Dancing In Manhattan - Moby

There are a lot of preconceptions about Moby.  Though the 42-year-old DJ has sold multi-millions of records, achieved a place on Rolling Stone Magazine’s ‘top five hundred albums of all time’ with 1999’s ‘Play’, and managed to survive over two decades in the fickle music industry, his professional credentials are still somehow overshadowed by his extra-curricular opinions.  They vary from speaking out against George Bush to his born again Christian beliefs, encompassing veganism, the war in Iraq, energy use and pro-choice views, and appear in numerous forms: in the folds of album covers, on his prolific blog postings, and in interviews.  Now, on the eve of the release of his eighth studio album, ‘Last Night’, Moby tells Gigwise why he’s keen to put the focus back on the music…

Moby’s latest album, ‘Last Night’, is strangely devoid of political and environmental opinion.  For an artist who is perhaps better known for his outspoken beliefs than his music (which says a lot about a man that has sold over 10 million copies worldwide of his biggest success, ‘Play’), this is perhaps surprising.  “This record is a record about my life,” he explains, “so it’s an excuse to leave politics at home and just have a party.”

A very specific kind of party, in fact.  ‘Last Night’ is a concept album, describing an eight-hour night out in the lower east side of Manhattan, condensed into a sixty-five minute record.  Moby describes it as “a very eclectic dance record.  There are hip-hop tracks on there, and there are house tracks on there, and old school rave tracks and some very quiet atmospheric tracks.  It’s just a diverse, eclectic dance record.”  He talks nostalgically about the early eighties in New York, citing it as his inspiration for the album, a time when disco was cool and meant “Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger and Liza Minelli getting into a limousine and going to Studio 54 and drinking champagne and doing coke and whiskey until five in the morning,” rather than “sad people in leisure suits dancing in the local pub.”

“One of the reasons I wrote this record is because one of the first times I went out in New York to a nightclub was in 1981,” he says of ‘Last Night’, “and one of the reasons I continue to go out in bars and clubs is that I really like every aspect of the night.  There’s the innocent beginning to the night, and I like the third or fourth drink around midnight or 1am, with that euphoria, and I really do sort of like the chaos, where things start to go wrong at 3am or 4am, and then that sort of calm, bucolic nature of going home at 7am, I also really like that.”

Moby has tried to encompass every part of the night into the album, from the anticipatory ‘Ooh Yeah’ to the ambient comedown of the title track.  Though he admits that ‘Last Night’ does hark back to the heyday of New York disco, the middle-aged vegan DJ wanted to achieve a forward looking dance record, too. “Dance music is going through this really interesting period,” he explained.  “There’s a lot of nostalgia and a lot of diversity, but it’s not the kind of nostalgia where people are tied to the past, I think it’s more a celebratory nostalgia.”

I ask where dance music is heading, if DJs like himself are now having to delve into the past to find inspiration for new material.  “The genres might change, but the way that people respond to the music is the same,” Moby ruminates, his years of experience in the industry almost audible in the tone of his voice.  “People drink, and they take drugs, and they stay out until late and they have a wonderful time and the music can be a part of that, but it doesn’t matter whether it’s hip-hop, or house music or punk-rock or whatever.  What matters is the emotional reaction of the person listening to the music.”