(First published in Issue 125 of Electronic Sound magazine, May 2025)
LUNAR TUNES
Pterodactyls in the garden, an obsession with Gabber videos and a catastrophic Yorkshire bike accident immortalised in song by Iggy Pop. As Dean Honer, Adrian Flanagan and Lias Saoudi explain, their long-awaited second album as The Moonlandingz has a complicated backstory
Words: Bob Fischer
“The whole process has been very fragmented,” says Dean Honer. “After the first album, we knew there was an opportunity to do a second one, and we made a start. But then Lias got really busy with The Fat White Family, and it got left for too long, really. By the time he was free, we were busy doing The International Teachers Of Pop. And then COVID hit.”
“Lias had two Fat White Family albums to make during that period,” nods Adrian Flanagan.
Lias Saoudi, looking immaculately ruffled in an adjacent Zoom window, is rolling his eyes.
“A normal band would have managed four,” he sighs.
They are, on the face of it, an unlikely trio. Dean and Adrian are, of course, a longstanding Sheffield-based double act, the knob-twiddling geniuses behind The Eccentronic Research Council and The International Teachers Of Pop. Lias was (and possibly still is – it’s complicated) the wild-hearted frontman of The Fat White Family, an outfit once described by NME as “the most dangerous, most scabrous and most vital new band in Britain”.
And the story of The Moonlandingz? It began in 2015. The fourth Eccentronic Research Council album, Johnny Rocket, Narcissist and Music Machine… I’m Your Biggest Fan saw Lias recruited to assume the persona of the titular fictional rock star. By 2017, Rocket’s equally imaginary band, The Moonlandingz, had crossed fully into our plane of existence with a poptastic debut album, Interplanetary Class Classics. It boasted guest vocals from Yoko Ono, Philip Oakey and the cowboy from The Village People.
And then? Eight years of silence, with that aforementioned global pandemic stuck gracelessly in the middle. Suddenly though, a new album – No Rocket Required – has materialised in a puff of magical moon dust, this time featuring contributions from Iggy Pop, Nadine Shah, Jessica Winter and Ewan ‘Spud’ Bremner from Trainspotting. For Lias Saoudi, it has provided welcome respite from what has clearly been a troubled few years with The Fat White Family.
“I was dealing with the car crash and the psychic fall-out,” he nods. “All the various malevolent nefariousness of that project. It was an all-consuming psychic breakdown, trying to unfuck my chakras… there was so much sage-ing that needed to be done.”
And the catalyst for said systematic unfucking? That enforced 2020 hiatus.
“The pandemic,” nods Lias. “That was a time of great healing for me. Ironically enough.”
It was, we all concede, an awful time for so many people. For the lucky few, however, lockdown afforded time to reflect, to re-assess, perhaps to press a much-needed pause button on life.
“It was nice not to be touring all the time,” nods Adrian. “I’d gone from The Moonlandingz to International Teachers Of Pop, and I was like this… (he whirrs his hands manically). Then the pandemic happened, and it possibly saved me from myself. I spent a lot of time just creating. Taking magic mushrooms and watching pterodactyls flying over the back garden. I mean obviously they were just big birds, but they looked like pterodactyls.
“During that time, I wrote my own Acid Klaus album remotely with some new collaborators. Then Dean and I did a double Eccentronic Research Council album soundtracking peoples’ dreams. So it was a rich period of creativity – albeit without leaving the house.”
With dinosaur-related inspiration clearly flourishing, further Moonlandingz tracks also began to take shape. But as Dean Honer concedes, it took a while for these disparate recordings to form a coherent whole.
“Adrian pulled it all together, really,” he recalls. “He said ‘We need to record some live drums’ and we went to a modernist farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, somewhere outside Leeds. That really brought the sound together, although there still isn’t a consistent style on the album – Iggy Pop sings a ballad, but there’s also a Gabber track.
“But I’m surprised it’s ended up as good as it is. It was a big mess, then all of a sudden it coalesced.”
