The Moonlandingz – Adrian Flanagan, Dean Honer and Lias Saoudi – will release their eagerly-awaited new album No Rocket Required this Friday, April 25 on Transgressive Records.
They have already shared early singles “The Sign of A Man” and “Roustabout” ft. Nadine Shah, and today they share one final preview that shows another side of the record. “It’s Where I’m From” was written 15 years ago by Flanagan after breaking both his arms in a bike accident. He was told by doctors he wouldn’t have full use of his arms again but in a defiant haze of Morphine he’d go to his home studio and attempt to write songs using one finger and a thumb on a mellotron, a midi keyboard and drum machine.
Flanagan explains of the track, “‘It’s Where I’m From’ was the very first song I wrote after my accident. I think I hit some kind of sweet spot between Johnny Cash doing ‘Hurt’ and something off Scott Walkers ‘Scott 2’ album, the track grounds you! I got busy with other projects and the track ended up dumped in a box at the back of a cupboard for well over a decade. During the final days of The Moonlandingz album recording sessions I rediscovered the CD with pretty much an album full of these beautiful songs on them, so I brought the rough demo to The Moonlandingz session. I got my friend Oliver Harrap to put some live drums over it, Alex White put some beautiful additional sax and flute on it and I put a new guide vocal on it with the intention of getting someone else to sing it before I completely re-recorded my original demo parts with my co producer Dean Honer!”
My absolute first choice to sing my song was Iggy Pop. No sweaty young upstart could sing this song and make you believe it. It had to be sung by someone who’d lived a thousand lives, who understood about mortality, loss – whose very throat exudes wisdom. As if by some kind of psychic magic Iggy said yes! Proof that something flung at the back of the cupboard all those years ago, made during great personal struggle and pain, can still have an extraordinary life in the future and enter the cannon of modern day pop ballads/standards of tomorrow!”
The accompanying music video sees the band collaborate with Jeanie Crystal again for another brilliant video, she adds, “This is the finale of a three piece sequence (for The Moonlandingz) about male vulnerability, sexuality, insecurities and ego and the absurd complexities of trying to understand the label of man.”
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.
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.
Thoughts Words Action 