Web Articles about Jas Mann, old but still interesting

[Lord-Shiva]

Sari girls .. sex god Jas is still a virgin; SHOWBIZ EXCLUSIVE: POP
Sunday Mirror, Jan 28, 1996

ON Top Of The Pops he is the sex god in a silver sari whose exotic image has sent Britain's teenagers into orbit.

Jas Mann, lead singer with pop sensations Babylon Zoo, is set to become a millionaire thanks to Spaceman, the fastest-selling debut single which has shot straight to No 1.

As part of the huge hype surrounding Jas, his publicists are sending out press releases beginning "Sex Is My Drug. I Can't Get Off The Carousel..."

But the handsome 24-year-old from Wolverhampton is still waiting to lose his virginity.

He is a Sikh, saving himself for an arranged marriage, revealed his former manager Tommy Langford.

Tommy, 32, told the Sunday Mirror last night: "There were always lots of girls hanging around and trying to get close to Jas. I've shared rooms with him and girls wanted to sleep with him all the time.

"But he never took advantage of them. The big shock is - he's a virgin."

He added: "Jas is very serious about his religion. He couldn't take a white woman home to his mum and dad, Sukbinder, who is a dressmaker, and Balbir, a foundry worker.

"My understanding is that his two elder sisters have had arranged marriages and I believe the family have the same thing in mind for Jas and that he is saving himself. Certainly he has kept himself clean and pure."

In the six years they were together, Tommy remembers Jas, who doesn't smoke, hates drugs and prefers hot water and honey to alcohol, having just one girlfriend. "But he never stayed the night with her," he said.

It comes as no surprise to Tommy, who still clearly remembers the night in 1987 that he first saw Jas, singing in a band called The Glove Puppets. "I knew he was brilliant the moment I saw him," said Tommy. "The audience was hypnotised."

Tommy signed him for his own band, The Sand Kings. Jas soon developed a big female following in the West Midlands. It was a shock to the Indian immigrant who was bullied at school because his mother refused to let him cut his long, black hair.

Says Jas, who spent his first two years in the Punjab: "I went from this paradise to the West Midlands and suddenly I'm playing marbles in the streets of what some would call an urban hell."

Jas and Tommy, once a trumpeter with Dexy's Midnight Runners, formed Babylon Zoo in 1992. Jas moved out of the family home and bought a pounds 60,000 Victorian semi nearby.

Tommy says: "I helped him decorate. We put in wall-to-ceiling mirrors so he could practise his dance routines.

"The house is next to a girls' high school and many of the pupils would look out for him on their way to and from school."

Tommy has parted company with Jas but still looks fondly at his pop prodigy who, he feels, could become as big as his idols, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley.

Tommy said: "I don't think anybody can control Jas. He's a one- off. He really believes in the Spaceman thing. He believes his music can reach people on other planets."

Sorry seems to be the hardest-working word
Independent, The (London), Apr 13, 2001[size=3]

"There are many types of apology and all they have in common is that they are means to an end. Let me read one from Thursday's Sun: `On 2 April last year we published a story about Jas Mann, of pop group Babylon Zoo. The story wrongly suggested that Jas Mann was depressed, had abandoned his career and joined a weird cult that practised exorcism and ritual slaughter of animals. In fact, all Jas did was join a community group raising money for homeless children in India. He is not depressed and his career continues, with a solo album out soon. Our apologies to Jas'."

[accadia]

The 'Sari Girls' article has been available here for awhile.

[Lord-Shiva]

DISTANT EARTH INTERVIEW
with
Carrie Melbourne[size=3]

My first really professional outfit was in 1996 with Jas Mann's 'Babylon Zoo' - we went from obscure nobodies one week to appearing on every TV show in Europe the next, and people stopping us in the street and asking for our autographs! It was wonderful, but sadly short-lived, the only time I had the same hair-stylist as Claudia Schiffer and Kate Moss! I don't know what Jas is doing now. He was a very wacky character though, and we appeared on BBC's Top of the Pops in January and February for 5 weeks running with

'Spaceman', which was a great experience - I remember sitting in the car and hearing on the radio that Babylon Zoo had knocked George Michael off the No. 1 spot in the charts! I then worked with Tricky, playing bass for him on the US Lollapalooza tour 1997, and subsequently with him for his 1998 "Angels with Dirty Faces" tours of Europe and America. He is a very interesting person, and the shows were very meditative and hypnotic. I left when my work with Mike Oldfield started to clash with Tricky's forward schedule.

The 'Sari Girls' article has been available here for awhile.

