Moby
O2 Apollo, Manchester
18th September 2024
Moby shows Manchester how Play is still a hugely significant album not due to chart success, but it’s internationally redemptive powers.
Play at 25 marks not just a significant album in terms of groundbreaking record sales, chart success and achieving the harpooning of the white whale in the shape of one’s wildest dreams within its belly; but it’s a significant album for Moby as a person with just enough foresight and downright insanity to understand the album as one with internationally redemptive powers.
Success? Sales? Or apprehending the nectar of success that most would kill for? Forget about it. There’s more to life than the trophies of a memory we spent sprinting from drug dealers and their bright young donkeys scattered across the North. There’s more to life than the toilet bowl. Moby’s fifth record isn’t significant because of the temporary-fix remedies and indulgences it provided him on a silver platter and all that came with it as an undercurrent. Riddled with contradictions, some of the platter’s content corresponding perfectly to his existence as a bonafide popstar (a suitcase lifestyle with a conveyor belt system of celebrities and a striptease of supermodels at every pool party, more drugs to deflate a herd of elephants, more alcohol to drown a thousand Bukowskis) but all executed with an undying love of music, an encyclopedic knowledge of it and an unprecedented intellectual edge to hold his own in the court of authors, artists, and addicts alike.
Other aspects of this platter are insanely antithetical to that infectious web of coping mechanisms for the weird little indie kid: raised on punk rock, devout Christian faith, immersed in electronic music and rave culture (okay fine, hedonism and acid house go hand-in-hand), vegan until the end. All of which were executed with an album to finance those flights of fancy customary to the streets, basements, and lofts of New York.
But Play is a success, Play is significant, because of how, 25 years ago, against Moby’s odds that it would be the end of his career, approached Porcelain with a ‘so what?’ attitude, that he became the sole dictator of his destiny. Play was the album that did this. That birthed such a sense of survival and continuously inspired perusal of artistry to happen. An artistry intent on understanding the innermost clockwork mechanisms under the surface of the skin, and articulating the human condition at its most raw, and hallucinogenic. The soul bathed in violent light.
Play means that 25 years later Moby can perform a wide spectrum of songs, testament to his intentional rupturing of what could have been an even steadier career (of indulgence and mingling) and instead favouring the punk rock ideology of making music for his friends. And that’s as far as the expectations of the radius reach.
Yet tonight – the radius of his impact, 25 years after Play, ten years after his last tour, is immense. The ambient yawn of My Weaknesses establishes the mood as one primed to explode at any moment: the looped choir cradling everyone as it resounds around the Apollo; in My Heart’s uplifting gospel vocal, rotating hip-hop beat and piano waterfall thudding through the room, as we orbit around its warm glow. Meanwhile, the ominous chords of Go lean on thick, it could be played in any order, on any instrument ever made, and it would still sound like a propulsive electronic monster about to kick a hole into the side of the sky.
It’s weird what we don’t hear in the heart of the songs that other people seem to have a soft spot for. They recognise vulnerability as power. Sharing a sentiment in Extreme Ways – things falling apart, things crumbling upon one fracture to many. Porcelain, made in 1998 was assumed (by Moby) to be his last album. Bad mix. Thin vocals. The last record that nobody was supposed to listen to. His manager convinced him to put it on the record. It comes alive with the ethereal butterfly wing strings and the captivating Kraftwerk/OMD synth solo, where the middle eight usually twists the ear and tilts us into an entirely new dimension of comfort and calm. It’s the Japanese art of Kintsugi applied to music – taking the broken, recomposing them with lacquer and decorating their fragilities in a way which radiates with blinding slices of gold and strings of silver powder.
From Play, breathing with mesmerising wheezing synths and weightless glide, the raw gospel electro-rock of Natural Blues could calm any troubled waters to an eternal expanse of tranquillity. A vocal line that could be hummed whilst doing the dishes, driving the car to a petrol station or watering the flowers and it would still sound like the most lonely, yet enlivening kick of soul-soothing groove one has ever had the luxury to let out. Elsewhere, the funk muscle of Honey has everyone on the floor virtually stuck to the ceiling. Dipping in, darting back out, too fast to catch, too slinky to have enough bravery to deal with its throbbing piano strut. A kit with a bass drum thick and fast enough to blow apart stone boulders. An upload of energetic life and dynamic groove with hyperventilating wah-wah guitars, rollicking rhythmic fevers and snappy verses that shapeshift and scissor kicks throughout. Elsewhere, the dark acoustic moods, eerie synth siren and shaking rush of cymbals of Everloving represent the diversity of the album perfectly. One of many shades.