So, Lias. Having been through the mixer with The Fat White Family, have Dean and Adrian proved easier company to work with?
“Maybe Dean,” he replies, without missing a beat. There are gales of laughter all round.
“I think Lias is actually the easiest person I’ve ever worked with,” says Adrian. “It’s worth putting up with his bullshit because there’s gold in that malevolent fucking mind of his. You just have to tolerate the abuse.”
“I don’t think it’s malevolence,” shrugs Lias. “I’m just overtly realistic. There’s a difference.”
What, I wonder, is Lias Saoudi’s relationship with Johnny Rocket these days? One of these men is a drug-fuelled rock star on a one-way path to self-destruction, the other is… oh, do the joke yourselves. Have there been moments where the barriers between fiction and reality have become dangerously blurred? Let’s ask his bandmates first.
“It’s a persona that was constructed, but there are definitely elements of Lias in there,” says Dean. “Or Lias from a few years ago, maybe not Lias as he is now. He’s matured, like a nice cheese. He’s not such a force of nature, he’s more of a bookworm. He’s definitely grown up.”
“I’ve been a slow reader recently,” admits Lias. “My partner is about to pop one out. She’s full term, so it’s any minute now.”
“I’ll get some towels!” laughs Adrian. “Although fatherhood isn’t that different to being in close proximity to The Fat White Family, is it? The shit, the crying, people throwing up everywhere… it’s just a normal day for Lias”.
He’s not joking. Adrian and Lias first met over a decade ago at a Fat White Family gig in Sheffield, where the latter conducted – let’s put this diplomatically – an onstage dirty protest. The night ended in predictable chaos, but the man speaking today seems urbane and witty, a world away from such scatalogical outrage. In 2025, is Johnny Rocket less a way of life and more a character Lias is happy to occasionally portray? Even the album’s title suggests the latter.
“For the last Moonlandingz gig we did [at London’s Lexington in February], I was able to inhabit him thoroughly for a change,” says Lias. “Which I didn’t really intend doing. I’ve been pretty straight for the last couple of years. I’m getting old, and if I do loads of drugs on the road then I want to end my life after a couple of days. So I don’t really get into that any more. Unless there’s a one-off London show, in which case I can burn the candle a bit then go back to home comforts.
“And I did that Moonlandingz show dressed as a fucking triangle. Trying to drink Red Stripe, but I couldn’t quite bend my hand around far enough.”
OK, forget drug-fuelled self-destruction. Let’s do advanced geometry. Can he expand on the triangle costume a little? He shrugs in baffled bemusement.
“It was just a giant red triangle,” he says. “I don’t really know where else to go with that. It was like a Babybel. Or a Trivial Pursuit wedge.”
Equilateral or isosceles?
“Pythagorian”.
We need to take a deeper dive into No Rocket Required. There’s gold dust in those disparate grooves. Ewan Bremner narrates ‘Some People’s Music’, a sweary, funk-fuelled rant that the trio modestly claim pre-empts bad reviews. ‘Roustabout’ is a torch song duet between Lias and Nadine Shah (“I felt she’d be a great Dolly Parton to his Kris Kristofferson,” claims Adrian) while ‘The Sign Of A Man’ is a high-camp rebuttal of toxic masculinity, inspired by both Sinitta’s ‘So Macho’ and the 1970s gay porn soundtracks produced by disco pioneer Patrick Cowley.
But the album’s emotional core? ‘It’s Where I’m From’, that genuinely touching Iggy Pop ballad. “Won’t someone put their arms around me?” sings the one-time Jimmy Newell Osterberg, his voice cracking with fragile vulnerability. “I cannot take the pain of those who’ve gone”.
All yours, Adrian Flanagan.
“I wrote that song about 13 years ago,” he remembers. “I’d just broken both my arms, and I was told I might never play an instrument again. I’d totally shattered my left wrist and my right shoulder had shot out of my back, an injury that’s usually only seen in people who’ve been struck by lightning. So ironically, I couldn’t put my arms around anyone. But this song came out – a song about mortality, loss, grief and being haunted by your own memories.”
