NEWS
The Moonlandingz announce new album 'No Rocket Required'
25 February 2025
The Moonlandingz - Adrian Flanagan, Dean Honer and Lias Saoudi - announce that their long-awaited second album No Rocket Required will be released on April 25 via Transgressive Records. To celebrate the announcement, they share brand new single “Give Me More” and after recently selling out two headline London shows they announce a UK tour which kicks off in May.
On the track Johnny Rocket (aka Lias Saoudi) says, “Even god would lose his innocence in Yorkshire. This song is an ode to the limitless. It’s like what the great Michael of Owen said: we are all geniuses when we dream.”
The Moonlandingz have returned, seven long years after their debut. When they first emerged from Valhalla Dale they were a semi-fictional band bringing us sticky squelchy pop songs to offer solace and punishment in the months following the Brexit vote and Trump’s first victory. The Moonlandingz conspired with Yoko Ono, Sean Ono Lennon, Rebecca Taylor, Phil Oakey and the Cowboy from The Village People to make one of the great albums of 2017, and we needed it. Interplanetary Class Classics was a dose of unreality equal to the unhinged times we were stumbling into. The Moonlandingz have finally returned – not when we wanted them but now that we need them – galloping in on their four horses, bareback and howling.
No Rocket Required delivers brassy squawks, motorik convulsions and sinister soothing vocals from a righteous line-up of guest singers and ranters: Nadine Shah, Iggy Pop, Jessica Winter and Trainspotting actor Ewen Bremner. Plus, of course, there’s The Moonlandingz’ own front man, Johnny Rocket aka Lias Saoudi, who has the wobbly-horny voice of R Whites’ secret lemonade drinker on new single “Give Me More” and then becomes basically Kris Kristofferson of the Pennines in the middle of epic “Krack Drought Suite”, imparting gnomic sawdust saloon wisdom from a barstool in Huddersfield. Mostly though he’s the man we know from Fat White Family, with gravelly crooning (to especially great effect in “Roustabout”, his duet with Nadine Shah) and camp working men’s club singer. Is that him, too, right at the end of the album, with a shonky German accent and vocodered to delirium over some thumping fizzing Scooterish techno? I do hope so.
On utterly lovely and gently jazzy single “It’s Where I’m From”, Iggy Pop offers a tender solidarity to us all, an appeal for softness – ‘won’t someone put their arms around me, I cannot take the pain of those who’ve gone / I’d like to put your world behind me, but everywhere I look is where I’m from’ – with that guileless grandiose vulnerability that sits alongside latter-day Johnny Cash and Scott Walker.
So much is packed in to No Rocket Required, by Adrian Flanagan and Dean Honer and all their musical and beautiful collaborators, and somehow it is cosmic on a human scale, Carl Sagan admiring the hectic carpets in a vommy town-centre disco.
What to do, as we potter and fret, as we watch bodies, homes and lives destroyed every day while our elected leaders, so forensic and so sensible, use their weasel words, shrug their coward shoulders and saunter off to raise our bus fares. Dancing of course and togetherness, looking out for each other, and that’s not enough. What kind of fight are we bringing? We will always need to organise, to fight, to collaborate, to connect and to dance dance dance. And that is what The Moonlandingz do.
Track listing:
1. Some People's Music
2. The Sign of A Man
3. Roustabout
4. The Insects Have Been Shat On
5. It's Where I'm From
6. All Out Of Pop
7. Yama Yama
8. Give Me More
9. Stink Foot
10. The Krack Drought Suite (Pts 1-3)
Tour dates:
7th May - The Classic Grand, Glasgow UK
8th May - Brudenell Social Club, Leeds UK
9th May - BOTW, Manchester UK
13th May - Rescue Rooms, Nottingham UK
14th May - Thekla, Bristol UK
15th May - Scala, London UK
16th May - The Great Escape Festival, Chalk, Brighton UK
17th May - Get Together Festival, Sheffield UK
On the track Johnny Rocket (aka Lias Saoudi) says, “Even god would lose his innocence in Yorkshire. This song is an ode to the limitless. It’s like what the great Michael of Owen said: we are all geniuses when we dream.”
No Rocket Required delivers brassy squawks, motorik convulsions and sinister soothing vocals from a righteous line-up of guest singers and ranters: Nadine Shah, Iggy Pop, Jessica Winter and Trainspotting actor Ewen Bremner. Plus, of course, there’s The Moonlandingz’ own front man, Johnny Rocket aka Lias Saoudi, who has the wobbly-horny voice of R Whites’ secret lemonade drinker on new single “Give Me More” and then becomes basically Kris Kristofferson of the Pennines in the middle of epic “Krack Drought Suite”, imparting gnomic sawdust saloon wisdom from a barstool in Huddersfield. Mostly though he’s the man we know from Fat White Family, with gravelly crooning (to especially great effect in “Roustabout”, his duet with Nadine Shah) and camp working men’s club singer. Is that him, too, right at the end of the album, with a shonky German accent and vocodered to delirium over some thumping fizzing Scooterish techno? I do hope so.
On utterly lovely and gently jazzy single “It’s Where I’m From”, Iggy Pop offers a tender solidarity to us all, an appeal for softness – ‘won’t someone put their arms around me, I cannot take the pain of those who’ve gone / I’d like to put your world behind me, but everywhere I look is where I’m from’ – with that guileless grandiose vulnerability that sits alongside latter-day Johnny Cash and Scott Walker.
So much is packed in to No Rocket Required, by Adrian Flanagan and Dean Honer and all their musical and beautiful collaborators, and somehow it is cosmic on a human scale, Carl Sagan admiring the hectic carpets in a vommy town-centre disco.
What to do, as we potter and fret, as we watch bodies, homes and lives destroyed every day while our elected leaders, so forensic and so sensible, use their weasel words, shrug their coward shoulders and saunter off to raise our bus fares. Dancing of course and togetherness, looking out for each other, and that’s not enough. What kind of fight are we bringing? We will always need to organise, to fight, to collaborate, to connect and to dance dance dance. And that is what The Moonlandingz do.
Track listing:
1. Some People's Music
2. The Sign of A Man
3. Roustabout
4. The Insects Have Been Shat On
5. It's Where I'm From
6. All Out Of Pop
7. Yama Yama
8. Give Me More
9. Stink Foot
10. The Krack Drought Suite (Pts 1-3)
Tour dates:
7th May - The Classic Grand, Glasgow UK
8th May - Brudenell Social Club, Leeds UK
9th May - BOTW, Manchester UK
13th May - Rescue Rooms, Nottingham UK
14th May - Thekla, Bristol UK
15th May - Scala, London UK
16th May - The Great Escape Festival, Chalk, Brighton UK
17th May - Get Together Festival, Sheffield UK
