Slow burner to global sensation

By FIONA STURGES

Bald, small, athletic, with a cross tattooed on the back of his neck, Moby is an intense-looking man. And those eyes. They're so big and round that they lend his face an expression of permanent surprise.

It's almost a relief when he puts his glasses on. They make him look more, well, sane. We're on Moby's tour bus: he and his band are driving from New York to Philadelphia to play a show. It's a reflection of Moby's status as a multi-platinum-selling artist that he is at the top of tonight's bill.

Astonishingly, the support act is his friend and admirer David Bowie. The inside of the bus looks like a luxury yacht with its dark wood trimming and plump seats. At the rear Moby has his "retreat", a fiercely air-conditioned room with a double bed, a desk and a chair.

I find him immersed in Grand Theft Auto, a computer game where the player assumes the role of a psycho who drags passing drivers out of their cars and hurtles around the streets turning pedestrians to mincemeat. "It's like crack," says Moby. "It's totally addictive. You wanna go next?"

It's hard to square the millionaire pop star, whose albums sit on coffee tables around the world, with the polite, rather awkward individual in front of me. Sitting cross-legged on his bed, Moby struggles to stay upright as the bus sways.

He tries the floor but that doesn't work either. Yet there's no denying his celebrity status. Over the past few years this eccentric New York musician has become a permanent fixture in American gossip columns. There have been rumours of celebrity romances (with the actresses Natalie Portman and Christina Ricci) and tawdry one-night stands with supermodels. Looking at Moby in the flesh, the idea of him dating a 1.8m waif is faintly ridiculous.

Can it really be true? "Of course not," he says with a grin.

So where did the rumours come from? "From me," he replies. "It's practically a given that if I do any sort of interview, I get asked about my sex life. If they're going to ask, I don't see anything wrong with giving them suitably entertaining answers."

Moby comes across as a shy person - his voice is neutral, flat even. Although if you ask him to talk about himself he'll happily oblige. "I spent so many years in which people didn't want to talk to me that I have a knee-jerk reaction where if someone wants to talk to me I just can't resist," he says. "I'm sure that makes me a jerk."

It was in 1991, when raves still took place in abandoned warehouses rather than ritzy superclubs, that Moby notched up his first hit single, Go, a song that sampled the theme tune from David Lynch's cult TV series Twin Peaks. He was a marketing man's dream. Dance musicians had always been a faceless breed, but here was a non-drug-taking, teetotal, vegan, sometime celibate Christian Marxist.

The next few years yielded a string of classics including Feeling So Real and Thousand, a song recorded in the Guinness Book of Records for having the most beats a minute - 1000, to be precise. For a while things ticked along nicely - the music critics loved him and he was making just enough money to get by.

But in 1997 he made Animal Rights, an album of heavy-metal madness. The record was disastrously received; five years on, the wounds inflicted by critics haven't healed.

"I couldn't believe the mean-spirited way that they responded to it," he remembers. "When I was growing up my heroes were people who always did different idiosyncratic things as they saw fit. If Lou Reed wanted to make metal Machine music, then he made metal machine music. If Bowie wanted to experiment with disco and ambient sounds, that's what he did. Musicians, by virtue of their job, were free to experiment all they liked."

Soon after the album's release Moby's mother died of lung cancer. A close friend called this period his "dark night of the soul". But within 18 months he was working on his next album. He'd stumbled across a series of recordings made by the American folk-music archivists John and Alan Lomax. In the 30s, this father-and-son team toured the American South recording for posterity gospel and blues. These became the fulcrum for Moby's album as he sampled segments of songs by barely known gospel singers and set them against his distinctive electronic arrangements. The resulting album was 1999's Play.

"In all honesty I thought it was the end of my career," says Moby. "At the time it was released, the records that were successful were pop records, rock records, hip-hop records and dance records. Play was none of those things. I was 33 when I made it and I was releasing it into a marketplace that was dominated by 19-year-old pop stars. I had a whole long list of things I was going to do after the album failed."

Such as? "I was going to go back to school and study architecture. It's one of the most adventurous and practical art forms that impacts people's lives most dramatically. If you're a musician and someone doesn't want to listen to your music, they can simply turn off the CD player. If you're an architect and someone doesn't want to experience your building, they actually have to move. I like that idea."

