This second book of Moby's memoirs provides insight to his early life and the effect it had on his later life. However, it is not an easy read at times (the much publicised episodes with Natalie Portman may put some readers off).

If you read his earlier book 'Porcelain' this is worth a read, otherwise read 'Porcelain' if you haven't already and maybe leave this one be...

I ended up giving up on this. It did start well – I was interested in Moby's childhood struggles, his neglectful parents and the way he was left to his own devices much of the time; it's interesting to see how this sort of childhood boredom can lead to a creative adult. I often wonder if I'd be a writer now if I wasn't bored often as a child (though my parents weren't at all neglectful and they did feed me three times a day!). I was interested in the stuff about fame too, and how he thought the fans and money would make him happy, but they didn't. He does try to be self-deprecating, but it didn't really ring true; his self-burns feel a bit lacklustre, like he's only saying it so that people reply with 'no, don't say that, you're brilliant'.

But I had to give up at all the stuff about Natalie Portman. It just made my skin crawl, particularly in light of the recent things online where she seems to think they were just friends hanging out and he shared a photo of them together where he's half-naked and she looks very unhappy about it – you're not proving your point there, dude.

I recently saw a famous author on twitter completely incredulous at the idea of a Moby biography being interesting. He joked that veganism and yoga hardly made for key ingredients in a rock n roll tell all but it turns out Moby has a very dark side after all. Alternating between his childhood and the explosion of fame that accompanied the success of multi million selling album Play, Moby finds that getting everything you wished for isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. Growing up dirt poor he tells the story of his friend finding five dollars, sharing a dollar of his good fortune with Moby and Moby spending that dollar on a record. It’s a rare treat for someone with barely a penny to spend and he tells how he obsessively listens to this single over and over again. Fast forward twenty years and Moby owns as many records as he could wish for and a luxury apartment in New York, yet he still doesn’t feel happy and suffers from crippling panic attacks which he tries to cover up by drinking excessively.

It’s a fame and fortune tale as old as the hills. All the epic nights out at exotic Russian strip clubs and parties with David Bowie, Joe Strummer and Bono etc can’t fill the gaping hole in Moby. He substitutes any meaningful relationship with women with sleeping with as many women as he possibly can. He tells one girlfriend that he can’t possibly be monogamous while on tour, despite her staying faithful to him but it’s all ok because he buys her a tea shop. There’s a story about a particular party trick that Moby and his friends play. I’ll leave you to read about in the book as it’s rather too explicit to describe here but I did notice that he choose to tell the tale of when he did it to Donald Trump rather than the famous actress I remember him mentioning in a interview a few years back. It did make me wonder, however, what other little bits of behaviour he’s conveniently airbrushed over or made more palatable.

All in all it’s an entertaining book. There’s plenty of anecdotes and tour tales. I particularly enjoyed a passage where Moby describes trying to nail down that elusive hit as he seeks to follow up Play. There’s some interesting bits where he talks about tweaking a tune to make it work and I feel like somehow there’s a book in there too. It’s a fairly standard tale of rock and roll excess and certainly worth reading if you have an interest in music.

I received a ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for a fair review.

I had read and thoroughly enjoyed the first volume of Moby's autobiography, Porcelain, and was very much looking forward to reading this sequel. He writes engagingly and I particularly like the way that the book hops back and forth in time, linking events from his adulthood to what happened to him as a child. The main feeling I got from the book, if I'm honest, was sadness. How sad that this man, who had everything he had ever dreamed of was so ill and unhappy for so much of the time and felt so unworthy of what he had earned. I rather hope that he writes another book in the hope that he has found some peace of mind since facing his demons.

Of course, the book reviewing gods never meant for me to read Porcelain before this book. But it really plugs me back into the times when Moby was a household name. Collecting every CD single off "Play" was the must-do thing for me, even though it had been several years earlier that I saw him gig live in the UK – well, I say 'saw', the stage was so badly designed there was a lip the audience side of the crash barrier that was crowded with people perching on it from doors opening, so Mobes had to stand on his own keyboard for anybody else to see him. T-shirt bought, copious records bought – and then came the almost inevitable downfall, peppered as it still is with sheer loveliness like "Slipping Away", but still a downward slide.

