BFI, London 1 June 2011
'Are you generally morose?' asked Adam Buxton, hosting
tonight's Moby BUG retrospective at the BFI on
London's South Bank this balmy late Spring evening. Moby's response
was a nervous laugh and a suggestion that after the evening had
concluded he'd be rocking backwards and forwards in a closet in
his hotel room.
It's not hard to see why Buxton asked such a question,
having been subjected to nearly ninety minutes of unquestionably
ambitious and artistic, but savagely glum, videos from Moby's twenty-year
career as a singular electronic and sometimes-not-electronic musician.
Every video that was played - starting with 1991's 'Go' and ending
with 2000's 'Natural Blues' concerned itself with isolation, notions
of heaven, angels and generally miserable themes. The Saatchi /
BFI / Moby-curated Hello Future video competition allowing
wannabe directors to create a promo for tracks from Destroyed
turned in three similarly bleak videos, featuring two for 'Be The
One' (Martin Rodahl and Roland Wittl) and one for 'After' (Alberto
Gomez); the first video of the trio, 'Be The One' directed by Rodahl
was filmed as if from the voyeuristic perspective of Google Earth,
scrolling and honing in on tragedy, love, separation, murder, all
from a lofty height; Gomez's 'After', meanwhile was dangerous, dark
and cryptic, like a less choreographed version of New Order's 'True
Faith' starring South American models; Wittl's 'Be The One' was
too clever for words, a sketch pad filled with pencil animations
(including a variation on moby's own Little Idiot
creation) juxtaposed with images of a loved one, lots of miserable
slogans and finally the destruction of the sketch pad by, successively,
red wine, cigarette ash and tearing.
Buxton and Moby discussed 2002's Joseph Khan-directed
video for 'We Are Made Of Stars', a video which featured dozens
of celebrity cameos and was, according to Moby, ludicrously expensive
to make. He described it as being about people damaged by fame,
hence the natural LA setting and the featuring of troubled stars
like Verne Troyer and Gary Coleman from Diff'rent Strokes.
Musing on the video's theme, Moby explained that he believes the
apocalypse has already happened and that those of us left on earth
are the ones God has given up on, leaving us to make whatever mess
we want to make on the corporeal terrain. With the dark, fame-fractured
LA seen on film in the video for 'We Are All Made Of Stars', it's
kind of hard to disagree. How else can you explain Paris Hilton?
Religious salvation plagues a number of Moby's videos,
the recent Evan Bernard video for Destroyed's 'The Day'
being a case in point. The video concludes with Heather Graham's
valiant angel defeating a ill woman's demons, a theme which 2000's
David La Chapelle-directed 'Natural Blues' video also mined, concluding
as it does with Christina Ricci's angel walking off with the body
of a aged Moby through the corridors of an old people's home. Elsewhere,
the tragic video for 'In This World' (by Stylewar), featuring a
set of cute tiny aliens trying desperately to communicate with humans
in the bustling metropolis of Manhattan, is bitterly moving, dealing
with themes of isolation that the animated video for 'Why Does My
Heart Feel So Bad?' takes a stage further, leading us back to the
miserable vibe that pervades most of tonight's proceedings.
Thankfully, the geniusly comic Buxton deftly found
ways of lightening the mood, reading out appallingly-crafted YouTube
comments on some of Moby's videos that had the audience, and Moby,
in stitches. Similarly, when Moby came on stage he immediately flicked
open Buxton's laptop, defltly browsing the internet for pictures
of DH Lawrence and Herman Melville to highlight the likeness to
Buxton's own hirsuite self; this followed a hilarious video Buxton
had made to show how easy it was to tell Moby from other bald specs-wearing
celebs including Bruce Willis, Heston Blumenthal and Michael Stipe.
Buxton's chat with Moby was also, mostly, upbeat, and in spite of
the tragic quality of the video material projected behind him, Moby
was his usual chatty, congenial, self-deprecating self, and the
banter between the two of them was often so natural that you felt
like you were observing some sort of private lounge chat between
them. It gives you the impression of what it might be like to be
mates with Moby, something which I would absolutely love to be,
only, as he said once during their conversation 'I have no friends.'
But hey, at least we have music that's often depressing and upbeat
at the same time, and some terrifically inventive - but bloody grumpy
- videos.
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