The boys on the Moon
“I knew all these years of signing on would repay ultimately,” laughs Adrian Flanagan of The Moonlandingz, as he and the band’s frontman Johnny Rocket – higher often known as Lias Saoudi – arrive at our organized rendezvous level, an historic pub on the river simply downstream of Tower Bridge, at Bermondsey.
He’s referring to the most recent promotional activity that he and Lias – who along with Flanagan’s longtime manufacturing associate and former The All Seeing I man Dean Honer make up The Moondlandingz – have undertaken in assist of the Sheffield-based mission’s imminent second album No Rocket Required, specifically signing a whole bunch of vinyl copies on the workplace of their distributor PIAS up the street.
As of late, in fact, messers and Saoudi are something however unemployed. For a begin, they’re each members of a number of bands, to the extent that their PR and yours really battle to call all of them as we await their arrival. In addition to making Juno Each day’s album of the yr in 2022 as Acid Klaus, Flanagan and Honer are members of the Worldwide Academics of Pop and the Eccentronic Analysis Council, the latter with actor and longtime mate Maxine Peak. Saoudi, in fact, is frontman of acid home emperors Decius and artwork punk revolutionaries Fats White Household, each of whom have launched corking albums within the final yr, in addition to an more and more prolific author. As if that weren’t sufficient to maintain him busy, he’s additionally getting ready to change into a father for the primary time after we meet him.
Information of the second Moonlandingz album and its normal awesomeness, in the meantime, has been spreading steadily. Initially, there was the splendidly camp immediate synthpop traditional ‘Signal of a Man’, the thought of which was sparked by Saoudi and Flanagan buying and selling the immortal traces “I’ve been to Paris the place I ate snails/I’ve been to Cardiff – that’s in Wales!”
As we calm down to speak, the pair reveal that one Boy George was initially lined up for the job of ‘Signal of a Man’, however touring commitments ultimately put paid to the doable pairing. Not that Saoudi himself wasn’t able to utterly slaying the job.
Then got here the band unveiling their dwell present at London’s Lexington, which turned out to be a revelation in itself as they rampaged by way of a set like a mix of The Specials and a Stax Soul Revue, full with full band, brass part and backing singers. Flanagan did his finest to wind up the southern crowd by enjoying the theme to Eastenders, whereas Saoudi made a spectacular entrance within the outsize triangle from the ‘Signal…’ video, sipping a can of Stella by way of its tiny facehole.
After that got here the actually large weapons. ‘Roustabout’, which dropped a month in the past, noticed Saoudi duet with Nadine Shah on a glowing, haunted different Bond theme.
“I’ve been a fan of Nadine for years,” Flanagan tells us, “I like her voice and her political and poetical stance. Once I wrote the music and refrain I used to be imagining a 60s John Barry-esque meets The Smiths again within the days when Our Mozza ‘used to talk’ to – nay rejoice – the outsider and the sexually awkward in a method you didn’t really feel alone! Lias simply took the lyrics to a barely darker place by bringing within the backyard shears and making it really feel a bit extra claustrophobic. Such as you’re listening to contained in the character’s darkest most non-public ideas. And Nadine simply fucking glides over the observe like an eagle!!”
Then this week, with the album about to drop on Friday, got here the ace within the pack, ‘It’s The place I’m From’ with a very heartbreaking vocal efficiency from Iggy Pop. “We simply requested him,” says Flanagan, merely, when requested how the hook up occurred, “and he stated sure.”
The track is wreathed in tragedy and dignified melancholia, and maybe that’s unsurprising whenever you uncover the circumstances it was borne out of. Flanagan wrote the track about 13 years in the past when he’d damaged each his arms after falling off a motorbike and had been informed he’d by no means make music once more by his docs.
“I used to be informed I’d most likely not be capable of play an instrument once more as a result of the breaks had been so dangerous on the time I couldn’t even undo a bottle of milk or wipe my very own ass and there’s been long run harm that’ll by no means get better from. However throughout these nights of absolute private devastation and by utilizing one finger and a thumb I began making an attempt to put in writing a track utilizing a number of keyboards, mellotron, pc and so on and this track got here out – a track about loss and your individual mortality.
