Moby: ‘I haven’t gone on a date in 10 years’
The screen is black. Moby, on the other side of it, and on the other side of the Atlantic, prefers to do interviews off camera these days. But I think I can say with certainty how he looks – square glasses, no hair, probably a T-shirt – and I know for sure that his right arm bears the word “ANIMAL” in permanently inked block capitals, with a matching “RIGHTS” tattoo on his left.
The 58-year-old has been a global music star for decades – his 1999 album Play was a multi-platinum smash across the world – but, as he tells me now, the fight to end animal suffering and reverse climate change is where his focus is currently. “I’ve simply stopped seeing music as a job,” he says. “Activism seems like the only good use of my daytime quotidian work life. And then at night, I work on music and that’s the refuge where I get to just breathe and enjoy time spent being creative.”
His collaborative project , out this week, is one of the fruits of that creative space. It has led to an album on which Moby provides the musical backdrop to songs sung by a diverse set of artists that ranges from Lady Blackbird to serpentwithfeet and Netherlands-based singer Gaidaa to British poet , who . “I’d never heard him do spoken word poetry,” Moby says – the two knew each other as vegan activists – yet their drum’n’bass collaboration, “where is your pride?”, is a revelation.
