Moby's Favourite Albums

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"One of the first jobs I ever had was working as a caddy on a golf course, and I worked just long enough so I could buy Lodger by David Bowie. The second job I had was cutting lawns, and I remember it was one of those hot summer days, I was sweating and getting attacked by wasps, and I was just thinking 'This is all worthwhile, because when I'm done here I'm going to ride my bike and go and buy the cut out vinyl of Suicide'. Cut outs were like the discount version. To be honest with you, I don't really even remember why I was fixated on buying the first Suicide album. Part of it was the cover, and the guy who ran my local record store, his name was Johnny, he was this alcohol and drug-addicted crazy person, and you'd walk in and he'd be playing all these random records, from Nick Drake to the Grateful Dead to The Clash to Miles Davis, and one day he was playing Suicide. It sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. I think I was about 14.

It wasn't until many years later that I met anyone who liked Suicide. I don't know if you experienced this as well, but when I was growing up albums were these almost, not to sound too grad studenty, totemic things that you would take into your house. Nowadays if I hear a song and it doesn't immediately resonate with me I probably won't spend any time on it. Some of the early records that I bought, like Public Image's Second Edition or Suicide, I'd made the effort to bring these into my house. I only had nine or 10 albums in my possession, so if I didn't understand a record back then I would think it was my fault. I'd think that the people making the record were smarter and more sophisticated than I was, and the fact that I didn't understand it was indicative of my own shortcomings."

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"I was an obsessive Echo & The Bunnymen fan, Crocodiles and Heaven Up Here especially, so when Themes For Grind came out... this might be a little creepy, but I was in a record store at the time, I was flat broke, and my girlfriend came from a really wealthy family, so I sort of talked her into buying it, knowing she pretty well wouldn't like it. I think she was a freshman at college at the time, and I remember being in her dorm room and listening to it over and over.

I still maintain it's one of the most beautiful records. I don't know anyone else who has ever heard this record. I bumped into Will Sergeant at an art opening and introduced myself and told him how much I love Themes For Grind and he looked at me kind of confused, and said 'how have you even heard this, no-one has heard this record!' I have the vinyl of it somewhere but I couldn't find it online to buy so he very kindly sent me a Dropbox version of the album. My girlfriend eventually got into it. Even though it's very experimental, it's really beautiful. All the sounds on it are very odd and idosyncratic, but it's also got a really wonderful sense of atmosphere and melody.

Boy, if I could be an evangelist for one record that people hadn't heard it'd be this one... but I don't even know how you'd get to hear it. Unless you email Will Sergeant. "

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"This was also quite a challenging record for me. I bought the 7" of 'Ceremony' when it came out, and I thought that's what Movement was going to sound like. A very pretty, emotional, bucolic record, and of course it has moments like that, but in a strange way it's almost darker than Closer. When I was 14 or 15-years-old I was full ensconced on the cult of Ian Curtis, so when I got Movement I listened to it and tried to decode it... how many songs were influenced by Ian Curtis, how many songs were written by Ian Curtis, were they trying to communicate with Ian from beyond the grave. It's certainly the darkest of all the New Order records, and after this they became much more melodic and happy.

The first track on the record is quite uplifting, then everything else is quite dark. One of the things I've always loved about Bernard Sumner's voice is there's a naive, vulnerable quality to it. I was at an airport the other day and 'A Perfect Kiss' came on, I hadn't listened to it in about 25 years, and it's such a perfect song. His vocals are sing-songy, like a nursery rhyme, but they're so effective.

Each of these records that we've talked about, one thing they have in common is that they're all primarily electronic. At the time I was completely surrounded by very traditional rock music, and it felt interesting and subversive to be listening to these records primarily made with electronic instruments. I think that affected me a lot. I was a guitar player at the time, and I was so bored and frustrated with playing the guitar because it didn't do that much. I couldn't figure out how to make a guitar not sound like a guitar, and then you hear all these electronic records with all these textures and atmospheres and sounds that I'd never heard before, and I found that quite exciting."

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"I had an English teacher in high school. You know how every high school has a super hip teacher? Mine was this guy named Leonard Krill. I had been a big fan of David Bowie, and I think Talking Heads had just put out Remain In Light, and of course I knew Brian Eno because he he worked with Bowie and produced Talking Heads and Roxy Music. My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts came out and I couldn't afford to buy it, but Leonard Krill loaned it to me so I could tape it.