We Are All Made Of Stars shoots across as a slab of forceful space disco. Euphoric robot-pop straight from the section of the dance floor where the strobe lights just about reach and a fully exposed new wave synth workout. Chic meets China Crisis covering Spacer Woman. When It’s Cold I Like To Die from 1996’s Everything Is Wrong is a squeeze of unrelenting techno power. That could shake steel beams from their bases like trees removed from the roots under the solid earth. Dark. Dirty. Pulsating signals drive through the airwaves in shimmering breakbeat rhythms and caustic rave edges. Feeling So Real from the same record is as ecstatic as Moby, the skinny white guy with a shamanic command taking people through its dirt track of intense house piano stabs, whirlwind beats, hallucinatory twinkles and psychedelic babbles of acid electronics.
Everything ends in the absence of all machines. Everything ends as it always has done for the last 32 years. Just the doomsday techno backing track – a slow pulse, teasing the sea of people with sickening speed…only to start up again. And again. Meditative. Maddening. Endless. With a BPM that gives a Lego Minifigure CRP as though it was Optimus Prime, Thousand is the song to silence all others. Moby with his arms outstretched. Christlike. Before the box. Behind it. On top. Crouching on a plinth of invisible synths. Pure techno moment. A podium soon smouldered.
In spite of the attempts at sabotage (coming after Animal Rights, and returning to dance-oriented energy, of heavenward downtempo and a mournful hymnal of gospel samples), and in spite of the self-destruction that lights all egos with a particular brand of matches, Moby greets Manchester as though he was one of our own sons.
In a way – he is. Tonight, in another part of Manchester, New Order celebrate their debut album Movement and their third album, Low Life. In collaboration with Apple Music, in Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos, the group’s Stephen Morris and Steven Wilson who mixed & engineered the albums for Spatial, will listen to the albums, and Blue Monday, in full.
Why bother telling you this?
Well, the North is palpable throughout Moby’s music. No place on the planet influenced him more than this city. Newcastle. Leeds. All inherent in his musical DNA. Japan and Germany, yes of course. But also, and more prominently, the structure of his musical heritage derives from, and is designed by: the North. Electronic music travels through, and from, and to, everything, everyone, everywhere. Mainframes. Brainwaves. Epicentres. It’s the conduit all cities clamour to become. In Cabaret Voltaire. In Heaven 17. In the Human League. In A Certain Ratio. In New Order. These are the groups that inspired him to create.
In the ’90s, 808 State asked Moby to go on tour with him. This adventure provided Moby with an opportunity to visit the Hacienda aka Church that Graham Massey organised on a night off. It was here that he met Tony Wilson. A person with such a reputation that Moby even doubted the factuality of his existence. Wilson was a myth. The same happened when he met Norman Mailer. The same happened when he met David Bowie. A life of teaching philosophy at community college became a full-thwarted future probability considering the stable of legends Moby was surrounding himself with.
A little vegan, two shades of the same Void t-shirt, sober, bald, author: The Confessions of Moby.
Another confession is that Moby is, above all else, a raver.
There’s a unanimous feeling that people came here to rave their backs off.
In the summer of 1990, armed with a keyboard and bag of records (and oatmeal), taking him from Aberdeen to Portsmouth, Moby raves on.
All this time later, 10, 25, whatever – that’s still very much the case. He has Manchester to thank for that.
All proceeds to Moby’s Play Tour go entirely to animal rights organisations.
Play 25 Live Dates:
September 21 – Antwerp, Belgium / Sportpaleis
September 22 – Berlin, Germany / Velodrom
September 23 – Düsseldorf, Germany / Mitsubishi Electric Hall – tickets
September 24 – Paris, France / Le Zenith
September 25 – Lausanne, Switzerland – tickets
Pre-order Moby’s latest album, Always Centered At Night here
Follow Moby’s Website | Facebook | Twitter/X | Soundcloud | Spotify | Instagram | YouTube
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Words by Ryan Walker
Photos by Phil Thorns, you can find his author’s archive here and his Instagram here
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