THE MOONLANDINGZ
Glam-stomp saucy disco doom for a new world order. Includes Yoko Ono.
The reality-subverting glam-synth supergroup are certainly Rising, but is it healthy? Involves Fat White Family, Yoko Ono and Fat Truckers – and the shocking misuse of Warburtons bread.
“THERE IS A SEVERE DAFTNESS ABOUT THIS BAND”
Lias Saoudi
“The world is looking unbelievably fucked up at the moment,” says Dean Honer. “And there’s a history of being daft when there’s shit things going on in the world. Like with Dada, that was a response to the First World War.” “There is a severe daftness about this band,” says Lias Saoudi. “I’d say it’s dafter than the Fat White Family, and that’s pretty daft.” Saoudi is lead singer of The Moonlandingz, as well as the Fat White Family. His Fat White cohort Saul Adamczewski is The Moonlandingz’ guitarist, while the sonic foundations are Sheffield muso magi Adrian Flanagan and Dean Honer, who between them have worked on projects including The All Seeing I and Kings Have Long Arms. “We collaborate so we don’t have to spend too much time around the same people,” says Flanagan, though it also seems they have a knack for creating alliances: their last album (as the Eccentronic Research Council) starred Maxine Peake; this one includes Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Slow Club’s Rebecca Taylor and Randy Jones, aka the cowboy from Village People. (“Lias met him at the KGB bar in New York,” says Flanagan. “I think he propositioned him.”) The Moonlandingz began as the fictional band at the centre of Eccentronic Research Council’s 2015 concept album Johnny Rocket, Narcissist & Music Machine… I’m Your Biggest Fan. They had one song on that album – the sinister, stomping Sweet Saturn Mine – but now they’ve juddered into a life of their own and made an album, due out on the Transgressive label in March. Interplanetary Class Classics shares some of that stoopid-genius rage that Fat White Family have, in the lineage of The Monks and Devo with an added dollop of Half Man Half Biscuit and Delia Derbyshire-gone-glam synth stomp. And, like FWF, the lyrics pick at scabs, delve into bodily functions and sticky orifices, and are sometimes in wilful bad taste. The Strangle Of Anna, for example, is in part a pisstake of hipster Velvet Underground fans (it also rhymes “Sunday morning” with “parquet flooring”), while the demented and cheery Neuf De Pape is inspired by the wine the band drank when they were at Sean Lennon’s studio in New York. And 40,000 Years Of Job Club is “about the Kafkaesque inanity of having to sign on,“says Lias. “Which I did for about five years, but it felt like 40,000 years. They’d rather have you in a room digging a ditch and filling it back up again forever than doing whatever you want to do. You have to be in there writing imaginary CVs for imaginary jobs.” Flanagan nods. “It’s much better to write imaginary songs for imaginary bands.”
Interplanetary Class Classics is out on Transgressive in March. The Moonlandingz tour in January and February.