This book is a weave of his childhood biography, and the hedonistic name-dropping years post-"Play". He gets to make an error or two – the album was never at number 3 in the UK before it was at number 1, as he alleges, but with the amount of drugs he was popping and snorting it's a surprise he has any memory at all, which makes one take some sections with a pinch of salt, however honest it seems when reading. You see eloquent portrayals of his fatherless childhood, however – a junkie mother parading from one biker to another, and what Richard frequently calls poverty. All of which means the reader is invited to take pause from the breathless Play success to see what came first, and what is cause to what effect. Does his waster drop-out mother make him a junkie later on; does his thanking God copiously as he used to do on his sleeve notes equate with the small mercies such as him snogging THE Holly from "Walk on the Wild Side" while Christina Ricci is waiting by his side ready to get her leg over? What ultimately makes him the musician he is – larking about with a kazoo, or listening to the chart countdown as sop to his mother's drugged-up waster bitch life?

For every twenty dropped names and groupies there is a strong insight into Moby's creative industry, and much more reportage (of the muck-raking kind, of course) of his own mindset. It's an awkward balance, but I think it's endearing enough, and the man is good enough (even if recent sales suggest otherwise) for us to be interested. He has a killer talent in opening lines of chapters (and of course there was his birthday on a certain 9/11), making this eminently readable, but the ultimate moral is one of hubris, egotism to make his Little Idiot alter ego at least half a perfect alibi, and make anybody question the sanity in his response to seeing his best mate ODing at a party as a 13 year old, which was to go on a three-decade bender.

Thanks to Net Galley, Moby and the Publisher for the pre-release ARC copy for review!

Then It Fell Apart is the second autobiography by musician Moby and it picks up after his first release “Porcelain.” I read “Porcelain” when it came out, being a huge music fan and a big fan of Moby. I don’t believe you need to read the first one to follow along, but I’d highly recommend you do, simply to enjoy where Moby came from, his musical start and just how hard he had to work to reach any sort of level of stardom.

Then It Fell Apart follows up as Moby is struggling with the failure of his 1996 release “Animal Rights.” The album itself was a blast of punk energy and guitars and for many people who knew Moby as an electronic DJ, the musical output was jarring for many.

So Moby returns to his roots and puts together the album “Play.” While most casual fans will know it for the multi-million selling album that had every song optioned in some form or another, it was actually a failure upon launch.

From here the book bounces back and forth between 1999 to roughly 2008 and Moby’s younger, formative years. It’s another fascinating look into an eclectic artist’s life and just what influenced him to arrive where he did.

The stories he shares fall along a sliding chart from sweet, sappy and joyful, to cringe-worthy and awful. One of the sweetest stories within was his sharing of the dinner he had with David Bowie, Iman, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. It was great reading how much Moby worshipped and idolized Bowie, but how he treated him like an equal and gifted him with a fantastic musical instrument. Moby doesn’t pull punches on his self-reflection and throughout he frequently states how he didn’t care as long as he had his fame, his money and people were talking about him, he was happy. He goes into great detail discussing just how selfish he was during this time, but how inside he kept telling himself he was happy because other celebrities knew who he was, he was getting and taking copious amounts of drugs and people were coming to watch his shows.

Then the album “18” was released in 2002 and the sales were good, but not great. Then “Hotel” came out in 2005 and the world had moved on. While he still had some hit singles, he was no longer the headliner and was struggling internally with what was happening.

It’s a fascinating insight into the “celebrity” mind of Moby, especially now when you follow him on any of his social media accounts and see just how active he is with social issues and how much charitable work he does.

Overall, I really did enjoy the book. My biggest criticism of it directly relates to the stories told. Many of them felt unresolved and unfinished. Two specific examples would be his time with Vinnie Paul and Dimebag Darrell from Pantera and his feud with Eminem. With the Pantera brothers he discusses how much he loved Pantera and meeting them was a dream. He hangs out with them and Tommy Lee for a fun night and then that’s it. The story ends and we move on. Maybe it’ll be discussed in a third release, but I felt cheated as a reader that he didn’t discuss Dimebag’s horrific death and if it affected him performing live at all. Vinnie Paul has since passed on later in 2018, so I don’t believe Moby would’ve been able to write about that based on the timeline, but reading that story now, I thought it would’ve sufficed to have a bit of a follow-up on their time together.

