15/08/2025
We love a licensing challenge but Moondata was a proper ghost record made that bit harder to uncover as the original vinyl has the writer’s name spelt incorrectly which always means you’re off to a tricky start but once that was resolved it was a deep search through Europe finally finding success in rural Switzerland. There are countless dead ends along the way but each avenue brings you closer to success if you keep looking hard enough.
There are many more nuances to the story but once we’d found Jean-Marie Gogniat the history of Let The Moonshine In came to light. What we have included on the album wasn’t actually the original version as the ‘demo’ was reworked in Boney M’s studio with the soon to become famous Jennifer Rush brought in for backing vocals.
From a label perspective, this is why we spend countless hours researching and searching for the original writers and producers as your time is always rewarded by brilliant stories.
Huge thank you to Jean-Marie Gogniat and his brother Pierre-Alain
Moondata - Let The Moonshine In (Dub)
It was summer of 1984. A demo of a track I had composed was on a tape — it was the music that would later become Let The Moonshine In. At the time, I didn’t think this song would ever be produced but a group of friends who had heard it convinced me to let them take charge of recording the piece. I was, of course, delighted — but I still needed a lead voice and lyrics. That’s when I met Joe Mwenda, who would go on to write the lyrics and perform the song.
After a few planning sessions, we booked Arco Studios in Stuttgart and were ready to record. The team at Arco, whom we had asked to bring in backing vocalists, did just that — and their presence turned out to be magical. They were three women who fully embraced the vocal lines in their own way, with great enthusiasm. It was a joy to hear them fine-tune and shape their parts. One of them was Jennifer Rush, who would later become famous.
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