A tale of a female fan stalking her favorite singer, Johnny Rocket, of her favorite band, the outer space rockabilly Moonlandingz, the ERC needed someone to play the band, so they brought in Saul Adamczewski and Lias Saoudi of Fat White Family to help out. They recorded an EP to go along with the album and then, buoyed by the experience, everyone involved decided to take it one step further and make the Moonlandingz a real live band. The resulting album, Interplanetary Class Classics, was released in early 2017 on Chimera Music. They toured the U.K. and Europe, then released the This Cities Undone EP late in the year. Their last shows of 2017 were billed as possibly their last ever, as the bandmembers resolved to return to their regular gigs. Their record label wasn’t ready to say goodbye, however, and in early 2018 released a deluxe edition of Interplanetary Class Classics that came with a second disc of remixes, demos, and stray tracks.
In 2025, they have returned with a new album, No Rocket Required.
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.