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There was a time not long ago when it was
hard to escape from Moby. The tiny New York techno pixie had his
album Play on all the coolest post-modern coffee tables from
here to way over there, and his music would come at you in twenty
second bursts nestled behind the most unlikely TV ads. After a decade
or more spent swinging wildly from genre to genre the theory is
that he found a tape of some old blues tunes, dusted them down with
his renowned eclecticism and soon found himself pontificating all
the way to the bank. We met him on his never ending tour and found
out that he’s not just everybody’s favourite pocket-sized jingle
composer — he’s also an expert on feline dentistry.
You got nominated for a Grammy for best
rock instrumental.
Actually I was nominated for two
Grammies; one was for best rock instrumental which is very bizarre
seeing as that song is neither a rock song nor an instrumental,
and the other was for best alternative artist.
How did you get into the rock category
— do Americans still not have much of a concept of dance music?
Um, I had nothing to do with what
I was nominated for. I don’t know how the process works, I’ve never
been nominated for Grammy before, I’ve never been to the Grammies
before, so it does seem very odd that I’ve been nominated for best
rock instrumental. I don’t even know why the category exists. What
seems to have happened is as the Grammies have gone on they’ve never
gotten rid of categories, so like best rock instrumental might have
made sense in 1971, and it’s still there so you gotta fill it. So
I think that what happened might be that different people in the
music business write in their votes and they just write in for anything.
But your nominated song wasn’t
an instrumental anyway.
It’s Bodyrock — it’s
filled with vocals.
Would you have let Spoonie G (whose
sampled vocals fill the track) pick up the award if you won?
He’s in prison, and I think that
my contribution to the song was greater than his anyway.
We all know that every track from Play
has been licensed for adverts and stuff — would it be true
to say that you’ve made more money from this than from sales of
the record itself?
I don’t know to be honest with you.
This might not sound true, but it is true as far as I know it —
as far as making records and selling records goes I never think
of the financial aspect. The album went gold in the UK and the US
and a friend of mine said “Wow! that’s great — now you’re
gonna make so much money!” That honestly never crossed my mind.
All these like licensing to movies, to commercials, to TV, selling
a lot of records — the financial aspect of it never crosses
my mind. I mean it’s nice if I get big fat royalty cheques that’s
great, I don’t complain, but also I have everything I need. I’m
lucky; I own my own house in New York and I have a recording studio,
and then when I get money I just put it in the bank, I invest, and
then it’s like the amount of money I make is kind of arbitrary.
It’s nice, it’s exciting (kind of) and it makes the record company
happy and my managers happy, but it doesn’t really have much bearing
on the way I live.
Do you have any interest or control
over what products get promoted using your music?
I have two things in my contract
with Mute: one says the music I’ve made can’t be used to advertise
cigarettes, and the other is that it can’t be used to advertise
weapons. Apart from that everything else is kind of fair game.
I’ve said this before but Mute is an independent label — the
last of the big independents — and the people that work there
are friends of mine, and Daniel Miller who owns the label is a friend
of mine, and if by licensing my songs to commercials and movies
and whatever it means that Mute can stay in business, and it means
that my friends can have jobs then great — I’m happy to go
along with it. Certainly when I write music I don’t think about
it being used to advertise chocolates or whatever, but we live in
a messy world and we certainly live in a commerce-driven world and
I’m grudgingly relatively happy to go along with it.
So far you’ve steered clear of the celebrity
DJ circuit. Is there any reason for this apart from being a bad
DJ?
I’m not really a DJ at all. I used
to DJ as a way to make money and I DJ occasionally for fun, but
I’ve been playing guitar since I was 9 years old — for better
or worse I just think of myself as a musician. There’s nothing wrong
with being a DJ, just as there’s nothing wrong with being a musician,
but by anybody’s definition I’m not really a DJ.
Do you ever get mistaken for Westbam?
Do you know Westbam? Max —
he’s a lot chubbier than I am, he’s quite round. He looks sort of
like a bald, chubby Napoleon. I love him, he’s an old old friend,
we first met in 1989. I really like him and he’s a smart, very interesting
guy, but if we were standing next to each other there’s definitely
no mistaking us. I get mistaken for Michael Stipe occasionally.
I got my picture taken with Michael Stipe, and from that... we could
be cousins but we really don’t look that much alike. But any white
guy with a shaved head is bound to look pretty much like any other
white guy with a shaved head.
You turned down production offers from
the likes of Hole and Guns’n’Roses — why do all these rock
bands want to work with you?
I think because a lot of rock musicians
see rock as a sort of dying entity, it’s not particularly been a
great couple of years for rock music — most of the interesting
developments in music have come from this hybridised world of electronic
music with other genres. Pure rock can be good but it’s not very
compelling, it doesn’t ever really break ground, and a lot of those
musicians are — like when I met Axl he said in the last five
years he hasn’t even bought a rock record. He likes DJ Shadow, he
likes Nine Inch Nails, he likes me, he likes Josh Wink, he likes
whatever. So I just think that hybridised electronic music is more
interesting, and that’s why a lot of those guys find it compelling.
So why aren’t you tempted to work
with somebody like that?
I’m a musician and the main reason
I make music is cos I wanna make my own records, so all the other
stuff like producing and remixing and doing film work and whatever,
it’s like kind of interesting but my main interest is to make my
own records.
Speaking of remixing — why were
there so many remixes of Honey?
