The Moonlandingz interview – “Iggy was the voice who for me ticked all those boxes”

The men on the Moon

“I knew all those years of signing on would pay off eventually,” laughs Adrian Flanagan of The Moonlandingz, as he and the band’s frontman Johnny Rocket – better known as Lias Saoudi – arrive at our arranged rendezvous point, an ancient pub on the river just downstream of Tower Bridge, at Bermondsey.

He’s referring to the latest promotional task that he and Lias – who together with Flanagan’s longtime production partner and former The All Seeing I man Dean Honer make up The Moondlandingz – have undertaken in support of the Sheffield-based project’s imminent second album No Rocket Required, namely signing hundreds of vinyl copies at the office of their distributor PIAS up the road.

These days, of course, messers and Saoudi are anything but unemployed.  For a start, they’re both members of multiple bands, to the extent that their PR and yours truly struggle to name them all as we await their arrival.  As well as making Juno Daily’s album of the year in 2022 as Acid Klaus, Flanagan and Honer are members of the International Teachers of Pop and the Eccentronic Research Council, the latter with actor and longtime mate Maxine Peak. Saoudi, of course, is frontman of acid house emperors Decius and art punk revolutionaries Fat White Family, both of whom have released corking albums in the last year, as well as an increasingly prolific writer.  As if that weren’t enough to keep him busy, he’s also preparing to become a father for the first time when we meet him.

News of the second Moonlandingz album and its general awesomeness, meanwhile, has been spreading steadily.  First of all, there was the wonderfully camp instant synthpop classic  ‘Sign of a Man’, the idea of which was sparked by Saoudi and Flanagan trading the immortal lines “I’ve been to Paris where I ate snails/I’ve been to Cardiff – that’s in Wales!”

As we settle down to chat, the pair reveal that one Boy George was originally lined up for the job of ‘Sign of a Man’, but touring commitments eventually put paid to the possible pairing.  Not that Saoudi himself wasn’t capable of completely slaying the job.

Then came the band unveiling their live show at London’s Lexington, which turned out to be a revelation in itself as they rampaged through a set like a combination of The Specials and a Stax Soul Revue, complete with full band, brass section and backing singers.  Flanagan did his best to wind up the southern crowd by playing the theme to Eastenders, while Saoudi made a spectacular entrance in the outsize triangle from the ‘Sign…’ video, sipping a can of Stella through its tiny facehole.

After that came the really big guns.  ‘Roustabout’, which dropped a month ago, saw Saoudi duet with Nadine Shah on a sparkling, haunted alternative Bond theme.

“I’ve been a fan of Nadine for years,”  Flanagan tells us, “I love her voice and her political and poetical stance. When I wrote the music and chorus I was imagining a 60s John Barry-esque meets The Smiths back in the days when Our Mozza ‘used to speak’ to – nay celebrate – the outsider and the sexually awkward in a way you didn’t feel alone! Lias just took the lyrics to a slightly darker place by bringing in the garden shears and making it feel a bit more claustrophobic. Like you’re hearing inside the character’s darkest most private thoughts. And Nadine just fucking glides over the track like an eagle!!”

Then this week, with the album about to drop on Friday, came the ace in the pack, ‘It’s Where I’m From’ with a truly heartbreaking vocal performance from Iggy Pop.  “We just asked him,” says Flanagan, simply, when asked how the hook up happened, “and he said yes.”

The song is wreathed in tragedy and dignified melancholia, and perhaps that’s unsurprising when you discover the circumstances it was borne out of.  Flanagan wrote the song about 13 years ago when he’d broken both his arms after falling off a bike and had been told he’d never make music again by his doctors.

“I was told I’d probably not be able to play an instrument again because the breaks were so bad at the time I couldn’t even undo a bottle of milk or wipe my own ass and there’s been long term damage that’ll never recover from. But during these nights of absolute personal devastation and by using one finger and a thumb I started trying to write a song using a few keyboards, mellotron, computer etc and this song came out – a song about loss and your own mortality.

