‘I’m the single worst judge of my own music’

READ ANY MOBY interview online and you’ll stumble across the same two subjects time and again – his strange quasi-beef with Eminem and being one of pop music’s oddest figures of hate.

And the man himself always offers the same response to both topics: let’s call it baffled acceptance.

We thought we’d try a few other avenues when talking with the New York dance superstar, who burst into the limelight with fifth album Play in 1999.

The album shifted more than 10 million copies worldwide, and infamously became the first record ever to have every one of its songs licensed for use in TV, movies and commercials.

Moby, who plays with his full band at Dubai World Trade Centre tonight, tells us about his new album Destroyed and why insomnia can be a good thing.

Is Destroyed your gloomiest record to date?

Destroyed is more a description of a state of being. Sometimes things look destroyed and it’s pretty easy to spot that which is destroyed.

You shot the album’s cover yourself at New York’s La Guardia Airport.

It’s the product of my keen photographer’s eye. The eye-catching image depicts the final part of an LED security warning: ‘Unattended luggage will be destroyed’, which I snapped as it flashed up, one word at time, in a deserted hallway at the airport.

You’ve also released an accompanying book of photography with the album. Can you tell us about that?

The book offers a stark, poignant, amusing and beautiful cavalcade of surreally deserted cityscapes and urban ‘non-places’ – airport buildings with endless corridors that seem to lead nowhere, and semi-abstract compositions of cloud forms and landscapes shot from the airplane windows. There are also contrasting images of luminous but lonely hotel room vistas set alongside vast, swaying, ‘single organism’ audience shots, as snapped from the stage. Their juxtaposition says everything about the bizarre psychological dislocation, the dramatic yin and yang, that is the international musician’s life. Touring is all contrasts and strangeness, and that’s what I am trying to convey in these pictures.

You’re a Los Angeles resident these days, having moved from New York. How well have you taken to the city’s music and art scenes?

I hear a lot of people talking about what gallery they are represented by, how much money they made at their last show in Cologne and so on. I just moved to LA recently, I still have my studio in New York, but in an odd way there’s an innocence to the art scene in LA that I find quite inspiring. There are still people in LA who make money out of it, but I still feel like a lot of the artists there are making art for the sake of making art. The music scene is vibrant and diverse, but not matured as much as New York in my opinion.

You’ve said that Destroyed was influenced by your endless travel schedule and sleepless nights in hotels. How does the music analyse what you’re trying to say?

When you’re in the airport, you haven’t slept in 27 hours and you are as exhausted as you’ve ever been, you’re covered in that weird travel grime and you haven’t eaten well – if anyone looked at you they would be like “Oh, he looks like a normal, upstanding international traveller”. But inside you feel like there’s something wrong with every cell in your body. That’s the quality of Destroyed that I’m talking about, and the odd comfort that comes along with that. Sometimes you can be in an airport and you can almost get past a level of exhaustion and it starts to feel good. It’s almost like the narcotic quality of feeling destroyed because of exhaustion, lack of sleep and not eating well.

And how will listeners relate to it?

Destroyed is a homogeneous listening experience – one designed to be consumed. This might sound bad, but when I was growing up, albums were some of my best friends. Heaven Up Here by Echo and the Bunnymen and Closer by Joy Division: I was closer to these records than I was to my family and friends. I love the idea of the album as a cohesive body of work, it’s still really precious to me.

What’s the oddest subject you’ve ever written a song about?

The subject is one of the really interesting things about making a record. I make a record and I have an idea of what it means to me, but I have no objectivity because I’ve been working on it by myself for a year. I put it out to the world and all of a sudden I start getting other people’s reactions to it, which is so fascinating. Like you just made me realise the trajectory of lots of the songs is the trajectory of hotel insomnia. It starts out disconcerting, and then you make peace with it and the more time goes on, the more you realise it’s not unpleasant. It’s actually kind of interesting.

So you’re actually eulogising insomnia, in a way?

Again, you’re in a hotel in Germany and all you want to do is go to sleep. You make peace with the fact that you can’t, you get up, and suddenly you realise there’s lots of interesting stuff to do. If you are willing to repurpose adversity like insomnia, you suddenly see amazing sunsets that you wouldn’t otherwise see. You go for walks in desolate city centres and you see stuff that is hidden from the sleeping world. And I think that ethos is part of this record. As you were saying, a lot of the songs start off minimal and fractured, and then sort of build and fill in a little bit as they proceed. At least I hope they do. I literally have no objectivity when it comes to my own music because I’ve made music before that I thought was great that no one else liked. And music I thought was banal c**p, other people seemed to like quite a lot. So I’m the single worst judge of my own music, I thin

Event details

What: Moby live in Dubai

Where: Dubai World Trade Centre

When: Tonight, doors open at 7.30pm, show starts at 9pm

Cost: Dhs200 to Dhs350

Tickets: Go to www.timeouttickets.com