The whole world loves him – but monkish Moby isn’t that impressed with himself Paul Lester An hour into my interview with Moby, he gets up from his seat at the back of the air-conditioned tour bus and reaches for a switch. “I have to show you this,” he says with a flourish, lighting a row of dull yellow bulbs more suited to a brothel. “This is the porn star suite.” Outside, the mid-day Arizona heat conspires, with the noise and pollution from one of Tucson’s busiest downtown streets, to create an invisible toxic inferno. The bus, meanwhile, parked by the side of the road in readiness for tonight’s gig at the Metro venue, is as cool and quiet as a five-star hotel. The year’s best-selling album artist, however, eschews such luxury. “I enjoy waking up in parking lots,” he says with a conspiratorial smile. Despite the near- three-million sales of his latest and most popular album, Play – which, like Macy Gray’s On How Life Is, is an old-fashioned, slow-build, word-of-mouth success that recently enjoyed a five-week run at No 1 in the United Kingdom, despite being released over 12 months ago – he rarely spends money on hotel rooms. Besides, the bus has everything a pop star, even one as atypical as Moby, could possibly need – even a porn star suite. “Here’s the killer,” says the musician, pressing another button as the hard, narrow faux-leather bench at the back morphs slowly, electronically, into a sexy divan. It’s the sort of kitsch appliance you might expect from a high-rolling gangster rapper or an unreconstructed rocker, not a small, pale, bald techno-punk with a reputation for monkishness. Moby’s tongue, however, is not far from his cheek. Four hundred rock critics across America voted Play the best album of 1999 in The Village Voice’s annual poll: Moby has been taken seriously throughout his 10-year recording career. But there’s serious, and there’s serious. Here, seemingly, is someone who uses rigid, rigorous forms of music – whether the hardcore guitars of his teenage punk bands The Vatican Commandos and Shopwell or the hardcore beats of his early underground singles as Mindstorm and Barracuda – to express a rigid, rigorous worldview. The fact that he was drawn, in the mid- 1980s, to Christ as much for his benevolence as for what he regarded as his iconoclastic, outlaw status, helped build up this slightly contradictory image of a rebellious puritan; he even gave up drink for a while, and abstained from drugs even as Go, his debut hit from 1991, became an anthem on the rave scene. Today, just as the music on Play, with its blend of the electronic and the emotional, is the artist’s warmest to date, so Moby himself has become less hardline. He may still be a vegan, and he may still detest cigarette smoke (later that night, he will politely yet firmly ask a local kid, hanging about backstage, to put out his fag), but he has his indulgences: “Travel is my only excess.” (This isn’t strictly true, as we’ll find out.) “In the last year, I’ve probably been to 200 different cities, maybe 300.” And he’s fted in most of them. Mick Jagger, Tom Hanks, Oliver Stone, Matt Damon, Sting and, his favourite artist in any medium, David Bowie, have paid him public tribute; United States sitcom queen Ellen DeGeneres declared how much Play means to her and her lover Anne Heche; he has remixed Michael Jackson and turned down Madonna; and Elton John is poised to record a version of his Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad? Yet Moby is not so impressed with himself. Like his contemporaries Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Courtney Love and her late husband, Kurt Cobain, he is a member of that generation of American superbrats whose success is more than partly founded on deep self-loathing. Indeed, his best friend, New York painter Damian Loeb, has acknowledged the “crippling insecurities” that bedevil the pair. Moby – who recently appeared as a 27m version of himself on the side of a building near his Manhattan apartment, an unlikely model for Calvin Klein jeans – is bemused by the current fascination with his work and life. “Most of my life has been just me in my bedroom, either in New York or in the suburbs, making music.” He’s being disingenuous now: Moby’s life has been full of intrigue and drama, with startling plot developments. He was born Richard Melville Hall on September 11 1965, in Harlem, New York. Moby was his name, he says, almost from birth, due to the fact that his great-great-great grand-uncle was Moby Dick author Herman Melville (although he has also used it as an acronym, particularly when he was DJing for people like Run DMC in the mid-1980s, for Master of Beats Y’All). When Moby was two years old, his father, Jim, then only 26 and a chemistry professor at Columbia University, smashed his car into a wall, leaving his mother, Betsy, a widow while still in her early twenties. The crash was a suspected suicide – among other problems, the Halls’ marriage was rocky. Speculation that Jim had been drinking on that fateful night perhaps explains why his son chose to shun alcohol in his teens. Moby moved with his mother to affluent Darien, Connecticut, where they lived “on and off” with his mother’s parents while she finished her degree. It was in this white-collar world that Moby began a love- hate relationship with the suburbs. To this day, part of him longs for that secure picket-fence existence, while another is drawn to the edge and energy of the city. “When I was growing up,” he recalls, “I associated stability with the comforts of suburbia – all my friends’ parents worked on Wall Street, drove expensive cars and had ski houses.” Back then, he couldn’t see that that security was illusory. Nor was he to know that single-parent households such as his would one day be the norm. “No one got divorced; the nuclear family was still thriving. I felt like an outsider.” Notwithstanding Betsy’s conventional secretary job, the atmosphere chez Hall was liberal verging on bohemian. Betsy “smoked pot, listened to weird music and painted”. As for her friends, they “all had long hair and sideburns and sat around discussing Schopenhauer”, an alternative lifestyle Moby “found threatening” (although he tried marijuana himself while barely in double figures). He would later see the value of this “culturally aware existence”, one he describes as “intellectual bohemianism as opposed to decadent hedonism”. “The idea of freedom of speech and freedom of expression was drilled into me from a young age,” he says, going on to talk about last year’s Gary Glitter child porn scandal. It was, he warns, an example of the authorities attempting to police not just our actions but our thoughts. His mother taught him well. “My personal ethical understanding of things is that, if an action compromises someone’s well-being, the law should get involved. If it’s just information … Listen, I don’t like child porn, I find it disgusting. But anything that can be reduced to binary code is [at worst] amoral. They’re images; they’re not real.”