Oh alright. Didn't know that so many updates have been made.
I normally go straight to the Forum.
Makes me look like an idiot now, doesn't it? Great.


Ok that's a more recent one i haven't seen before.
The person is very sarcastic about Jas

What's happened to Babylon Zoo?
Source: The Scotsman[size=3]

Published Date: 16 February 2008
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.




Friday, May 19, 2006
The Disappointment of Being the Bloke Out of Babylon Zoo
[size=3]

Jas Mann was the man who, in 1996, broke chart history in the UK with his Babylon Zoo record “Spaceman”. It was a record that shifted no less than a quarter of a million records in the space of one week, making it the then fastest selling single in British chart history. Its success was almost entirely down to two things: Firstly, Levis had used a portion of the track on a television advertisement at a time when TV adverts had become, in themselves, a fashionable thing (think Levis' laundrette and the Guinness surfing horses). Secondly, the hook was a speeded up section at the beginning of the track that would have made Father Abraham and the Smurfs proud. This accounts for 32 seconds of a 5’30” track. That works out to 1241666.67 unplayed minutes of CD and vinyl as the kids of 1996 put the first 32 seconds on constant repeat, discarding the much heavier sound that was the Zoo.

Despite this record breaking success, Jas Mann’s Babylon Zoo, who had made great play of the fact that they were going to be the next big thing, gently slid out of the public’s consciousness. Granted, Jas probably walked away with a bulging back pocket full of cash, but never really got the prolonged fame that he appeared to crave.

More recently, Babylon Zoo has caught the imagination of Mr VeryVeryBored’s two and a half year old. This is not because he is a child genius authoring a twenty-thousand word dissertation on the role of rock music in modern television campaigns, but because his current favourite television show is Lunar Jim, a collaboration between a Canadian broadcaster and the pre-school division of the BBC, CBeebies. In their divine wisdom the Beeb have opted to use Spaceman in the trailers for the show - the sped up bit of course - in a bid to capture the imagination of new generation who don’t even know what Levis Jeans are. He was beside himself with joy when Mr VeryVeryBored downloaded the track from ITunes (after being slightly amused by the dialogue box “Are you sure that you want to purchase Spaceman by Babylon Zoo?”). He danced around the room singing the smurfy section, complete with dance routine, but looked slightly bemused as the clock ticked over to the heavy guitar piece. “Daddy, not like this – want Lunar Jim on again!”. Sorry Jas – it’s a new generation, but they still don’t like your song.

[raspberryman]

ooh! I didn't realise our forum Q&A thing was referenced in the press. Thanks for sharing!

[Lord-Shiva]

ooh! I didn't realise our forum Q&A thing was referenced in the press. Thanks for sharing!

No Problem.
Yeah i was surprised too.

I just can't believe after all those years, people are still very nasty about him and expect him to fail. You know i wish that one day he does an Axl Rose and shows them all the middle finger with releasing a great Album as TBWTXREyes was, to shut them up forever.
I'm not a big Guns' n Roses Fan, my husband is, but i think it was great what he did to all the people who were mouthing off.
I mean who are they to tell people like Axl or Jas they can't do it. Of course BZ was never as big as Guns' n Roses were, i know that. But Jas has a great potential as we all know.

Sometimes i can't blame him for not wanting to come back as BZ. There is so much negativity sticking on that name from the media. I'd like to know where that comes from.

The British press is really the worst so far, closly followed by the German press.
Thankfully the Austrian press was never bad about him as far as i know. They tend not to gossip nasty about people. They were probably just happy that a big British star at that time was coming to Austria. Everywhere i've seen BZ appearing on TV there or in Magazines and Newspapers they were quite nice and liked his music. They even played Animal Army and The Boy with the X-Ray Eyes on the Radio a few times.
Babylon Zoo wasn't as big as in the UK, not many people knew him and there wasn't such a hype.

I can remember me writing a letter to the national Newspaper called Krone, after i've seen a nice picture of Jas. It was when they thought that Jas was writing a song for AC Milan with his friend Paolo Maldini. I really wanted that photo and asked them if i can buy it. A few weeks later i got a few nice Photos of Jas sent by a Photographer who obviously worked for the Newspaper through the post with a note Kind Regards, and i was just - wow THANKS.
They were the ones you can see on Page 3, (the last 3) and on page 4 (the first 3) on the Gallery of babylonzoo.net

I hoped that something like that would be possible here aswell , but they seem to hold on to the Photos like Gold. I know that people like Maddy and others have tried, especially as she's a Photographer herself you would think they'd sell it to her.