It was again one of those records that I didn't fully understand, because all the vocals come from these weird, disparate sources. I kind of thought because I was listening to a David Byrne and Brian Eno record I would hear David Byrne and Brian Eno's vocals, that it'd sound like one of the records they'd made. On the first listen I didn't quite get it, but after that it became one of my favourite records.

In 1999 when I put out the album Play, I was doing some interviews and people were asking where did I get the idea of putting other people's old vocals onto rhythmic music, and I said 'it all started with My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Without that album I would never ever have had the idea to sample old vocals and put them on my tracks'. It was a direct inspiration - in a really simple way I was copying my heroes. I can't think of any person who has affected modern music more than Brian Eno. If you invented a fictional character like Brian Eno it'd be almost unbelievable."

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"When I was 15 and living in Conneticut, me and my friends started creeping into New York and going to nightclubs in '80, '81. You'd go into New York specifically with the intention of seeing punk rock bands, but a lot of the clubs at the time like Danceteria, Fall Out Shelter, they'd have a punk rock band playing but the DJ before would be playing dub reggae, and the DJ after would be playing early hip hop and electronic music. There was a radio station in New York called WNYU, and they had this three hour long show every afternoon called The New Afternoon Show where they just played new music. I remember them playing 'Der Mussolini' or 'Alles Ist Gut' and having that same reaction as I did to many of my favourite records at the time, which was 'I've never heard anything that sounds like this'.

Another reason I loved D.A.F. was because at the time I was living in this very depressing, boring American suburb and I would listen to D.A.F. and imagine how cool it would be to be in Berlin, making weird electronic music with these German guys who only wore black and made songs that, I didn't know what the lyrics were saying, but they sounded cool. I just re-bought Alles Ist Gut, I have the vinyl and CD and just bought the iTunes version of it, and it still sounds amazing. "

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"So I'm mentioning New York nightlife. I'd been born in New York, but I'd been brought up in the suburbs, and I loved New York, I was obsessed with everything pertaining to the New York art scene, the New York music scene, and I would hide in the bathroom in the train that went in and out of New York from my town, so I wouldn't have to buy a ticket. I would go into New York and walk around and look at record stores, clothing stores and nightclubs, so I was exposed to a lot of music that I wouldn't otherwise have been exposed to, like early hip hop.

Hip hop, up until Eric B & Rakim, had been very drum machine based, drum machines with synth basslines. Then they rolled up with this song called 'Eric B Is President' which was sample-based. The first time I remember thinking, 'wow this sounds so different from all those other hip hop songs'. Rakim I think is still the most powerful MC of all time. Paid In Full I think is still really the first cohesive hip hop album. It helps that it has four or five huge New York hit singles on it. Paid In Full came out, and Public Enemy's Nation Of Millions came out, and suddenly people realised that hip hop could be a genre that worked on albums and not just tracks.

At the time, it was impossible to go out in New York and not hear this record. Every car that drove by, ever nightclub, restaurant, shop, something off Paid In Full was playing at every second of every hour of every day. That and Public Enemy, you just couldn't get away from these records, and it helped that they were amazing records, not ubiquitous and terrible."

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"I did an Apple iTunes show at the Roundhouse, and they asked me 'if you could have anybody in the world playing with you, who would it be?' And I said 'oh, Silver Apples'. I'd seen him play the Knitting Factory in New York, and I thought that if I asked him to play with me his response would be a resounding 'no', but he was really enthusiastic and happy to do it, he's just this cool guy with a nice hippy girlfriend. Everything about them, the fact that he invented his own equipment, and he did kind of single-handedly invent electronic dance music. You listen to 'Oscillations' and maybe someone would challenge me on this, but I think that's the moment when... before that, electronic dance music didn't exist. It's got the four on the floor kick, all the different synth textures, even the subject matter, singing about technology. That's techno in 1968.

