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Nick Morgan and crew
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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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CONCERT
REVIEW by Nick Morgan
MOBY
Royal Festival Hall, London, June
16th 2009 |
| One
of the many upsides of having to spend quite a lot
of time in a car driving around Scotland is that
you hear some fantastic programmes on the radio.
A little while ago, I was captivated by a documentary
called Beat
Mining and the Vinyl Hoover, put together by
photographer and broadcaster Toby
Amies and which opened the lid on the world
of crate diggers. This potentially highly lucrative
pastime involves tracking down samples that might,
just might, be worth a fortune to producers and
artists. Part of the fascination of the show was
the extent of the hidden sub-culture that it revealed
(some of the crate diggers’ blogs were aghast
at just how much of their secret world was brought
to light). But it was also enlightening to understand
just how important sampling has become to contemporary
genres of music: it’s travelled a long way
since David Byrne and Eno experimented with the
technique on My
Life in the Bush of Ghosts in 1981. When we
saw Byrne earlier in the year, he joked that it
had been made in an age of innocence compared with
today, explaining that for legal reasons, he would
have to sing the sampled vocal himself on ‘Help
me somebody’. Amies’ programme began
to suggest just what a murky world it had become.
And it’s not surprising. Moby
sold nine million copies of 1999’s Play, a
record built around samples
from Alan Lomax’s field work in the southern
states of the USA in the 1920s. |
 |
| I’m
sure Moby paid his dues (he’s notable for
giving much of his dosh away to charity), and sure
enough artists like Bessie Jones, a sample from
whom provides the background to ‘Honey’,
get an acknowledgement as a licensed artist, along
with Boy Blue’s recording of Joe Lee’s
Rock (‘Find my baby’) , and Bill Landford
(and the Landfordaires) for ‘Run on’.
But while there is a general thanks to the Lomaxes,
there’s not a mention of poor old Vera Hall,
whose sampled lyric from ‘Trouble so hard’
provided the backbone to ‘Natural blues’,
one of the big hits for the album. In addition,
I’m not sure that the Lomax family or Vera
Hall, or the other original performers, received
much by way of royalties when the songs were re-used
in numerous TV adverts for brands such as Calvin
Klein and American Express. Moby woudn’t have
got far without them. ‘Natural blues’
is one of the centrepieces in this second of 2009’s
Meltdown concerts at the Southbank Centre, curated
by Ornette Coleman. ‘Honey’ was the
lengthy coda to the set. Other songs from Play,
‘Why does my heart feel so bad’ and
‘Porcelain’ were two of the more impressive
pieces of the evening. The latter of these earned
a similarly frenetic audience response, particularly
from the over-excited guys in front of us; then
came Moby’s first breakthrough hit, the David
Lynch-inspired ‘Go’, appearing to transform
the RFH into a disco under the arches on Brighton
sea-front (I swear all that was missing was Dave
Broom). Strange, you might think, for this first
night of an extensive European tour ostensibly aimed
at promoting Moby’s new album, Wait for Me.
|
| He
did present five songs from the new work, including
opener ‘Walk with me’, a blues sung
by the imposing Joy
Malcolm, who also sang the sampled parts from
Play herself - no samples in use tonight. Malcolm
was joined on vocals by the more delicate Kelli
Scarr, who sang (among others) new tracks ‘Pale
Horses’ and ‘JLFT’. The latter
was introduced by Mr M with the strange boast that
it was inspired "by the vast majority of my
friends in New York, who have all been heroin addicts".
For much of this time, Moby chose to concentrate
on guitar, where he showed a surprising mastery
of power chords, which when combined with the amplified
string trio, occasionally produced a wall of sound
that even Phil Spector must have heard from his
prison cell in Corcoran, California. |
|
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| He
occasionally took the coveted RFH Steinway (“how
could I have a piano the size of a small car in
my small New York apartment?”) and even sang;
brave, given the relative weakness and tunelessness
of his voice. Only once did he really hit the synthesiser
for ‘Go’, and even then, no sooner cranked
up than he chose to move over to play the congas
with abandon instead. So it was an odd and eclectic
set of the rather laid-bare and perhaps self-indulgent
new material rubbing shoulders with highlights of
the old, with little doubt as to where the audience’s
heart lay. We even had a couple of covers: Joy Division’s
‘New dawn fades’, and ‘Helpless’
which was wrongly attributed to CSN&Y, rather
than simply Y. Despite all this, the audience would
probably have been happier, not to mention more
exhausted, if he’d played ‘Go’
all night. |
| Oh
yes. For the record, Mr Coleman, who had personally
called Moby and invited him to perform in the series
of concerts, didn’t manage to show up on stage,
as some of us (including Moby apparently) had rather
hoped he might. – Nick Morgan (photographs
by Kate) |
Check
the index of all reviews:
Nick's
Concert Reviews
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