1999, and went to live in India.

In 2004, a comeback was threatened, including a slightly eccentric competition in which Mann asked fans to sum up their lives in one word; he would then write every one of these words into the song lyrics of his new album.

Perhaps Mann is still struggling with this formidable task, because the album, four years later, is still to appear.