Bloody hell. What had he done?
“I came off my bike,” he winces. “I’d got my first-ever PRS cheque, after one of my tunes was used on Coronation Street. At the time, I was working in a cafe making fry-ups, so every day I’d have a bacon buttie. But when I got £350 from the PRS, I bought myself a bike, thinking that I’d cycle to work every morning and get fit.
“Five minutes after leaving the bike shop, I went arse over tit and broke both my fucking arms. I was lying on the ground in the middle of the main road like a pregnant seal, trying to get up. There was a barber’s shop nearby and these two guys ran out, dragged me off the road, and propped me up against a wall. At which point my girlfriend at the time – who was following me in the car – came round the corner and thought I was being mugged. So she got out and ran at them with a Crook Lock.”
And did he convey any of this backstory to Iggy Pop before he recorded his beautiful, fractured, Lee Hazlewood-style vocal?
“No. But I knew it had to be sang by someone who had lived a life.”
“You can kind of hear Iggy’s age,” nods Dean. “Which is really nice.”
“He did a perfect job,” says Adrian. “It’s my proudest moment as a songwriter.”
These are, by their own stout admission, men utterly in love with pop music. Its majesty, its madness, and – above all – its insane, life-affirming unpredictability.
“That’s the great thing about The Moondlandingz,” says Adrian. “You never quite know what’s going to happen. We just throw these things out there. Like Randy Jones, the cowboy from The Village People – getting him to sing a song called ‘Glory Hole’ was just monumental. One of those beautiful moments in pop. Just being able to say you’ve done something with these iconic human beings is always better than… well, not being able to say that.”
And what about the 1990s Dutch techno craze that fuels the album’s epic, nine-minute closer, ‘Krack Drought Suite’? I don’t say these things lightly, Dean Honer – but we need to talk about Gabber.
“I did get a bit obsessed with watching Gabber videos on Youtube,” he admits. “It was this amazing little cult thing that happened in Holland, and it was properly tribal. The kids were really into it, and it had a uniform – the shaven heads and the tracksuits. I kind of miss those days. When I was growing up, music was very much about different tribes. You had disco, Mod and the New Romantics. That seems to have dissipated now, everything is a bit more homogenous.”
“Every time I go to Dean’s house, he’s always showing me his Gabber videos,” smiles Adrian. “I like to imagine, as soon as I leave the room, that he’s doing the dances himself.”
So where next for the assorted members of The Moonlandingz? These are restless souls, remember, with multiple projects and personas permanently swirling like seedlings on the breeze. For Dean Honer, focus is now firmly back on I Monster, the fly-headed duo he formed in 1998 with fellow Sheffield producer Jarrod Gosling.
“That’s had a big resurgence recently,” he says. “One of our old tracks, ‘Who Is She?’, went viral on Tik Tok about two years ago. Clips of it were getting used by people like Kim Kardashian, it all fed into Spotify, and our figures went silly. We had a really good tour of Europe earlier this year, and it’s given us a new lease of life.”
Lias and Adrian, meanwhile, are preparing to hit the road as The Moonlandingz. A one-time fictional band now fully realised in corporeal form. Will there be more recordings when they return, or – like Joy Division and The Traveling Wilburys before them – are they a perfect two-album band? Is Johnny Rocket really no longer required?
“If we’ve not killed each other by the end of the tour, we’ll maybe do something else after that,” says Adrian.
“Yeah,” smiles Lias. “What is it now, 2025? We should have another album lined up by 2039.”
No Rocket Required is out now on Transgressive Records.
Electronic Sound – “the house magazine for plugged in people everywhere” – is published monthly, and available here:
https://electronicsound.co.uk/
Support the Haunted Generation website with a Ko-fi donation… thanks!
https://ko-fi.com/hauntedgen
