Born Richard Melville Hall (his stage name based on the eponymous whale from his distant uncle Herman Melville’s Moby Dick), MOBY was instrumental in the early incarnations of house and dance music. In 1999, MOBY released his fifth album, Play, which went on to sell over ten million records. “Porcelain” ended up selling millions more—the opener on that mix CD you regret making in college.
My most embarrassing gig is not terribly dramatic, but it still pains me to think about it. I dropped out of college in 1984 and started a band with some friends. We were called AWOL, which was an acronym for Angels Without Light, because we were Joy Division-obsessed, gothic, overly dramatic suburban kids. We borrowed money from our parents and released this five-song EP, with the release party at a Chinese restaurant in Norwalk, Connecticut, called the D.C. Cafe. I have no idea why it was called that, but they were the only place that would allow us to set up equipment and play a show. I had a huge crush on a girl named Margaret Fiedler, who, oddly enough, has gone on to have a very interesting career in music. She was PJ Harvey’s guitar player, and now she plays guitar in Wire.
I really wanted to impress her, so I invited her to our album release show at the D.C. Cafe, which was in a strip mall. It was the lowest of the lowest rung of Chinese restaurants. We set up, with our little borrowed PA, in the far corner next to some vegetable crates. We had made hundreds of flyers to promote the show and put them up in every record store and venue in the area. I had visions in my head of hundreds of people filling the restaurant. Margaret arrived shortly after by herself. The owner demanded that, in order for her to sit and watch the show, she had to order food. My friend Paul arrived with his cousin, and they were told the same thing. And, that was it. Literally no one else came to our show. This was our big, triumphant, record-release show, and the setting was so sad. There I was, trying to impress the girl that I had this huge crush on, playing sad songs in an empty Chinese restaurant, while she ate food that she’d been forced to order. Thankfully, Margaret and I still keep in touch to this day.
The craziest gig is going to sound like I’m overdramatizing this, or indulging in hyperbole, but I promise I’m not. With most shows, there’s a little bit of chaos. But for this one, it was so insane that it was almost like scripted chaos. This was in 1997, and I was playing a festival at Leeds in the north of England. This was at a very low point for me professionally. I had just released an album called Animal Rights that no one liked. I was still playing the occasional festival, and I would try and play some of my new punk rock songs from Animal Rights, but in order to get paid, I had to play dance music, because that’s what I was hired to do.
We started playing, and the audience was weirdly chaotic. It seemed like they had been drinking and taking drugs for a few days, which was probably the case. I played Woodstock ’99, and this had a similar vibe of things just being wrong. Early into our set, I jumped into the audience. One of the security guards, who was either mentally ill or simply didn’t realize that I was an artist, just started punching me. He was huge, and the audience was trying to pull me into the crowd while security was trying to pull me towards the stage. It didn’t make any sense, because even if I was some kid who’d stage-dived, the security guard had no reason to start punching.
My arms were immobilized by the audience, and the security guards had my legs, while this guy was punching my head and back. Finally, I was somehow released, and I screamed in the guy’s face. He hauled back to punch me again, and I ran back on stage. This has never happened before or since, but at that moment, I swear to you…my amplifier caught on fire and exploded. I’m not sure if it was a Firestarter moment, where my chaos and rage caused the amp to blow up, but there was fire belching out of the amp. I was muddy, bruised and bloody, and I started berating the violent security guard from the stage. He tried to get on stage, and my tour manager and the other guards literally had to wrestle him to the ground. Immediately after the last note of our set—and I swear I’m not kidding—the heavens opened up, and it was the biggest thunderstorm I’ve ever seen. It was biblical, and it felt…perfect.