He declared his intention to go away for a while after pointed criticism of his second memoir. But now the musician is back with a new album - and a visceral documentary

Moby is considering the question he is often asked in interviews: “Do I think I’ve been treated unfairly?” muses the 55-year-old musician, who, let’s face it, is hardly a stranger to terrible press. “Honestly, I don’t think I have been. I’m sure there are times when I’ve been portrayed badly and it was accurate. And even with some of the bad stuff I’ve been through, I don’t have any right to complain. When you look at the 8 billion people on the planet, a reasonably affluent caucasian cis-gendered male public figure musician is not necessarily the first person you think of as having valid criticisms about how they’re being treated.”

Moby is upbeat today – “I can’t think of many things to complain about besides baldness and mortality” – which is perhaps surprising given that the last time he was in the public eye, it involved rather a lot of the aforementioned terrible press. To summarise: in among the shocking confessions, rampant addiction and grotty sex of his second memoir, 2019’s Then It Fell Apart, was the claim that the “beautiful actress” Natalie Portman had asked him out when she was 20, at which point he would have been in his mid-30s.