IT'S PROBABLY a reflection on the sad and lonely life I lead but some of my most magical and revelatory moments have come from watching Top of the Pops.

There was my dad throwing a wobbly at the sight of Alice Cooper in his lace-up leather bodice; Johnny Rotten proving that I wasn't the only teenager in the world with a giant zit on his nose; and Motorhead, warts and all, scaring the proverbial crap out of the Kevs and Sharons in the studio audience.

I'd begun to fear that that sort of inspired perversity belonged in the past until a week last Thursday when ace dance face Moby decided to update the old rock 'n' roll guitar trashing routine by subjecting his keyboard to a spot of grievous bodily harm.

A testimony to the inspirational qualities of amphetamine sulphate, I thought, but nope, the strongest stimulant coursing through the New Yorker's veins as the camera crew dodged the hi-tech shrapnel was adrenaline.

"I don't do drugs," explains the former philosophy student who in a previous life was known as Richard Melville Hall. "I used to, up until the time I was 10, but then I decided it wasn't adding anything to my life and stopped. I might have been tempted to try Ecstasy but these days they cut the stuff with so much crazy shit, you've no idea what you're taking. There are better ways to die than OD'ing on rat poison.

"Basically, I'm an introvert who desperately wants to be an extrovert. In normal day to day life, I don't quite know how to express that but on stage those inhibitions disappear which, happily, also makes for a better show."

sex element

Dismissing the let's-get-bolloxed-out-of-our-heads-and-party philosophy as "understandable but ultimately futile", Moby isn't afraid to put principles before street cred. Let's face it, you'd need the courage of your convictions to tell a club full of E'd up techno nutters that, "This track is dedicated to Jesus Christ and if you don't like it you can fuck off!"

"Yeah, I believe in God," he admits, "and one of my crusades is to differentiate between cultural Christianity and Christ which, as anyone who's been force fed religion knows, are entirely separate things. I was brought up in a strict Presbyterian household and went to church every Sunday and that nearly destroyed my faith before I'd had a chance to explore it.

"I consider what I do to be highly spiritual. Okay, it's mainly instrumental but there are no lyrics to a beautiful sunset or a brilliant painting. When I listen to gospel, for example, it's the feel and quality of the voice that's important, not the words."

It's easy - and great fun - to mock the PMRC and their fundamentalist cronies when they start playing Led Zeppelin records backwards and branding Robert Plant the anti-Christ but does Moby think that deep down, beneath the right-wing rhetoric, there could be some validity to their arguments?

"There are certain types of music I'd consider to be 'satanic' but my definition of what that means is way broader than their's. To me, Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest singing about the devil are in no way threatening. What I do find offensive, though, are people like Ice Cube and NWA being openly misogynistic, homophobic and racist. Aesthetically, we're not that different but lyrically, most the rap I hear these days preaches violence and hatred and I'm a sworn enemy of that type of bigotry.

"The sad part," he adds mournfully, "is that I love the music. I used to play a lot of hip-hop and rap as a deejay but now I distance myself from it because of the message."

Have the New York rap and techno communities become in any way integrated?

"There's not a lot of two-way flow between them, no. For the reasons we've just discussed, rap artists tend to draw predominantly black crowds and when I play, it's mainly to white kids. The Hispanics have a foot in both camps which proves that if people are positive enough, they can overcome their prejudices."

Talking of which, what does Moby make of his championing by mainstream rock journalists who'd normally prefer to have their toenails ripped off with pliers than waste valuable column inches on anything as 'unmusical' as techno?

"Yeah, they've homed in on me and the likes of Orbital and Meat Beat Manifesto because we're white and our range of influences are wide enough for them to relate to. My concern is that techno is generally becoming a little too anaemic. The kids coming through now are exorcising the feminine disco qualities - the 'sex element' - which give the form it's subversive edge and that's a pity."

cheap synth

Moby's musical education commenced at 13 when he got caught up in the English punk invasion. Later, as PVC trousers gave way to long macs, he discovered Joy Division and Echo & The Bunnymen and that in turn lead to an infatuation with the early dance pioneers which endures to this day.

"Suicide, DAF, A Certain Ratio, Cabaret Voltaire, Killing Joke - those were all bands that took the energy and attitude of punk and combined it with black funk beats and European electronics to create something which to me, as a guitar fetishist, was an absolute revelation."

This blinding flash of light, on what Moby reckons was probably the road to Greenwich Village, lead to him committing the ultimate rock 'n' roll heresy - binning his Fender and picking up the cheap synth he later used to construct 1990's groundbreaking 'Mobility' single.

Since then, he's earnt himself a place in the Guinness Book of Records courtesy of the impossibly fast 1,000 bpm 'Thousand', a track you don't so much dance as spasm to, and gone top 5 in the UK with his cheeky re-working of the Twin Peaks theme, 'Go'.

"That was fun," he enthuses allowing himself a rare smile, "because, in many ways, my life is one big David Lynch movie. It appears conventional enough on the surface but dig in and you'll discover all kinds of insanity!"

Shit, who wants to be normal?