Moby Biography

Moby is so nicknamed because of the fact that he can trace his ancestry to Herman Melville, the author of the famous whaling tale, ‘Moby Dick’. Moby is a strident environmentalist, Christian, non-drinker and vegan, with strong views on many subjects, but he is also one of the more exciting artists to emerge from the last decade.

His father, a Professor at Columbia University, died when he was just two, and so he was raised by his bohemian, hippy mother in a small conservative town called Darien. The fact that he came from a poor single-parent family, with an unusual mother, made him feel like an outsider from an early age. The young Moby found solace in music; he began learning the classical guitar when he was just ten. Initially, Moby never thought of having a career in music, as he saw it as his life, not something that was a job. So he went to college and studied Philosophy, which in his words "doesn’t prepare you for anything in life, other than being annoying at cocktail parties". He realised college wasn’t for him and he dropped out, to start life as a full-time musician.

He spent a number of years dj-ing in New York clubs, before recording his first hit, ‘Go!’, in his bedroom. The 1991 track used a sample of the Twin Peaks theme and stormed into the UK top 10.

He signed to leading independent Mute in 1993. He has released many albums under different guises, as well as compilations, but he considers he has made four real albums, ‘Everything is Wrong’, ‘The End of Everything’, ‘Animal Rights’ and ‘Play’. His first real LP released in 1995 was titled ‘Everything is Wrong’; it was a hybrid of house, rock, hardcore, thrash and jungle. The second being the techno metal album, 'Animal Rights'. This shocked and surprised his audience and music critics, as it was completely different from previous records, and apparently not what the people expected. He also released 'The End of Everything' under the pseudonym of Voodoo Child. In 1997 he released ‘I Like to Score’, a compilation of many of his tracks that have been used in movies, which included the James Bond theme.

In 1999 he released ‘Play’, an album that sampled recordings of indigenous black music from the early twentieth century, recorded by the historian Alan Lomax. Moby explains "I discovered them by accident, I was out to dinner with a friend and he gave me some CD’s that had these old vocals on them, and I just fell in love with them. They had a really beautiful quality to them, so I sampled them, and basically wrote new songs around those vocals". The result was an album that is different, unique and selling faster than you can say ‘Moby’.