Another move, to blue-collar Stratford, Connecticut, heightened the 12-year-old Moby’s sense of alienation, as his strange home life conflicted with the straight working-class milieu of his peers. Being the token hippie kid on the block, living on welfare and food stamps, did have its advantages, however. “There was a sort of respect for my circumstances,” he says. “I was the underprivileged kid, with the sneakers from those metal baskets you get in cheap supermarkets. I didn’t have Adidas or Levi’s. But there was a little bit of pity – you know, ‘he doesn’t have a father.'”
Moby’s close relationship with his mother compensated for his fatherlessness, although a series of “uncles” paraded before him throughout his adolescence made it a sometimes tense alliance. “She brought home some really sketchy characters. She had low self-esteem, and if someone liked her, she’d be so thrilled. There were some nice guys, like the one who played pedal steel guitar in a country band. Not surprisingly, when Betsy remarried at 42, having finally found a worthy partner, her son – who had left home two years earlier, aged 19 – was delighted. Moby describes his stepfather in glowing terms. “He was perfect,” he enthuses, “a god-send, a saint; kind and smart, even-tempered, stable, creative; not emotionally self- indulgent …” It was a union that would last until Betsy’s final days: she passed away in September 1997, having been diagnosed eight months before with lung cancer.
Since his emergence in the early 1990s, Moby has been mostly single, although, in 1995, he endured a “long and painful” break-up (with a woman rumoured to be Margaret Fiedler of New York art-techno duo, Laika). “I lie in bed each night tortured that she’s with someone else,” he told Melody Maker soon after the split, adding that, “from a neuro-chemical point of view,” he was in “so much pain and anguish,” he needed to “balance it” with regular bouts of “hedonistic, uncommitted sex”.
Now that he’s in the celebrity super- league, Moby has been linked with several A-list beauties. First, there was Phantom Menace star Natalie Portman, but he dismisses any hint of romance. “We sort of met and flirted, but there was never anything serious.” Then there was Christina Ricci, who made a cameo appearance in the video to Moby’s hit single, Natural Blues. “No, no,” he says, swatting away the rumour like it’s a fly. “She’s like a casual friend. She’s a very attractive, sexy woman, but her boyfriend is a good friend of mine.” Besides, as he admits, three months away from his 35th birthday, “I really love peers. I like women, not girls. I think I’d have a hard time having a sustained romantic involvement with someone under 20.” Common experiences and all that.
So is he still having hedonistic, uncommitted sex? “I’ve had promiscuous periods and I’ve had unpromiscuous periods.” What’s promiscuous? That, says Moby, depends whether you’re straight, gay or lesbian. “My male friends,” he elucidates, “who are gay have slept with, on average, three or 400 people. My female friends who are gay have all been involved in monogamous relationships for years. My straight male promiscuous friends have slept with, on average, 50 to 100 people, and the women – around the 20 mark.” After the concert, a shirtless Moby will be surrounded by local girls eager to make his acquaintance. I wonder if he keeps a tally. “Yes, I do,” he replies. Why? He doesn’t want “to get to 50 and not remember things”. Not that he’s telling. His future wife, he explains, might be reading this article and “be freaked out or turned off”. The pious ideologue has learned to get happy, give or take the odd moment of what he calls “self-involved melancholy”. He drinks (“although not excessively”) and he takes drugs (“I love mushrooms and hope to take them again at some point”). He’s also learned to live in the real world, leaving the preaching for his sleeve-notes. He may occupy the same converted prison in New York’s Little Italy that he’s lived in for years and he may lack the acquisitive streak of new best mates like Elton John, but he realises there are bills to pay, hence the use of music from Play on commercials for Renault and Microsoft (in fact, all 18 of Play’s tracks have been licensed hundreds of times, for adverts or compilations).
With the album having gone platinum in 10 countries and selling upwards of 150E000 copies a week worldwide, Moby is bound to attract at least some of the sorts of people he’d want to avoid at parties.