The 1990s File Feature
In The Meantime
"In the Meantime": Spacehog's Glam-Rock Transmission Aliens in the Grunge Era There was something almost defiantly anachronistic about Spacehog arriving in t…
01 The Story
"In the Meantime": Spacehog's Glam-Rock Transmission
Aliens in the Grunge Era
There was something almost defiantly anachronistic about Spacehog arriving in the mid-nineties. While the dominant conversation in rock music was about authenticity, stripped-down performance, and the Seattle inheritance, this Leeds-born band transplanted to New York City was doing something closer to classic glam rock: big, swaggering, deliberately theatrical, with a debt to David Bowie that was cheerfully acknowledged rather than concealed. The four Langdon brothers at the core of the band, along with their collaborators, had absorbed the full spectrum of seventies British rock and were making no effort to disguise it. Their debut album Resident Alien arrived in 1995, and by spring of 1996 the single "In the Meantime" was making serious inroads on alternative radio. It debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 6, 1996, entering at number 43 and signaling an immediate strong start for a band that had arrived without much conventional promotional infrastructure behind it.
The Chart Run
The song moved steadily through April, climbing to its peak position of number 32 on April 27, 1996. The chart run lasted 20 weeks in total, which, while modest compared to some singles of the era, represented genuine mainstream penetration for a band that was essentially offering glam rock to an audience that had been told for years that glam rock was dead and had taken the news at face value. Modern rock radio in particular embraced the song enthusiastically, placing it alongside the heavier post-grunge acts without apology. The production had the kind of arena-sized sweep that worked well on that format: wide-open verses, a chorus that fills whatever room you play it in, and a bridge that suggests the whole structure might levitate if you push it hard enough.
Royston Langdon and the Sound
The band was fronted by Royston Langdon, whose vocals carry the track with a quality that sits somewhere between Bowie's theatrical mode and the earnest belting that alternative rock favored in the nineties. The production on "In the Meantime" is dense and layered, with electric guitar tones that belong firmly to the classic rock tradition, and a rhythm section that drives harder than most glam-influenced music allowed itself to. The guitar work carries real melodic weight, with the main riff functioning as a hook nearly as strong as the vocal melody itself. The song was not subtle, and it was not trying to be, and that lack of subtlety was precisely what radio needed at that particular moment.
A Moment Without a Follow-Up
Spacehog proved unable to replicate the commercial success of "In the Meantime." Subsequent releases received less attention from radio, and the band eventually dissolved before reuniting in the 2000s and 2010s for the inevitable and welcomed return. In the broader arc of nineties rock, the song is often cited as one of those pleasant anomalies: a band from outside the expected genre corridors arriving briefly and memorably on the mainstream chart before the particular moment that favored them passed. The fact that the song remains genuinely enjoyable to listen to now suggests the anomaly was rooted in actual quality rather than fleeting novelty or clever timing.
What the Song Built in Three Minutes
The production reveals additional details with each listen: the way the bass line anchors the harmonic movement beneath layers of guitar, the way the bridge expands the song's emotional register before the final chorus, the way Langdon's vocal sits just slightly above the mix so that the words land without effort on the listener's part. These are not accidents; they are the work of people who had studied the form carefully and understood what made it effective. The song proves that competent genre reproduction, when executed with genuine commitment and skill, can produce something that outlasts its moment.
A Relic Worth Revisiting
Heard today, "In the Meantime" occupies an interesting position. It sounds like nothing else that was on the chart around it in the spring of 1996, which is partly why it stood out and partly why it didn't maintain commercial momentum through multiple albums. But the song's self-contained nature is also a virtue: you don't need context to enjoy it. What Spacehog built is a complete, satisfying piece of rock craftsmanship that refuses to apologize for its flamboyance. Give it a spin and see if it doesn't still feel like a small, strange gift from a decade that was stranger than it remembered being.
"In the Meantime" — Spacehog's singular moment on the 1990s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of "In the Meantime": Love, Waiting, and the Space Between Moments
An Anthem for the In-Between
"In the Meantime" draws its emotional force from a familiar but rarely examined human experience: the waiting. Not waiting for something specific and defined, but the larger waiting that characterizes significant portions of a life, the period between where you are and where you want to be, between the relationship you have and the one you need, between the person you currently are and the one you are in the process of becoming. The song's narrator is caught in exactly that space and is addressing someone who is caught there with him. The central offer is company, presence, mutual endurance through uncertainty, which turns out to be no small thing at all.
Love as Accompaniment
The lyrical emotional core of the song is a form of love that is specifically about showing up during the difficult period rather than only for the celebrations. This is a different thing than the romantic declaration that dominates most pop love songs. The narrator is not promising perfection or a perfect future; he is promising to be there in the complicated present. That kind of love, which is quieter and arguably more demanding than the ecstatic variety, resonated with listeners in the mid-nineties who were navigating the specific uncertainties of young adulthood in a world that seemed to be changing its terms constantly.
The Bowie Shadow and What It Means Lyrically
The song's lyrical style carries traces of the late-Bowie tradition of ambitious imagery loosely tethered to emotional narrative: vivid phrases that suggest more than they explain, lines that accumulate feeling without necessarily building a tidy argument. This approach asks the listener to meet the song halfway, to bring their own experience to the imagery rather than having it spelled out in the plain language of a therapy session. In the context of 1996 alternative rock, where lyrical directness was more fashionable, this slight opacity was unusual. It gave the song a quality that rewarded re-listening, because you found different things in it depending on what you brought to it that particular day.
The Cosmic and the Personal
There is something conspicuously large-scale about the song's imagery, references to things beyond the personal and immediate, gestures toward something cosmic or at least expansive. This is consistent with the glam rock tradition that the band drew on, where love songs were often written against a backdrop of vastness, as if the small, specific human feeling was most clearly visible when placed against an enormous canvas. The strategy works here because the production supports it: the arrangement has the sweep and scale of something designed to fill an arena, which makes the personal emotional content feel simultaneously intimate and significant rather than self-indulgent.
Why It Still Holds
Listeners who were in their teens and early twenties in 1996 often cite "In the Meantime" as a song that captured something true about that period of life, when almost everything felt provisional and the future was genuinely uncertain in ways that were exciting and frightening in roughly equal measure. The song's central emotional proposition, that the in-between time has its own value and that having someone with you through it matters as much as whatever comes after, is one that gains rather than loses relevance as you accumulate experience. It is a comfort song dressed in glam-rock clothes, and that combination turned out to be exactly right for a specific and memorable moment on the American rock chart.
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