Moby at the Arena: one of the best concerts I've ever seen

There are concerts you watch, nod along to, and forget by the next one. And there are the far rarer ones where everything lines up. This was the second kind - one of the best concerts I have ever seen.

The day was a perfect summer one, and it wasn’t hot, which in Pula at the end of July is not the usual thing. With me was Max, who has loved Moby for roughly as long as I have, so nothing had to be explained to anyone, before or after. And just enough cold ones in us to be fully in it.

The sound was excellent. In the Arena that is not only a compliment to the sound crew - there is no more beautiful concert space in Croatia, and once you get the sound right inside two-thousand-year-old stone, you really have no excuse left for anything being off.

Tightened up, not rearranged

And then the man we came for. Songs we’ve known by heart for twenty-odd years, Moby has reworked so that they sound far, far better than on the records. That is the crucial difference: not rearranged to be different, but tightened up to be better. You hear it immediately, from the first second. That’s why we go to concerts at all - to get the full measure of performers like this.

Max and I kept catching each other’s eye that night, and it was always the same, without words or with just one: I can’t believe how good this is.

It looked phenomenal too. Live footage of the band was mixed with effects in real time, so you were watching the stage and what was being done with it at the same time. This wasn’t a backdrop running on its own while the band played - it was tied to what was happening right then, and it looked superb.

The women’s vocals have never sounded lovelier. They were billed as backing, but they carried the evening. Their presence on stage was angelic - especially from those wonderful musicians.

What gets you

There were songs where you couldn’t hold back the tears. Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad? is one of them - and anyone who says otherwise is lying.

His fight for animal rights, and what today’s mass food production does to them, kept running through short films mixed into the performance. This was not the part you wait out - it was honest and hard, and you could hear the Arena listening.

And then Bowie.

To me Bowie is one of the greatest musicians who ever lived, and the very thought of Moby having him as a neighbour feels unreal. But he did: in 2000 Bowie moved in across the street from him in New York, they waved from their balconies and ran into each other at the deli, and they played Heroes together on acoustic guitars in Moby’s living room.^[1]

Imagine your neighbours being Bowie and Moby.

His performance of Heroes that night was something else, and deeply moving. I don’t know how you pull that off in front of a few thousand people in a Roman amphitheatre and still have it sound like it’s coming out of that living room - but that is how it sounded.

The first time I saw him I didn’t even notice him

I had seen Moby before: 2 September 1994, at Križanke in Ljubljana.^[2] He was the support act, and we had come for the headliner that night - Inspiral Carpets. Miranda Sex Garden played too.

My brother and I were devoted to the Carpets back then, and they were superb.

I didn’t know Moby at the time. Electronic music wasn’t high on my list, and I took him in lukewarmly, roughly as something that plays while you wait for the real concert.

Thirty-two years later, that same man gave me one of the best nights I can remember. I don’t know whether he changed that much or I did. Both.

I filmed two songs in full. I think they say more about how perfect that performance was than anything I could write.

The one complaint

The organisation. Too few bars for a packed Arena - the wait for a drink was far too long. Same for the toilets, where the queue ran about twenty minutes.

Afterwards

Carrying on at the nearby Rock Caffe was just as good - going back over the whole gig with dear friends we ran into after the show. The cold ones kept coming, one after another, no mercy…

Now that’s what you call a perfect night of music.

---

^[1] Moby has spoken about his friendship with Bowie many times - RTÉ, 2016 · Forbes, 2021

^[2] The poster gives the day but not the year. It works out as 1994 because all three acts on it were on Mute Records that year, and the Carpets moved there exactly then. No database lists the gig - if anyone has a ticket or a newspaper clipping, get in touch.