How fame nearly killed Moby
The album ‘Play’ made the musician famous and rich, but it also saw him hit rock bottom
Moby remembers the time he hit rock bottom. Or, one of his rock bottoms. It was 2007, and he was in his then-apartment in New York’s Chinatown. The DJ had had a dizzying decade, surfing the success of Play —a10 million-selling album. But after a good few years enthusiastically pursuing his addictions — alcohol, drugs — Moby felt empty and suicidal.
“I’d read an article about how one of the ways [people] kill themselves is by tying plastic bags around their heads. So I tried that,” he says.
“The bag smelled strongly of polyvinyl chloride. So even though I was blind drunk and out of my mind on drugs, some little voice in my head said: ‘Your last moment on earth should not be smelling the inside of a garbage bag.’ So,” Moby smiles, “that didn’t work.”
Moby, 52, has talked about his drug and alcohol abuse before, but he has never spoken so candidly about the frequent lows he experienced after Play made him famous in 1999.
“As fame and wealth and drinking and drug use increased, so did narcissism and entitlement... and anxiety and depression. And usually those came when things were great,” he says as we talk on a secluded deck outside his house in the Hollywood Hills.
“There was one experience in 2002, an MTV Awards in Barcelona. I was staying at this super-fancy hotel, and I’d just won an award. And I was so anxious and depressed, all I wanted to do was throw myself out of the window, but the windows didn’t open wide enough.”
Memories like this show the gulf that sometimes exists between someone’s public persona and their real self. When most people think of Moby, they think of a do-gooding vegan. But the man born Richard Melville Hall, who was brought up in poverty in Connecticut by a single mother, seems to be on a truth-telling mission, which started two years ago when he published a memoir.
Covering his life in New York between 1989 and 1999, just before Play was released, the book, Porcelain, included descriptions of his countless nights of substance abuse. His publisher, he says, turned down one chapter Moby had written, saying: “I think you’ve established that you were a broken dysfunctional degenerate at this point. We don’t need more evidence.”
But Moby insists the second volume of his memoir, due to be published next year, will be
even more shocking.
In the second volume, we will see up close the aphrodisiac wiles that millions of album sales can gift a short, skinny, nerdy bald man. There was a time round the turn of the millennium when Moby was a serial squirer of actresses and models, Natalie Portman being perhaps his most highprofile paramour.
Is she in the second book?
“Oh yeah,” he says. “There’s a lot of [famous] names in the second book. I’ve learned that libel is more problematic with private figures than public figures. If I write about dating Natalie Portman, anyone can Google and find pictures of us together. So it’s not libellous.”
Moby is not revealing all these personal details for the money. He has sold so many albums he never has to work again, and writes because he enjoys it. The same goes for his music.
“I almost don’t see making music as a profession any more,” he says evenly. “I certainly don’t make money from it. My manager keeps asking me why I still make albums. Well, I love making albums. And I’m a middle-aged guy who doesn’t have relationships [he says he hasn’t even been on a date in 18 months], so I have to do something!” he laughs lightly.
He sees his animal rights activism as his day job.
“Even sitting backstage for someone else’s tour made me never want to go on tour again,” he said.