“So when it came to finishing this Moonlandingz album I brought this song to the table and immediately knew it had to be sang by someone who lived a life, a voice where you can hear experience omitting from its voice and soul… and Iggy was the voice who for me ticked all those boxes. I had to send him some directive notes for when he recorded his voice in Miami – I said start with the authority of say Frank Sinatra – then be vulnerable, be Jimmy Osterberg in the first chorus – step it up to Iggy in the second verse and chorus – then go Elvis ‘If I Can Dream’ on that final chorus… He did a perfect job.  I’m so bloody proud of that track and it’s proof that sometimes that little tape at the back of a cupboard from years ago can find its own life many, many years later!”

While you can expect maximum BBC 6Music plays on that track until hell freezes over, don’t make the mistake of thinking – as is so often the case – that No Rocket Required’s best moments have already been shared.  It’s an album of many moods and multiple surprises.

Take the album’s opener ‘Some People’s Music’, featuring Ewen Bremner – that’s the actor that Spud in Trainspotting’, if the name sounds familiar – that starts paying tribute to the lifechanging  qualities of good music, but quickly flips into a tirade about the insult and injury that bad music inflicts on us all.

It’s a point of view that the pair appear to share.  Asked why it had taken eight odd years to produce a follow up to their debut Interplanetary Class Classics the ever outspoken Flanagan says “We thought we’d go away and when we came back bands like IDLES wouldn’t be there anymore,” he states with a glimmer of a snigger, “but they’re still fucking there.  You’re still kowtowing to this awful fucking music!”

“I’ve become so disaffected and jaded,” Saoudi adds, “that I’m beyond resentment now.  It’s a kind of nullification of everything.  I’m just at a loss.  I’ve been listening almost nothing new, although  I was listening to Sarah Davachi, those organ pieces.   I was listening to that Irish rap group Versatile the other day.  It was funny that Kneecap are wandering around the world like Nelson Mandela on ket, this great renaissance of Celtic culture, you know?  But Versatile weren’t this deracinated, Guardian-friendly fight the oppressors thing.  They were genuinely perverse.”

But it’s pop, in its purest sense, that seems very much on the mind of The Moonlandingz on No Rocket Required.  ‘All Out of Pop’, which was produced by the great Ross Orton and co-written by Saoudi and Sean Lennon, who appeared on the debut album, is an ode to the death of all the greats of pop who we suddenly lost around the year 2016.

“Do you remember that year when all the best people started dying?” Saoudi says, “George Michael, Prince, Bowie… It’s like everything was just dying, you know?  Things have just been in steady decline since then.”

It’s all, ultimately, about the death of the mass mainstream media event, we ruminate, as life shifts away from the shared cultural communion of the immediate past and towards ever more niche, self-curated isolation.  “They really mattered,” he says, “they were ‘god men’.  The mass icon we can all march behind is gone now, it’s all much more fragmented.  You choose your wormhole and you’re there, the algorithm feeds you.  Atomisation.  I think in 2016 we lost those totems.”

The totems of old pop may be gone, but there’s shortage of glistening pop sensibilities on No Rocket Required, from the big singles to album tracks like the bursting P-funk bouncer ‘Give Me More’  to  ‘Stinkfoot’, where Jessica Winter – a long time mate from her days with Saoudi’s former housemate Alex Sebley in Pregoblin – joins Syd from Working Men’s Club (guitar) and Orton again. Eventually it was Winter and her co-producer Wu Oh who put the finishing productions to a supersonic mixup of old and new influence.

“I love it!” says Flanagan.  “It’s part French electro with that lush sounding classic 70s disco strings thing.“

They may not have caught up with Boy George this time round – and as the album proves, they were more than capable of handling duties themselves. But fear not – Saoudi has another icon from the 80s in his sights for the future.

“I’m determined to get Andrew Ridgley on every track on the next Decius album,” he says with a smile, “even if it’s just a grunt!”

Ben Willmott

The Moonlandingz play:

May 7 – Classic Grand, Glasgow –

May 8 – Brudenell Social club , Leeds

May 9 – Rescue Rooms, Nottingham

May 10 – Band On The Wall, Manchester

May 14 – The Great Escape, Brighton

May 14 – Thekla, Bristol

May 15 – King’s Cross Scala, London

May 16 – Various venues, Brighton

May 17 – Various venues, Sheffield

Jan 2-5, 2026 – Rockaway Beach Festival 2026