Thar He Blows Again!

THE LOSS of a parent — whether through bereavement or estrangement — is a characteristic common to many musicians and songwriters. Five minutes of chasing the theme might yield the following names: John Lennon, Bob Geldof, Sinéad O'Connor, Goldie, half of U2, John Lydon, Phil Lynott, Tricky, Nick Cave, Kurt Cobain.

To this list, you can add the man sitting across from your reporter; dancefloor warlock/film scorer/straight-edge graduate Moby, Richard Hall to his friends, a slight, crop-headed man with a friendly but serious manner and a voice that calls to mind no-one so much as Steve Buscemi.

We're having lunch in Juice, the vegetarian restaurant on George's St., Dublin (where, incidentally, this writer began his career as a civilian some years ago, in the kitchens), and Moby's chewing on his vegan meal — Miso broth and a Juiceburger, chased with a carrot/orange/spinach/ginger juice — and mulling over the can of worms we've just opened.

"Hitler too," he adds, after some consideration. "He was a painter. Remember that movie The Boys From Brazil where they're raising all these little Hitlers around the world, and at one point they go and kill all the parents at the age Adolf Hitler's father had died? Maybe if you're trying to breed artists, at some point you have to go around killing their parents."

Moby's father died when he was two years old, and he's still not quite sure how and to what degree the bereavement impacted on him.

"I never knew anything else," he reasons. "I think it's a lot different if you lose a parent when you're eight or twelve or fifteen, but I was two, so I have no memory of my life with my father. I really have no idea how it affected me, except in that I was always aware when I was growing up that all my friends had fathers and I didn't. I could never escape that. It certainly branded me as an outsider. But I didn't know that there was such a tradition within pop music. Dave Navarro, his mother was murdered. Maybe there's something to this, it's the Rosetta Stone of figuring out pop music.

My mother died a few years ago," he continues, "so now I'm an honest to goodness orphan, but I was talking to my stepfather just recently, and I found out that my father killed himself. That's interesting to discover when you're 32 years old. I think that my biological parents had a very unhappy marriage — my mother and stepfather had a wonderful marriage — but I think my biological parents were quite young when they got married, and maybe they shouldn't have. So I have a feeling it would 've ended probably with divorce at some point, and, it's very selfish to say, but I'm kind of glad — I'd rather grow up with a single parent than in a broken home where the parents hate each other.

But the other strange thing is that he died when he was 26, so at some point a few years ago I realised that I was older than my father. And now I'm 33, so the older I get, the more sympathy I have for him, it's like, 'How sad. This young kid, 26 years old, dead'."

And now, Moby, at the age of Christ, has delivered his most complete work in years, the new album Play. In many ways, after the lukewarm response to his return-to-hardcore Animal Rights and the extracurricular activities of I Like To Score, it was the record he had to make if he was to recover lost ground. Not that the man cares too much about anyone else's opinion once he's satisfied with the work.

"Well, I'm kind of simple-minded," he grins. "I liked Animal Rights so I kind of felt like, 'Well, other people didn't like it. That's too bad.' I still had a lot of personal satisfaction from it. And the reason other people didn't like it was very reactionary, so that made me feel like I had a cause. Like, Goldie's second album, I didn't hear it but I guess it got really bad reviews . . . now that would be depressing, to make a record that is stylistically similar to your first record, but that people don't like. But Animal Rights was a complete departure, so I wasn't too surprised, and as a result it wasn't that dispiriting."

Play, on the other hand, is a many-sided riddle, splicing Alan Lomax field recordings of indigenous black musics dating from the early part of the century with more classically electro-European disciplines and commercial hip-hop beats.

"I've always liked using vocals in the music I've made, whether that means me singing, or hiring someone to sing, or sampling old disco or blues or jazz vocals," Moby explains. "So in this case I was just thrilled that I found these old acapellas that had been well recorded, that had a really beautiful emotional and lyrical quality. I mean, finding interesting acapella vocals is a rarity, cos usually there's music attached to it, or they're poorly recorded, or something's wrong that makes them unusable from a sampling perspective. But in this case — beautifully recorded, crystal clear, 60-70 years old in most cases, so I was thrilled."

Apart from the field recordings though, the album's unifying element is probably the breakbeats. Indeed, Moby has admitted that he listens to artists like Timbaland, Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes, a fact which might surprise people who 'd think the New Yorker would be attracted to the more serrated edge of the wedge.

"It sounds good on the radio," he sums up. "I mean, New York is such a hip-hop city, you hear it on the radio, you hear it in shoe stores, you hear it in nightclubs, cars driving by your house. It was interesting; during the gangsta rap period no-one in the city listened to hip-hop. Like, '90/'91, whenever gangsta rap was happening, the African-American community in New York listened to R&B and reggae. I think mainly it's that the gangsta rap sounded corny (laughs), it sounded silly, and it was too tough. I mean, hip-hop in New York, the stuff that's been successful, has always had like a disco quality to it, and a sensual quality, which is why I personally didn't like a lot of the LA stuff, it was just too unfunky, too unsexy. Even someone like DMX, who's quite hard, or Jay-Z's album, the music still has a more deft, sensual quality."

If you don't know Moby by now, you will never ever know Moby. Cheap link, but the fact is, Richard Hall, like that other former straight-edge devotee Henry Rollins, is as famous for his beliefs and lifestyle as much as his music. And fair enough, there aren't that many vegan, teetotal, environmentalist Christians clambering up the charts right now. All the same, the media, and maybe even the public, tend to have a very ambivalent relationship with characters who make such good copy. First there's fascination, and a certain amount of respect, then, perversely, a tendency to caricature and jibe such characters when they don't change their convictions, or cry "Turncoat" if they do.

"The thing is, especially ideologically, I think I've been misrepresented in the press," Moby says, without rancour. "If I was to read articles about myself, I'd think I was some rigid vegan ideologue, a dogmatic, non-drug-taking, non-drinking . . . whatever. As far as I know myself, I don't think those things are true. I think the way I've been presented in the media has been a lot more rigid than I actually am, cos my opinions change all the time."

Has he encountered anything recently that has shaken his ideals?

"I've had some minor and major epiphanies," he admits. "One was in 1995 when I went out and drank liquor after not drinking liquor for about seven years, and I realised how much I like alcohol. Up until 1994/5 I'd been quite strict in the way I lived and the things I believed, and I sort of sat down and asked myself, 'Is my belief system based on pragmatic, empirical understanding of the world or is it just based on rigid dogma?' And I realised that some of my beliefs hadn't been questioned in a long time, and that a lot of my beliefs and lifestyle choices weren't appropriate anymore.

Like, alcohol for example, for all the years I was adamantly opposed to drinking and drug-taking, I was missing out on a lot of information. You learn a lot about the world being in a bar at five in the morning, drunk. You learn a lot about compassion and your fellow human beings and human frailty, and I'd rather be drunk in a bar at five in the morning with the human condition thrust in my face than sitting at home going to sleep at midnight feeling smug in my puritanical beliefs.

That's one thing — in New York I don't have a lot of friends who are musicians, but I do have a lot of friends in the art world, which is strange because the art world is such a bizarre beast.

Art parties are really the only genuinely interesting, degenerate, hedonistic parties that I'll go to, they're still living it up like it's 1969 at The Factory. Y'know, people taking lots of drugs and drinking and having affairs with each other. I'm not advocating any of these things but it's certainly more interesting than some bunch of overweight musicians in 12-step programmes sitting in a bar complaining about MTV."

Play is released on Mute on May 17th.

The single "Run On" is out now.