Play turned out to be what the record industry calls a "slow burner". In the first six months it shifted a measly 10,000 copies. Since then, however, it's sold another 10 million and gone platinum in 26 countries.

Moby has already anticipated my question about the controversial licensing deal that saw his songs accompanying a series of high-profile car ads, helping to send Play into a new commercial stratosphere. The rationale was simple, he says. He wanted to get his music heard.

"When the album was released it wasn't getting any attention from radio or TV," he says wearily.

"I knew that this way thousands more people would get to hear it. You know, it irritates me how this has become such an issue. Every magazine and newspaper I've ever talked to has advertising on its pages. No one seems to have a problem with that."

Still, it was a move that didn't quite fit with the browbeating, socialist, anticorporate Moby of the early 90s. But he admits to having relaxed his ideologies over the years. Though he hasn't allowed any of the songs off Play's 2002 follow-up 18 - an album which hasn't set the cash registers ringing as hard as its predecessor - to be licensed.

"Ten years ago every position I held was militant, be it Christianity, Marxism, veganism, whatever. Then I realised over time that my militancy was really serving no purpose other than alienating the people I was close to. I wasn't making the world a better place, I was just being obnoxious and annoying."

He's still a Christian "though not in a rigid, conventional sense", but his teetotal days are long gone. Lately he's also been dabbling in drugs.

"I've been experimenting with Ecstasy," he confesses, "though I took drugs for the first time when I was 10 years old. I didn't enjoy it. I just thought it was a way to hang out with the cool kids. We used to smoke cannabis and take pills."

Richard Melville Hall has been known as Moby since he was "about 10 minutes old". The only child of two Columbia University students living in Harlem, he was named in memory of his great-great-great-uncle Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick.

When he was 2 his father died in a car crash. That year his mother moved back to her home town of Darien, Connecticut, where she put herself through college. Moby describes the people he grew up around as "blue-collar hippies".

"My mother had tarot cards and she and her friends smoked a lot of pot and had long hair. Some played in bands or worked in petrol stations - they were hippies with jobs."

At 10 he began to take music lessons from a friend of his mother's, a hippie trained in classical music and music theory, who also played in a heavy metal group. Moby's first band was called the Vatican Commandos.

"That was my hardcore punk-rock, atheist, meat-eating stage, as opposed to my dance-music, Christian-vegan phase," he giggles.

In 1984 he went to study philosophy at the University of Connecticut, but within a year had dropped out and moved to New York where he got a job in a record store and started making music.

He sent 30 or so tapes to New York record companies, and when he had no response he visited them. "I'm still amazed at the humiliation I was prepared to put myself through," he recalls.

"Giving tapes to uninterested receptionists who knew they were just going to throw them away. Eventually I found this label, Instinct Records, and signed with them without realising they'd never released a record. For the first year I made all these 12-inch records under different names so it would seem like they had lots of artists on their roster."

You get the feeling Moby isn't completely comfortable with his millionaire status. He has lived in the same spartan bachelor apartment in Manhattan for seven years and has no inclination to move. His biggest purchase since Play took off is Teany, a small vegan restaurant on the Lower East Side. He pops in most days for breakfast, bringing with him piles of homemade compilation CDs for the staff to play.

Moby is aware of the perils of his celebrity status. "I go on tour and everyone around me either works for me or wants to meet me. So you find yourself the centre of attention and it does lead to this pernicious narcissism."

He believes he's been altered by the experience, possibly a little corrupted by it, but he can still see a way out.

"I don't want to spend the rest of my life defining myself as a public figure. That's one of the reasons why I can pursue it wholeheartedly now. I've spent most of my life looking at celebrity culture from the average man-on-the-street's perspective. To suddenly be on the inside looking out is, for personal and anthropological reasons, very interesting.

"But I also recognise that you get a very warped perspective of yourself and the world around you.

"There's an entertainment programme here in the US where they do these celebrity biographies. You see all these ageing public figures struggling desperately to hold on to fame. It's sad and it's not healthy. I hope to avoid that by at some point simply saying, 'I'm not doing this any more.' Then I'll just disappear from view."

Performance

Who: Moby

Where: St James

When: Monday March 17

- INDEPENDENT