1987 was the year I got my first turntables. I was 12, in my bedroom in Southampton, and I’ve been a DJ ever since. It turns out 1987 was a big year for Moby too.
“When I became a vegan in 1987, in one fell swoop I extended my life expectancy and annoyed most of the people in my life.”
That line gives you the tone of the whole book. Moby is funny about himself all the way through Porcelain. He’s the skinny, awkward bloke in the corner of every story, and he knows it.
You might expect a memoir of New York clubs, or a book about veganism. There are lots of things this book could be about. Here’s what it’s about for me: a man with a talent he wasn’t going to give up on, and everything he went through.
The book covers ten years, from 1989 to 1999. When it starts, Moby is living in an abandoned factory, making music on cheap gear and DJing in New York clubs. He gets a rave hit with “Go”, and for a while it looks as if he’s made it. His later records don’t land the way he hoped, and by the late ’90s plenty of people had written him off.
As a DJ, I’d say it’s worth reading for the club stories alone. The early rave nights, the record shops, the crowds who’d never heard anything like it before. It’s a brilliant snapshot of a scene that was being invented as it went along. And it’s written by someone who was right in the middle of it, still slightly confused about how he got there.
He’s honest about faith and loneliness too. In the early ’90s he was a skinny Christian vegan who made techno, which didn’t make him an obvious fit anywhere. A lot of the book is him trying to work out where he belonged. It’s funny, but there’s real sadness underneath it.
And there’s the rest of it. Green smoothies kept him alive through the binges, which is about the most Moby way of surviving I can think of. Coming from the bloke who ended up as Natural Juice Junkie, that’s a compliment.
Everything leads up to Play
Play came out in 1999. It’s built on old field recordings of blues and gospel singers, laid over his own beats and piano. It didn’t take off straight away. Then the tracks started turning up in adverts, films and TV shows, and before long you couldn’t get away from it.
It changed everything for him, and it changed the way a lot of other people made music too. Producers everywhere saw what you could do with a sampler, some old records and a bit of nerve.
What gets me is where he was just before it happened. The people who’d written him off had a point, on paper. He kept making music anyway, on his own terms, without much reason to think anyone would care.
That’s done beats perfect in action. It’s the idea behind my book: get the thing finished and out into the world, then make the next one better. Moby didn’t wait for the industry to tell him he was good enough. He kept turning up and making the next track.
That’s the bit I’d want anyone with a creative itch to read. Most of us have something we’ve been sitting on because we’re not sure it’s good enough, or we’re scared nobody will care. Moby spent years making music that plenty of people didn’t care about. He kept going, and the record that changed his life came out of exactly that stubbornness.
Say what you like about Moby (Eminem did), but this is a brilliant read. So is the follow-up, Then It Fell Apart, which picks up after Play and goes somewhere much darker. Both brilliant. I read Porcelain in 2017, and it’s one I’d hand to anyone, whether they’ve ever bought a dance record or not.
You’ll find it in the recovery chapter of my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me. It could just as easily sit with the music books.
Read it for the clubs, the smoothies or the music. Whichever way in you pick, you’ll come out the other end rooting for the bloke in the corner.