Silver Apples came out of that Lower Manhattan performance art scene, starting as them playing music for artists on LSD dancing in lofts. There's one song that they've done that I've always wanted to cover, the song 'I Have Known Love', and every couple of years I go back to it and try and cover it, but every version I've tried to do of it is terrible. At some point in my life I want to try and find someone to do it with because it's a really beautiful song... Maybe I should just accept the fact that the original is perfect and it doesn't need to be covered. "

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"I mentioned Johnny's record store, and as well as Suicide, which is ironic considering he killed himself, he got me to listen to Nick Drake. This is such a perfect record, the songs are perfect, the singing's perfect, the instrumentation (even though Phil Collins plays on the songs) is perfect. It was one of those records that didn't need any explaining. I walked in, it was playing, and I asked 'what's this?', I thought it maybe was a Cat Stevens b-side. He told me it was Nick Drake and that I should buy it and he gave me a discount on the record because he was such an evangelist for it, and thought it was one of the best records ever made and that people needed to learn about Nick Drake.

I took it home and fell in love with it. It's been a constant for me ever since. I can't imagine a month of my life that's gone by that I've not listened to it.

The funniest experience was the first real tour I did, in 1991, with the band The Shamen. It was the first electronic music rave tour of the States, and at the time I didn't drink, I didn't do drugs, I was a very naive little kid and I was on tour with the Shamen, who were all really partying quite hard. I think we liked and respected each other, but we didn't really have anything in common apart from a shared love of electronic music. One day I was in the back of the lounge listening to Nick Drake's Bryter Layter and the singer came back and you could see his face lit up, and you could see he was a huge Nick Drake fan. We bonded over that.

The next tour I did was with the Prodigy and Richie Hawtin, and the one after that was with Orbital and the Aphex Twin. During these tours there was a rave scene in the early 90s, but compared to the UK it was much smaller. It certainly existed. One of the reasons why the rave scene in the States is how it is, is because a lot of the people involved do way too many drugs. You get these DJs and performers who get really into the rave scene and then do more drugs in one night than most human beings should in a lifetime, so the burn-out rate is pretty high.

In 1996 I was dating this raver girl, and she had gone out and did three hits of ecstasy, three hits of ketamine, some acid and crystal meth and I just remember thinking 'how can your body handle that?' But I guess if you're 19 years old it can handle it for a little while. Definitely that type of drug use led to a lot of people burning out."

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"I remember hearing 'Requiem' on college radio, and it really combined all of my favourite things - it had synths on it, really heavy distorted guitars, tribal drums, this crazy jazz drummer and punk rock vocals. The first album is great, but What's This For is one of those rare albums where the second is actually better. I remember when it came out I went to the record store the week of release, though I couldn't afford to buy it, and looking at the cover and how beautiful it was. It was this collage, with these psychedelic, apocalyptic colours, and the title is one of those great titles where it meant nothing but it was captivating. What are they asking, I don't understand. Standing in the record store, holding this piece of vinyl, hoping that one day I'd be able to buy it... when I finally got it home, the sound quality was even better than the first album, and it just had this sinewy darkness to it that was really amazing. Everything about them from the basslines to the drumming to the way they approach guitar and lyrics... it was the first time I'd ever heard really heavy distorted guitar that the way they were mixed they didn't dominate the music, the fit perfectly within the framework of the song. "

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"It was a real wake-up call. Hip hop until 1984, 85 was fun but for the most part it was party music. Living outside New York we'd listen to WBLS and Kiss FM where they played a lot of hip hop and me and my friends liked it, but it was very lighthearted. The Fatboys are the perfect example, or the Treacherous Three, where they have disco basslines and this fun vocal. Then almost out of nowhere Public Enemy happened. Everything about it was different. The lyrics were different, Chuck D's vocal approach was different, the subject matter and the production, the Bomb Squad. I remember hearing it for the first time and thinking how did they do this, because they've basically made punk rock hip hop, the sounds they were using, the way they were distorting basslines, it was a lot of the same ways industrial records were being made but they were making hip hop. It was so revolutionary. You can refer to musical culture in New York as before and after Public Enemy, it changed the city. New York was so dangerous then, it had the highest murder count, people were getting stabbed and shot and the crack epidemic was decimating communities and people were dying of AIDS. You'd go out to nightclubs in the late 80s and you'd hear these apocalyptic Public Enemy songs that perfectly described the city that you lived in, but they were oddly celebratory and you could dance to them. For better or worse one of the reasons I've left New York is because the city I grew up with is still there, but it's become a much meaner, safer version of its former self. I still love New York, but it's become primarily the domain of hedge fund managers and wealthy tourists, so I don't know how many more Suicides and Silver Apples and Public Enemys and Eric B & Rakims are going to come out New York City."

