PREVIEW MUSIC
Moby in mosh rock shocker
Moby. Wee baldy, veggy, Christian, techno nutter, yeah? NOpe. Rory Weller chews the animal-free fat with a born again hardcore kid.
When Moby played a speed metal track he’d been working on to his record company in 1992 they were very surprised and a little bit scared. His ‘Gol' track released a year previously had been a top ten hit and he was being described as ‘techno‘s first star'. Hard rock isn't exactly a big money spinner when all the world‘s buying dance. using it in commercials and hearing it on a million compilations. He would have had a warmer reception if he had decided to get into woolly jumpers and start playing folk music. By the time his debut album ‘Everything Is Wrong' came out last year. Moby’s disquiet with the dance scene was already evident. tracks like the turbo metal ‘All That 1 Need Is To Be Loved’. pointing the way forward. His live set began to combine more of the harder guitar material and during a series oftours with the Red Hot Chili Peppers the old dance stuff had already been left by the wayside, and Moby had become a straight. top off. shouting into the mic. hip
slung rock outfit.
So why has the man changed his tune? ‘lt’s what I enjoy most now.‘ says the 3l-year-old New Yorker in
Moby: har to the core yf trning
y. " " 1 t- r ,l’ .I‘ ‘ 1,;2 3""; ‘ "' via ,. A, I, . \a ,3 i 5 - . .
the cheek fr southern dance music. Sort of
his tour bus. as his manager checks the supplies of Moby's special vegan diet. ‘There is an element of returning to something i did fifteen years ago. (Moby had been the guitarist in Ultra Vivid Scene). but it's morejust what interests me and excites me: punk rock. speed metal etc. Most of dance music has just settled into being background music and when i hear a dance record I think “that’s nice". but my appreciation never goes beyond nice. Culturally too, I realised I had nothing in common with these people apart from the music. Dance is very self referential
and the only effort it‘s made to be political isfaux new age environmental awareness. I‘m not saying I don‘t like dance though. There was a time between 82—92 that excited me. dance rock. early hip hop. house, dance hall reggae. freestyle techno. Then in 92 it just became a little bit conservative.‘
It's not the commercialisation of dance music that bothers him. What really gave him the impetus to look for new horizons was the wrath of the ubiquitous. indefinable underground. ‘lt‘s so anal: you walk into these trendy record stores and everyone looks so worried. It reminds me of what it was like to
‘Alternative metal is the only stuff which will'offend your parents. It you put on Oasis your parents will have bought it already, and if you put on dance music
they’re not going to notice it.’
be in the Communist Party in the l930s. if you said. “Well. Stalin‘s not the greatest guy in the world". then you were pounced upon. That's the state of the underground.’ he spits. ‘lfJuan Atkins puts out a record everyone has to love it. and if you dare say it‘s boring people say, “It‘s sophisticated". No. sophisticated is Ravel. I love Detroit techno and a lot ofexperimental stuff but dance musicjust sounds the same. It's not as compelling as a Pantera or Soundgarden record. Dance music isjust an anonymous soundtrack. it isn’t bad, but keeps rue from wanting to run out to my record store.‘
When Moby was fifteen he bucked the cool school trend and formed a punk rock band. instead of going along with everyone else and getting into the Doors and the Grateful Dead. What would a fifteen-year-old Moby do today? He thinks it would probably be experimental dance music. but he doesn’t believe it would have the same sexy visceral charge as listening to the Sex Pistols. ‘Altemative metal is the only stuff which will offend your parents. If you put on Oasis your parents will have bought it already. and ifyou put on dance music they're not going to notice it.‘ Moby plays King Turk Walt Wth Hut. Glasgow. Wed 30; Venue. Edinburgh. Thurs 31.
m— Gashew for chaos
‘You just have to get your dick cut off and you can have a book written about you. It’s pathetic!’ Twenty-four- year-old singer llut (named by her parents after an Egyptian goddess, not the more familiar woody fruit) is attempting to explain the tongue-in- cheek “books will be written about me’ line in her single, ‘Brains’, and ends up bemoaning the fact that we seem to be turning into a society of professional victims.
Despite leaving her llewcastle home at fourteen and pitching up in london two years later, having ‘been through a Iot’ on the way, she hasn’t
displayed the scars left by those experiences on her album, Fanfanlclfy. She got that out of her system at a lianif Kureishi writing class some years ago.
She turned to singing after dabbling
llut on a highway to shell
in prose and drama turned out to be blind alleys. ‘I couldn’t get into acting. The idea of being inside someone's world really appeals to me, because I hate reality. It’s not the most exciting thing, is it? I like to go
é. .
somewhere else, and I thought acting would give me that, but i don’t want to say other people’s words.’
Then, one day, liut sneaked into flatmate Pete Evans’s room and ., - recorded a vocal on one of his songs,
' where it lay unnoticed for months.
liut turned out to have a fine voice, and they became songwriting partners. After she and Evans got their fingers burned with a previous record company, she’s left the more mundane aspects of reality to her manager, giving her plenty freedom to think deep thoughts. ‘I don’t think of someone as just a man or lust a woman,’ she says, apropos of certain verses from Fanfanlclfy. ‘People are . obsessed with putting you in a box. All of that’s irrelevant, because I don’t think that anyone’s really got a sex. We can all transcend limitations.’ (Alastair Mabbott) Nut plays KTWWII, Wed Z3.
The List l8-3l Oct 199641