“So when it got here to ending this Moonlandingz album I introduced this track to the desk and instantly knew it needed to be sang by somebody who lived a life, a voice the place you may hear expertise omitting from its voice and soul… and Iggy was the voice who for me ticked all these containers. I needed to ship him some directive notes for when he recorded his voice in Miami – I stated begin with the authority of say Frank Sinatra – then be susceptible, be Jimmy Osterberg within the first refrain – step it as much as Iggy within the second verse and refrain – then go Elvis ‘If I Can Dream’ on that remaining refrain… He did an ideal job. I’m so bloody happy with that observe and it’s proof that typically that little tape in the back of a cabinet from years in the past can discover its personal life many, a few years later!”
When you can count on most BBC 6Music performs on that observe till hell freezes over, don’t make the error of pondering – as is so typically the case – that No Rocket Required’s finest moments have already been shared. It’s an album of many moods and a number of surprises.
Take the album’s opener ‘Some Folks’s Music’, that includes Ewen Bremner – that’s the actor that Spud in Trainspotting’, if the title sounds acquainted – that begins paying tribute to the lifechanging qualities of fine music, however rapidly flips right into a tirade concerning the insult and damage that dangerous music inflicts on us all.
It’s a viewpoint that the pair seem to share. Requested why it had taken eight odd years to supply a observe as much as their debut Interplanetary Class Classics the ever outspoken Flanagan says “We thought we’d go away and after we got here again bands like IDLES wouldn’t be there anymore,” he states with a glimmer of a snigger, “however they’re nonetheless fucking there. You’re nonetheless kowtowing to this terrible fucking music!”
“I’ve change into so disaffected and jaded,” Saoudi provides, “that I’m past resentment now. It’s a sort of nullification of all the pieces. I’m simply at a loss. I’ve been listening nearly nothing new, though I used to be listening to Sarah Davachi, these organ items. I used to be listening to that Irish rap group Versatile the opposite day. It was humorous that Kneecap are wandering all over the world like Nelson Mandela on ket, this nice renaissance of Celtic tradition, you realize? However Versatile weren’t this deracinated, Guardian-friendly combat the oppressors factor. They had been genuinely perverse.”
Nevertheless it’s pop, in its purest sense, that appears very a lot on the thoughts of The Moonlandingz on No Rocket Required. ‘All Out of Pop’, which was produced by the good Ross Orton and co-written by Saoudi and Sean Lennon, who appeared on the debut album, is an ode to the dying of all of the greats of pop who we immediately misplaced across the yr 2016.
“Do you keep in mind that yr when all the most effective individuals began dying?” Saoudi says, “George Michael, Prince, Bowie… It’s like all the pieces was simply dying, you realize? Issues have simply been in regular decline since then.”
It’s all, in the end, concerning the dying of the mass mainstream media occasion, we ruminate, as life shifts away from the shared cultural communion of the quick previous and in the direction of ever extra area of interest, self-curated isolation. “They actually mattered,” he says, “they had been ‘god males’. The mass icon we will all march behind is gone now, it’s all rather more fragmented. You select your wormhole and also you’re there, the algorithm feeds you. Atomisation. I believe in 2016 we misplaced these totems.”
The totems of previous pop could also be gone, however there’s scarcity of glistening pop sensibilities on No Rocket Required, from the large singles to album tracks just like the bursting P-funk bouncer ‘Give Me Extra’ to ‘Stinkfoot’, the place Jessica Winter – a very long time mate from her days with Saoudi’s former housemate Alex Sebley in Pregoblin – joins Syd from Working Males’s Membership (guitar) and Orton once more. Finally it was Winter and her co-producer Wu Oh who put the ending productions to a supersonic mixup of previous and new affect.
“I like it!” says Flanagan. “It’s half French electro with that lush sounding traditional 70s disco strings factor.“
They could not have caught up with Boy George this time spherical – and because the album proves, they had been greater than able to dealing with duties themselves. However concern not – Saoudi has one other icon from the 80s in his sights for the longer term.
“I’m decided to get Andrew Ridgley on each observe on the subsequent Decius album,” he says with a smile, “even when it’s only a grunt!”
Ben Willmott
The Moonlandingz play:
Could 7 – Traditional Grand, Glasgow –
Could 8 – Brudenell Social membership , Leeds
Could 9 – Rescue Rooms, Nottingham
Could 10 – Band On The Wall, Manchester
Could 14 – The Nice Escape, Brighton
Could 14 – Thekla, Bristol
Could 15 – King’s Cross Scala, London
Could 16 – Numerous venues, Brighton
Could 17 – Numerous venues, Sheffield
Jan 2-5, 2026 – Rockaway Seashore Competition 2026
