Moby is a creature of the night. “Daytime is certainly healthier,” he concedes, “but I just find daytime to be kind of tedious. I resent it.” If you infer from this that Moby’s life revolves around clubbing, his new album will do nothing to dissuade you from this view. Last Night is a homage to the New York club scene and to the dance music that captured his imagination more than 20 years ago, and clearly still fires it.

Moby was born in New York, but raised in Connecticut, where his first musical loves were punk and hardcore. Early in the 1980s, however, that changed. “My friends and I were punk rockers,” he says. “We were into the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag, but back then you’d hear everything - DJs would play hip-hop followed by the Clash followed by Johnny Cash. We noticed that people from rock bands were making dance records. I guess the turning point would have been one of the early New Order singles, Everything’s Gone Green or Temptation. We thought, ‘If it’s good enough for our heroes, dance music must be okay.’”

Moby and his formerly hardcore friends began sneaking into Manhattan to go clubbing, hiding in the toilets on trains because they couldn’t afford the fares. (Moby and his mother lived on welfare and food stamps, and, to this day, he celebrates his humble origins on his blog: “You know you grew up poor white trash when you remember KFC being too fancy and expensive.”) Soon, dancing to the DJs wasn’t enough; Moby wanted to get behind the turntables. His then girlfriend asked a favour from a mate of hers who owned a club, and Moby began DJing. He was, perhaps, a little underprepared. “I had to play from 10pm through to 4am,” he remembers, “and I had maybe 20 or 30 records. So I just kept playing the same records over and over and over. Fortunately, there were only about five people in the bar, and three of them were junkies.” Moby’s career had begun, but for a while, “in order to have enough records, I had to borrow them from my mum”.

One of the highlights on Last Night is the pounding house track Everyday It’s 1989, which marks the year Moby returned to Manhattan. “I moved into an apartment on the Lower East Side, four of us in a three-bedroom place. It was really inexpensive. I would DJ twice a week and supplement my income by collecting cans and bottles, then returning them.”

There was a reason the rent was cheap. “There was a crack epidemic, HIV/Aids. Every week, you’d hear about someone else who had been shot, someone else who was sick,” Moby says. “It was a difficult time, but it was also an amazing time for house music and techno. Part of that was because nightclubs became a sort of refuge. It was a double-edged sword, because they could turn out to be really violent places - drug-dealers would turn up, armed, to sort out their differences - but the clubs were definitely places to go and forget the reality of life outside. The music was very, very celebratory. Back then, even hip-hop was dance-oriented, though that all changed with NWA. Suddenly, a lot of New York hip-hop artists thought they had to get tough.”

The other big change was that while, as Moby notes, “from 1984 to 1990, there would be huge dance hits that nobody outside ofNew York had ever heard of”, as the 1990s progressed, dance music entered the mainstream. So, Last Night looks back at a specific era, but also alludes to contemporary clubbing, as many of these old-school sounds are being revived and reappraised. But why has Moby revisited these roots now, after two albums of more rock-oriented experimentation (18 and Hotel)?

He recalls that, a year and a half ago, he was making some music that was quiet and introspective, but also some music that was more fun and gregarious, and couldn’t decide which direction to take on his next album: “Then I thought, I do have a tendency to take myself a bit seriously, so maybe it might be time to do a record that’s fun.”

Last Night isn’t just an album that’s fun to listen to; it was also clearly fun to make, judging by Moby’s explanation of the research stage of its development. “I wanted to make a record that sounds like a night out in my neighbourhood,” he explains. “So I would go out, get drunk and hear someone play disco, then come home and make a disco track – or, anyway, my version of a disco track. Another night, I’d go out, get drunk and hear some piano-led house music, then I’d come back and do some of that. I’ve made all my records in my home studio for the past 12 years. It’s a really small apartment, two bedrooms, and I sleep in the small bedroom and have my studio in the larger bedroom. For a time, I thought that people who make real records go to big studios, but I soon realised that what I could do at home was fine for my purposes.”

You can hear a good spread of the music made in Moby’s apartment on A Night in NYC, the free CD of Moby’s music that comes with the Sunday Times. As well as featuring tracks from Last Night, it encompasses music from the various phases of Moby’s career. Moby chose the tracks himself, and his criteria for selection were pleasingly simple. “Part of me would like to have chosen some really obscure B-sides and some of the more challenging stuff,” he admits, “but then I remembered someone once gave me a John Lennon box set as a present - I was really looking forward to hearing all those songs that I loved, and it turned out to be full of strange demos. Bearing that in mind, I thought, ‘If I was a fan, I know what I’d want to hear.’ So, on A Night in NYC, I’ve erred on the side of populism.” This means, unsurprisingly, that it includes several tracks from Play, the 1999 mega-hit album that propelled Moby to a far wider audience than his earlier work had reached, although it also caused some negative reaction when track after track was licensed in commercials. The controversy seems almost quaint now, as, in the years since, the negative connotations of a band “selling out” have virtually disappeared. Moby has no regrets. “I figured it was better to take money from a large corporation than to give it to them,” he says simply.

He admits, however, that Play’s success was confusing for him, because “up until that point, I’d been making records simply on the basis of what I wanted to hear, or maybe what a handful of my friends might like to hear. Having a bigger audience did make me wonder, ‘What do I do now?’”

The postPlay confusion is over now; with Last Night, Moby is clearly back making the music he likes.

Track by track

Here is the track listing for next week’s free CD. It takes us from his first hit, Go, to his new single, Alice.

1 Ooh Yeah One of the songs from his new album, Last Night, Ooh Yeah features 1970s-style disco beats and a feather-light vocal.

2 Honey The first single from Play introduced us to the field-song-sampling sound of the album.

3 In My Heart Taken from Moby’s 2002 album, 18, In My Heart echoes the style of Play, with a sweeping, yearning musical backing.

4 Disco Lies Another new track, Disco Lies harks back to 1990s dance styles, with a powerful vocal by Shayna Steele over a restless beat.

5 Go Moby’s first hit, taken from his self-titled debut album, Go samples Laura Palmer’s Theme from the cult television series Twin Peaks.

6 Everyday It’s 1989 One of the standout tracks from Last Night, Everyday It’s 1989 has more than a hint of Black Box’s Ride on Time about it, and that can’t be bad.

7 Lift Me Up Moby takes the vocal lead on this track from Hotel, which backed ITV’s Formula One coverage.

8 Extreme Ways The one that goes “Oh, baby, then it fell apart”, Extreme Ways will be familiar to fans of the Bourne movies, as it plays over the end credits of Identity, Supremacy and Ultimatum.

9 Natural Blues One of the best moments on Play: you may know it better as “Ooh Lordy, troubles so hard”.

10 Alice Moby’s latest single is a slightly uncharacteristic track amid Last Night’s dance music: harder-edged, rap-heavy electronica.

11 Porcelain The prettiest moment from Play: stop-start strings, wandering piano lines and a softly sung vocal.

12 Last Night The title track from the new album offers a more chilled moment, with a stunning vocal by Sylvia Gordon.

13 Rockets A previously unreleased slice of ambient prettiness.

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