Remember Moby? The small, bald New York electronic musician who made spacey
and bittersweet 1990s dance tracks such as Go, Find My Baby
and Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad? The one who seemed to go from
being a Bible-bashing vegan to an Ecstasy-gobbling rave egotist, getting his
freak on at sex parties and flogging all the songs from one album to adverts
for booze, cars and credit cards? Well, he’s still around, about to release
his eighth album. But as for being the same man, it seems not. Sitting in a
London hotel room filled with summer light but few possessions, the
43-year-old doesn’t appear to carry too much baggage.
He is surprisingly good company, happy to chat amusingly about anything you
bring up, whether it’s him being a sell-out, his drugs hell, tantric sex,
Wittgenstein or even his love of rats. (“I tend to ramble on,” he says at
one point, grinning, “You must stop me. We have limited time and this is not
my therapy session.”) The only thing I daren’t ask is what that huge bag of
carrots is doing on top of his television set. Some things are better left
unsaid.
Moby is here to talk about his new album, Wait for Me, a melancholy,
touching collection of songs made, in very lo-fi surroundings, with a
mixture of electronic and acoustic instruments. In the past he has worked
with Britney, fallen out with Eminem and won the Guinness World Record for
the song with the most beats per minute (Thousand), but this album
involves no famous friends, and no fuss. He says the songs won’t be going on
adverts because he has learnt his lesson. Of course, he has already made his
money. But he’s refreshingly free from bitterness about the slagging he got
in the past.
“In a way it’s karmic retribution because when I was a straight-edge punk
rocker I was really judgmental, and critical of other musicians who did
anything that even slightly smelt of commercialism. Far less egregious
things. So it does make sense that I would be criticised.” And yet,
interestingly, he is not even guilty of the crime. “People say every song on Play
was licensed — yes, mainly to films. I think there are only about three or
four licensed to adverts. Still, in hindsight, I’m not proud that I did it,
especially since I’ve been repeatedly crucified for it. I became the poster
child for selling out and I kind of wanted to say: ‘Wow, I really screwed
up’.”
Born in New York, Moby was brought up in Connecticut after his father, a
science professor at Columbia University, died when he was 2. His real name
is Richard Melville Hall but his family gave him the nickname because the
author of Moby Dick, Herman Melville, was an ancestor. Moby studied
philosophy but insists he wasn’t as brainy as that makes him sound.
He hated Kant but loved Bertrand Russell, who thought universities should
provide the students with brothels so that they could get on with their work
better, and Wittgenstein, who wrote his Tractatus in bullet points,
“so it was like old computer code, I could cope with reading that”.
Moby plays keyboard, guitar, drums, computers, and he sings. He first hit the
UK Top Ten in 1991 with Go, an electronic track that borrowed from Laura
Palmer’s Theme from Twin Peaks. The rave scene was taking off in
the UK and Moby was a big part of it. He remembers playing four different
cities a night, “and my driver would be a 17-year-old friend of the promoter
who’d be doing drugs, driving around the roundabout getting lost. You’d show
up at the Eclipse in Coventry at five o’clock in the morning, everybody out
of their minds.”
Other hits followed, but by 1999, when Moby released Play, he felt his
moment had passed. “I was already a has-been. It was hard for me to get a
record deal outside of the UK. And Play got really bad reviews. Melody
Maker gave it one out of ten; the LA Times said — this is one of
my favourites, almost a Spinal Tap moment — ‘There is a song on this
record called Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad. The answer is because I
just had to listen to this terrible record’. It came out and was a failure,
basically.”
So he agreed to license the songs, which led to recognition, then resurgent
sales, with songs such as Porcelain and Natural Blues giving
him several appearances on Top of the Pops. In the intervening years,
that sell-out argument has lost its sting, so I suggest to Moby that history
will forgive him. “Yeah, you’re right. Everybody licenses music to adverts
now; it’s ubiquitous; it’s seen as standard business practice. But the irony
is I won’t do it any more.”
With rave success came drugs. “I remember flawless nights and going to amazing
parties on Ecstasy with my friends and drinking champagne — but then
afterwards having that dark night of the soul. If someone were able to
invent a drug with no consequences, I would be f*****-up every day for the
rest of my life. But when I was doing a lot of drink and drugs I wasn’t a
particularly nice person,” he admits.
He laughs at some of my questions but hardly blushes. If any of this bothers
him you’d never know it. “That sex-parties rumour was Chinese whispers on
steroids. I had a straight-edge period, when I was very annoying, followed
by a lot of hedonism and experimentation, but not much happened. I didn’t
experience anything that the vast majority of people in our demographic
don’t experience regularly.”
Oh but it sounded as if there were tickets to be bought for these parties!
Held in a dungeon perhaps, with the Marquis de Sade hosting? “Yeah! That was
not the case.The wonderful thing about the gossip press is that my life is
invariably made to sound a hundred times more interesting than it is. I was
on tour a few years ago and Natalie Portman and Nelly Furtado came backstage
after the concert. A few days later the New York Post said they had
been fighting over who would go home with me. How fantastic! I did enjoy,
for a brief second, living in this fantasy world where those two women would
fight over me for romantic favours. And then I look in the mirror and I’m a
43-year-old bald guy.”
Moby used to talk about being a Christian but that’s mellowed into a more
general sense of spirituality and healthy living. He used to say he was
bisexual, but now he says he’s straight. Why, the man turns out to be so
conventional that he’s never even done tantric. “I was once dating a woman
who had read an article about it and wanted to try it. I wasn’t sure what it
was but I put on some relaxing New Age-type CD and we started trying to have
tantric sex. Three seconds in, the CD started skipping. It reminded me of
that scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen does the cocaine and
sneezes and it goes everywhere. Alas, I have no Sting-like experiences of
orgasmic transcendence.”
Musically, though, Moby now prefers the lo-fi to the highs. His new album, Wait
For Me, features guest vocals from a variety of unknown friends, and he
made the record as simply as he could, preferring the bedroom recording
aesthetic over the expensive mastering suite. “My friend Emilia sang the
song Pale Horses. She came over and we recorded some vocals, made
spaghetti, talked about The Simpsons.” I call the new album mournful;
he likes the word elegiac. He says he wanted to make something beautiful,
and that all his favourite music, such as Joy Division, is rather sad. The
songs go down a treat at the Festival Hall a few weeks later, and the whole
audience are on their feet for his hits, which is something of a feat in
such a big, staid venue.
Moby is clearly on a roll, because a few days after that, his art exhibition
opens in East London and his restaurant in New York . . . burns down. Oh
dear. Except it’s not his any more — he opened Teany with his former
girlfriend Kelly Tisdale, but “no one should go into business with a
romantic partner, because we basically broke up the day it opened. A simple
question of ‘Did you order the vegan scones?’ In ten minutes it’s
degenerated into ‘Who are you sleeping with?’ ”
Still, they made a success of it. “One day we had David Bowie and Iman, Gus
Van Sant and Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo,
from Sonic Youth, all roughly at the same time. So I’m trying to be cool and
inside I’m a nervous wreck. Only 25 seats and filled with all these people!”
Moby says that Tisdale does much better without his involvement because he
found the running of a restaurant akin to “owning an incontinent,
developmentally disabled elephant”. He feels bad that he was such a lousy
entrepeneur that he struggled even to help her to get rid of the rats from
the bins outside, because he thought they were cute. Perhaps he can start to
make amends by lending his ex-girlfriend some carrots.
Moby’s Wait For Me album is released on Monday on Little Idiot