We fucked up. For example there
were a lot of remixes for Natural Blues but we shelved a
couple of them cos they weren’t that good. With Honey I did
like 3 or 4 mixes, then Rollo and Sister Bliss said they wanted
to do a mix, and then Mickey Finn and Aphrodite did the drum’n’bass
mix. Then we needed a German house mix so we got Sharom to do a
German house mix, and then there’s a Westbam mix — Westbam
and Hardy Hard. And then there’s a drum’n’bass mix and a big beat
mix that were done on spec... so we had all these mixes and we kind
of felt like we had to use them cos they were ours, so rather than
be selective and say “you know, this one’s not really all that
good” we just put them all out which completely confused the
issue. What I’ve found with most remixes is at the end of the day
none of the remixes are ever as good as the original version. I
can’t think of a case where I’ve had a song remixed where I’ve liked
the remix more than the original.
The popular view of Play is of
you playing around with field recordings of old gospel and blues
songs. Where does Spoonie G fit into that tradition?
I’m not quite sure. There are 18
songs on the record and six of them have old blues vocals on them,
that still leaves 66% of the record that doesn’t have old
blues vocals on it. I just wanted to make a nice record, I didn’t
think of it as a record based around old blues vocals; I just wanted
to make an emotional and compelling record.
You’ve never really been known
for doing much in the way of hip hop/electro sounding stuff. Bodyrock
seems out of context with the rest of the album anyway.
Hmm, the nice thing about living
in a democratic culture is that everyone has a different opinion.
It’s funny, just as like Natural Blues for example —
I don’t think of it as a gospel song even though it has gospel vocals
in it, I don’t think of Bodyrock as a hip hop song even though
it has hip hop vocals in it. I mean Bodyrock doesn’t sound
like the hip hop I listen to, but yeah I guess...
The first hip hop record I bought was The Message in 1982
and from like 1982 to 1989 I loved hip hop — Eric B & Rakim,
Jungle Brothers, Afrika Bambaataa — I thought hip hop was really
exciting. It’s funny because all the people on my tour-bus all got
into hip hop in like 90/91 which is when I sort of lost interest.
When it became like NWA, Ice Cube, Eazy E — that’s when I just
lost it — gangsta rap meant nothing to me and I found it really
distasteful. I like Cypress Hill (I like some of their productions),
I like A Tribe Called Quest, but a lot of that early 90s to mid
90s hip hop I just didn’t like at all. Then around 95/96 it started
to become really interesting to me again, because the only hip hop
I like is soulful, RnB hip hop — I almost prefer RnB to hip
hop. Stuff like the Wu Tang Clan just loses me because it’s too
aggressive, it’s too mean, whereas stuff like Busta Rhymes I love
because it’s got a little dirty, soulful quality to it.
Are cats born with teeth?
(he’s taking a long time to answer
this one. I think we’ve been rumbled) Cats are born with
teeth. Whether or not the teeth are actually present below the gumline
when they’re born, they certainly have teeth in their bodies.
With reference to your hatred of cigarettes
— is your performance affected by smokers at the front of the
audience?
I don’t like cigarettes but I have
a sort of detante with them. Most of my friends in New York
smoke. It’s all contextual, I mean if you were sitting here right
now and you were smoking it would genuinely irritate me, but if
this was a bar and you were smoking it wouldn’t bother me in the
slightest. Just because I’m irritated by cigarettes doesn’t mean
you’re a bad person if you’re smoking, it just means that I’m sensitive
to it and I do think that they’re kind of a waste of time, drugwise.
My mother died of cancer and she’d been a smoker, and it just seems
like such a waste. I used to smoke when I was very young and I understand
the nicotine high, but it’s nothing. You do such damage to
your body and to the people around you for this teeny little nicotine
high — if you’re gonna do drugs shoot smack or something, at
least then you’ll ruin your body and you’ll get a terrific high
out of it, but cigarettes and cocaine just seem like the stupidest,
most worthless drugs. Cocaine especially, I don’t judge people that
do it (maybe I do a little bit because it does seem like such a
status-driven drug) but it doesn’t do anything. It gives
you a little lift, it gives you some endorphins and you feel like
you’re on top of the world for ten minutes or half an hour or whatever,
and all the expense... To be in a room full of people who are doing
a lot of cocaine — they’re the most annoying people in the
world — what a waste.
If your house was burning down what
two things would you save?
(taking a while to think about
this one...) My passport and my laptop. The thing is like I’ve
got the sequences for a lot of new songs on my Macintosh G3 at home,
and then I’ve got all the sounds scattered on a bunch of different
synths and samplers, so I couldn’t just save one of them. I wish
I had one hard disk with everything on it — that’s what I would
save — but it’s scattered on like ten different hard disks.
One of the things that gives me great comfort in the world is having
a passport and credit cards, so I know I can leave anywhere, just
that sense of freedom like if I’m in Middlesbrough and it’s cold
and I’m depressed within 24 hours I can be anywhere on the face
of the earth, and that’s such a comforting feeling. I get really
claustrophobic if I can’t leave anywhere — if I’m stuck somewhere
and there are no taxis, and there are no cars, and there are no
buses, and there’s no nothing — that’s my definition of claustrophobia.
We’ve noticed that you’ve been tapping
your feet throughout this interview — are you getting yourself
excited for the show, or are we scaring you?
I always do that.
If you had a catchphrase what would
it be?
Regarding what?
That’s rubbish!
No, that’s not the catchphrase.
But a catchphrase? In what context?
Don’t know really, it’s just a
question we came up with earlier.
But a catchphrase for what? For
going to a fast food restaurant? A motto to live by?
Yeah maybe. Something that’s instantly
recognisable as you.
(finally getting the idea)
Oh, like if I was a Simpsons character — my equivalent
of “Ay Caramba!”...
Perhaps Moby doesn’t need a catchphrase —
he certainly can’t think of one, that’s for sure — but we're
sure you’d all recognise him anyway if he walked past you in the
street. You’d have to be looking down at the time though! Bless
him though, he was a lovely fella and we look forward to hearing
the contents of those ten hard disks some time soon.
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