FOR a man who loves to experiment with music, Moby puts on a disappointingly predictable show. Anyone who has seen the New Yorker live in the past six years knows to expect a set that includes the best-known singles from his masterpiece, Play, a trek back in time to his rave days, a short, speed-metal instrumental, a couple of unusual covers and some so-so attempts at rowdy rock marred by his characterless vocals.

At a busy Brixton Academy all those elements remained, but Moby had added one impressive new string to his bow. Or rather, a new member to his band. His co-vocalist Laura Dawn, who appears on his current album, Hotel, shared the limelight on stage and breathed new life into the night’s highlights. She was barely audible on the opener, Extreme Ways, a noisy rock number that failed to move the audience, but when her powerful, soulful vocals took over towards the end of the second song, Raining Again, everyone’s ears pricked up.

Moby’s best move was to allow Dawn to reinterpret well-worn tracks from Play. Singing what were scratchy samples on record, she turned a slowed-down Natural Blues into a breathtaking cross between trip-hop and gospel and Honey into a great, gritty refrain on to which the band piled psychedelic sounds and the riff from Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love. The crowd joined in with handclaps.

It was those moments that most had come to hear and Hotel’s tracks paled by comparison. There was no need for Moby to mention that the forthcoming single Spiders was inspired by his “deep love” for David Bowie because it was clearly a bad Bowie pastiche, Where You End had silly rhyming lyrics that sold the smart musician short, and even Dawn couldn’t pull off Hotel’s weird reworking of New Order’s Temptation, turning it into a bland power ballad that Celine Dion could have sung.

Moby’s supposedly off-the-cuff covers were also hit and miss. His tribute to Ian Curtis, a fairly faithful rendition of Joy Division’s New Dawn Fades, worked well, but trying to mimic Lou Reed on Walk on the Wild Side was a mistake.

The real surprise, however, was that Moby’s decade-old dance anthems were such a success. Helped by humorous between-song chat that recalled gay discos in mid-1980s New York and a Raindance rave at the Brixton venue where Moby made his British debut in 1991, both Go! and Feeling So Real had the crowd on their feet, cheering and waving their arms in the air. No one can slot rave, rock and gospel into a gig quite like Moby. The problem with the mix is par for the course.