Clever Dick

As intelligent as Michael Stipe, as influential as Aphex Twin, as prolific as Mark E. Smith and as mad as a train - it's always a pleasure to trip through the wires of Richard Melville Hall, better known to consumers of popular culture as Moby.

Just flicking through random access memory, you'll find he's named as he is because his great-grandfather (or someone) was the author of the famous Captain Ahab whaling story, Moby Dick; he's in the Guinness Book Of Records for recording the fastest ever single - a song called Thousand which comes in at 1,000 bpm; he's a Christian, a vegan, and a militant environmentalist; he's on the new Clash tribute album doing Straight To Hell, and he used to be the singer in a hardcore outfit called Flipper. Incidentally, that's the same Flipper Kurt Cobain liked so much he used to wear their Tshirts on stage.

His first foray into music came aged 10 as a classical guitarist but he was soon swallowed up by punk, stopping off to front a speed-metal outfit called The Vatican Commandoes, before joining the fondly-remembered 4AD band, Ultra Vivid Scene. His Zelig-type existence continued when he sold his soul to house music in the 1980s, as he became an idiosyncratic fixture on the nascent New York rave scene. Charts-wise, he picked up his first Top10 hit with an eerily beautiful re-working of the theme song from David Lynch's Twin Peaks, but it was the resultant album, Everything Is Wrong (1995) that brought him to widespread attention. A philosophy graduate, he used to pepper his album-liner notes with a call to arms for a vegan lifestyle and strict adherence to environmental causes - all done in a very Julian Cope way, it has to be said.

With the dance world at his feet, mainly because he eschewed the usual anonymity of dance acts and was visible, he was labelled a traitor when he picked up his electric guitar again and went on the Lollapallooza tour in 1996 as a bornagain hardcore punk/speed-metal axe monster. Just as he was doing techno and jungle while everyone else was still listening to Pearl Jam, Moby later did industrial punk/goth before Nine Inch Nails and the pitiful Marilyn Manson ever realised it could be a good career move. Before Fatboy Slim had been invented, he was the re-mixer du jour, and everyone - from Michael Jackson, to Brian Eno, to Orbital, to the Pet Shop Boys - sent him DAT tapes to overhaul.

When last seen around these parts, he had just been asked to re-write the theme song from the James Bond film. Now he's back in a new guise of folk music archivist with a fresh-found love of hip-hop. On his new album Play, he has collated field recordings of black American music from the early part of this century, which is kind of typical in that, at a time when almost everyone else is ransacking the 1960s and 1970s for musical inspiration, Moby is back in the 1910s. "The field recordings were made by a folk historian called Alan Lomax," he says, "and he had amassed a huge catalogue of indigenous folk recordings. When I first heard them, I was so moved by them. Those wonderful vocals became the starting points for my music." This swamp, hip-hop part of the new album only makes up the first third, though; in act two he more or less starts a new album with a collection of break beats banging away behind his vocals, and in act three everything changes again as we find ourselves in quiet and meditative instrumental land.

In true Mike Oldfield fashion, he plays all the instruments himself and turned down re-mix offers from Hole and Metallica to finish the album. Part Ladysmith Black Mambazo, part Busta Rhymes, part Orb, this is a veritable head-spin of an album that nevertheless remains commercially on-side.

While much is made of his oddity value, it's more instructive to consider Moby as a plain old originator and innovator. For someone who's been all around the bases, you can always rely on him to come up with a new spin on material that ranges from hands-in-the-air techno to Stooges-style garage rock. While this may not be the greatest album of recent times, it sure is one of the most quizzical.

Moby's Play is on the Mute label