Moby on fame and regret: ‘I was an outof-control, utterly entitled drink and drug addict’
Moby is considering the question he is often asked in interviews: “Do I think I’ve been treated unfairly?” muses the 55-year-old musician, who, let’s face it, is hardly a stranger to terrible press. “Honestly, I don’t think I have been. I’m sure there are times when I’ve been portrayed badly and it was accurate. And even with some of the bad stuff I’ve been through, I don’t have any right to complain. When you look at the 8 billion people on the planet, a reasonably affluent caucasian cis-gendered male public figure musician is not necessarily the first person you think of as having valid criticisms about how they’re being treated.”
Moby is upbeat today – “I can’t think of many things to complain about besides baldness and mortality” – which is perhaps surprising given that the last time he was in the public eye, it involved rather a lot of the aforementioned terrible press. To summarise: in among the shocking confessions, rampant addiction and grotty sex of his second memoir, 2019’s Then It Fell Apart, was the claim that the “beautiful actress” Natalie Portman had asked him out when she was 20, at which point he would have been in his mid-30s.
She didn’t quite see it like that: “I was surprised to hear that he characterised the very short time that I knew him as dating, because my recollection is a much older man being creepy with me when I had just graduated high school. He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18. That he used this story to sell his book was very disturbing to me.”
At first Moby reiterated the claim, even posting what he said was “corroborating
photo evidence” of the pair together. But then he posted an apology, accepting that some of the criticism was valid, that he should have run the book past her and that he should have acted more responsibly given their age difference. He declared his intention to “go away for a while”.
Before we get on to Portman, Moby wants to talk about his new album. Released next month, Reprise sees him rework old hits with the benefit of guest turns (Gregory Porter, Kris Kristofferson) and a philharmonic orchestra. It’s not quite the about-turn it first appears: Moby’s mother was a pianist, his great-grandmother taught classical composition and he had studied music theory himself, playing classical and jazz up to the age of 13, at which point he realised that playing Clash covers was more fun: “And that broke my poor music teacher’s heart,” he says, “because he wanted me to become this virtuoso prodigy.” Even so, Moby admits making the record still required him to get over “this cognitive dissonance around the idea that a 16year-old kid who’d played punk shows to 10 people a night, at best, would ever be in the realm of possibility to work with an orchestra”.
If these restrained, melancholic reworkings aim to shift people’s perceptions of Moby – he’s a fan of Debussy, Vaughan Williams, Muffat – then so does the accompanying 90-minute documentary he has made about his life. In this, Moby gets friends to reenact the lack of interest his mother showed in him as a child, delves into his various addiction traumas and recreates, with the use of handmade wooden puppets, the drink-driving accident that killed his father when Moby was two. For light relief, he dresses as a scientist and describes the alcoholism that almost killed him via an anecdote about a time he got so drunk that he woke up after a session of group sex covered in someone else’s poo (he still doesn’t know whose it was). What must that have been like to make?
“There’s something obviously sort of a little bit shameful or embarrassing about using my intimate story as public entertainment,” he says. “Obviously there’s tons of historical precedent for it – I’m not pretending that I invented narcissistic self-involved narratives – but it’s especially odd to assess these intimate aspects of my life in terms of the lighting and sound quality.”
This is, I say, quite a detached way to talk about restaging your own father’s death as a puppet show. “Well, when you put it like that …” he laughs. “But I guess because of years of going to