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"There are certain bands that are hard to talk about, OMD, Simple Minds, where their earlier records were just phenomenal, and later on they made records that were too commercial and not quite as strong as their earlier ones. The first OMD album, Dazzle Ships and Architecture & Morality were flawless. They were beautiful, experimental, inspiring records, then a few years on they were making music for John Hughes movies, and they were good at it and I'm glad that they had success with it, but it wasn't nearly as creatively inspiring as the first three records. Architecture & Morality, I mean it's not hard to overdo the hyperbole, but it's a perfect album, so cohesive, and every song perfectly speaks to the other song, the unapologetic emotional quality of it is really inspiring. Even the artwork by Peter Saville, everything about it is perfectly crafted. One of my very odd musical moments was years ago when I was at South By South West in Austin and OMD were doing a reunion show at a BBQ at three in the afternoon, and they asked me to play bass with them. I found myself playing bass with OMD on 'Enola Gay' at a BBQ at three in the afternoon in Texas. It was one of those moments where you told me that actually I'd just done way too much mescaline and I was currently lying on a bed somewhere and making up the whole thing, I'd believe you. It's a shame that a lot of people came to know of OMD through the last couple of records that were more commercial. It's like Simple Minds, the first five albums are amazing, and then they became a stadium rock band. Now you mention Simple Minds and people think about 'Alive And Kicking' and 'Don't You Forget About Me' which aren't terrible songs, but the earlier stuff was experimental and textural and weird. Maybe someone sees OMD on this list and immediately thinks of a John Hughes movie, maybe they'll be inspired to back and listen to Architecture & Morality. "

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"This is his Los Angeles album, and what's funny about that is it's one of his most European records. On the 'Station To Station' song he even sings "the European cannon is here", and it's ironic that he recorded it in the Hollywood hills while doing tons and tons of cocaine. It's odd when you talk about these really iconic artists, whether it's Led Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones, there's always that debate about which is their best album, and usually there's some degree of consensus. With David Bowie most of my music cognoscenti friends will go with Low, but for me Station To Station is the weirdest, most subtly strong David Bowie album. It doesn't have the ambient beauty of Heroes or Low, but it's almost as if he was trying to make a conventional record, but it ends up sounding even stranger because it's trying to be conventional. And that's why I picked it. In a way it reminded me of some of the Roxy Music albums being made around this time, like Manifesto in that was these very strange artists trying to be a little more normal and ending up making something even more disconcertingly odd. How he could make this amazing record when he was constantly out of his mind on cocaine, and also the courage of having the first song on the record nine and a half minutes long, but the music on 'Station To Station' doesn't even get going for the first few minutes. When I was growing up Bowie really had this otherworldly mystique. There was so many different David Bowies, there was glam Bowie, European Bowie, then later on there was dance album Bowie. There was an assumption that whatever he was doing was phenomenal because he was David Bowie. To be a celebrity name-dropper one thing that amazed me was that I lived across the street from David Bowie for a while in New York and we had BBQs together, we went on tour together, and one of my most treasured memories, if I'm on my death bed this might be the thing that I think of. One morning David Bowie came over to my apartment and we were sitting on my couch at 10 in the morning drinking tea, and I played 'Heroes' on acoustic guitar and he sung along. Even if I end up getting married, having children and a family life, my favourite memory will be playing 'Heroes' on acoustic guitar with David Bowie."

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"I somehow remember hearing the first Human League album that has 'Being Boiled' on it, and just being amazed at how strange it was. Then when they started Heaven 17 it was the most odd, phenomenal pop music. At times it seemed as if they were choosing to be really poppy and commercial, and they were really good at it, and other times of their own free will and volition, they were trying to be like mutant pop stars. Then the BEF, and I feel old dating myself like this, it first came out as a cassette and it was very rare for an artist to release an album on cassette. There was one song on there, I think it's called 'The Decline Of The West' and it still stands as one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard. That particular instrumental somehow wormed itself into my DNA. There are certain songs like that, 'Heroes' by David Bowie, 'Atmosphere' by Joy Division, I remember as a young 15-year-old musician thinking to myself 'all I want to do is aspire to make music that's 50% as good as this'. It seemed utterly absurd to try and make music as good as this, because that would be impossible, but I thought it might be a realistic challenge to make music half as good. Thank you for asking me to do this. Now I'm going to go and listen to all these records."