October 6, 1999

London King's Cross Scala

Tonight's headliner [a]Moby[/a] might well be the original mentalist. He's arguably to blame for bringing the cultural pollution of trance to the masses, with his first hit [B]'Go'[/B]...

Skulls seem to be the new smiley faces. Death In Vegas appear on the NME cover with one, and now even tree-hugging Moby has plastered the bar of his gig with posters of them. Maybe the dance baldies are so serotonin-exhausted from the years on the pill that they've all woken up feeling a bit sad and alienated and acquired the iconography of the sixth-form goth.

In the case of Luke Slater's brand of darkcore, it doesn't stop with his chrome dome either, because he sounds like Killing Joke in a tumble dryer. With a clammy shudder of beats and plenty of asthmatic vocoder mumblings, Slater is bringing evil to the dancefloor. All that's missing is the voice of Richard Burton warning us that the Martians are coming.

Tonight's headliner Moby might well be the original mentalist. He's arguably to blame for bringing the cultural pollution of trance to the masses, with his first hit 'Go' paving the way for Robert Miles and ATB. Tonight, though, he's trying to make up for it with a proper electric show. Like a whirling dervish he visits David Essex, The Cranberries and Bon Jovi. It's pure madness that'd be amazing at a wedding reception. At one point, he pauses to comment, "I feel like I'm in Spinal Tap!" Yeah, and we feel like we're in Drop The Dead Donkey.

Moby seems to be a manifestation of dance music's self-disgust with its facelessness. These days, everybody wants to be in AC/DC. Not such a bad thing, but just grow some hair, alright?