The perpetually serene Moby almost didn't make it to his Friday night gig in The Point due to the absence of a work permit when he arrived at the airport that morning. A rare slip from the most organised (some might say calculating) man in pop. Or is it rock? Or dance?
For a musician who is essentially a music producer with a talent for recycling, Moby ably put up a good front as a performer. He careered, reeled and sprinted around the stage as if dementedly looking for something. But all his energy was going nowhere. The problem with playing Moby's music live is that so much of it relies on sequencers and samples culled from other people's music that in a live setting it is not so much performed as rendered with embellishment.
Moby's music works as gentle pastiche: unpretentious and easily absorbable in the comfort of your own head. But, as a frontal assault, the experience was a little like listening to a huge, cranked-up stereo, with the band (bass, drums, decks, three-piece strings, vocalist Diane Charlemaine and Moby - the live part of the show) struggling to compete. Aurally, the mix buried the live instruments a little too much.
In his defence, Moby has astounding energy and an immense musical imagination. But, on the night, his performance seemed more like detached vehemence than passion. At one stage he announced that the band was going to play a short death metal track, "just to get it out of our systems". What followed was suitably noisy; but, more importantly, the band were wholehearted in their delivery and rapturous in their enjoyment of it. That feeling should have been in their systems for the entire night.