The same can be said with his feud with Eminem. I remember how big of a deal this was. I remember Eminem having a temper tantrum at the MTV Video Awards and punching Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Moby goes into a bit of detail regarding it and how he suddenly realized Eminem was dead serious about it and how some Hip-Hop and Rap musicians distanced themselves from Moby. Moby even mentions that Eminem drew a detailed picture of himself choking Moby. Then the story ends and we move on. I wanted to know what happened. Was it discussed behind the scenes? Did Moby and Eminem ever talk about it? Why didn’t Moby contact authorities about the picture? If anything it could’ve bumped some of his album sales back then. Moby does mention later on that old-school New York Hip-Hop musicians kept supporting him, but that’s it, a single paragraph a few chapters later. I just wished for more resolution for some of the stories, but that’s me personally, and the stories themselves were entertaining.

My last little criticism, and this is because I’m such a massive music and Moby fan – not enough stories/back ground on actually making the albums. I would’ve loved to hear some of the inspirations behind some of Moby’s biggest and most loved songs.

To wrap this up, criticisms aside, I think this was a really well done follow-up, but also a solid stand-alone autobiography. Made me appreciate just how hard the struggle can be for even the most established musicians. I think people will really enjoy this release, and from the way it ended, I’ll be looking forward to a third entry.

Review was originally posted on my blog;

https://stevestredauthor.wordpress.com/2019/03/12/book-review-then-it-fell-apart-moby/

A disclaimer: I am not a Moby fan. Of course, I have a copy of "Play", but that's only as a result of the controversial 1999 government ordnance that every suburban household be issued with a copy. Otherwise, he's simply a figure I best know from advert music, and the occasional appearance on chilled Spotify playlist.

Having said that, Moby's first autobiography, Porcelain, was an unexpected triumph - one of those brilliant music memoirs that touches on the world around it, specifically the dying decadence of New York in the nineties, a subject for which I'm a total sucker.

So I was pretty excited to see how he would follow it up, and Then It Fell Apart takes a different, two-pronged approach to examining the parts of the musician's life that Porcelain left out, alternating chapters about his childhood and his rise and fall from Play onwards. The childhood chapters make for a more interesting counterpoint to the early sections of Porcelain, covering a pretty tragic backstory of poverty, abuse and salvation through punk rock and Christianity, in unsparing prose. Anecdotes about being so intimidated by a well-to-do friend's house that he masks his terror by unscrupulous politeness ("the safest route to not being thrown out", as he describes it) offer a glimpse of his personality in a way which is at once endearing and sympathy-inducing.

Unfortunately, the more recent chapters seem better suited to a Bret Easton Ellis first draft, an unending tide of blackout drinking, near-constant drug use, and the shit, vomit and blood-soaked tales that come with it It all gets pretty numbing after a while, which may well be the desired effect. Moby doesn't paint himself as a figure you're supposed to feel sorry for, at least on a surface level - a man who "could still find moments of happiness, so long as [he] had the trappings of rock stardom".

Perhaps, like Luke Haines's two incredible autobiographies, he is simply writing "in character". It would certainly explain this extract, just one of many conversations where he is told in no uncertain terms that he needs to change his extreme ways:

Looking around she said, with horror in her voice, "You are chaos".
I put my hands on her shouldered and grinned. "That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me," I told her sincerely.
"It's not a compliment," she said, disgusted, and walked away.
But it was a compliment. I was proud to be chaos.
The world was terrible. I was worse.

When Moby's attention turns from reeling off his bad behaviour and focuses on how this impacted him on a personal level, then his writing becomes a little more nuanced. His description of a Williamsburg in 2008, for example, where "the children of affluence were using their parents' money to look like they'd grown up on welfare", is one of the few places where he offers the broader view that he managed to take within his first book.

Regardless, these moments are few and far between, making the book strangely disappointing by virtue of its honesty. Sure, Moby spent the halcyon days of his biggest success in a state of self-destruction, but Then It Fell Apart presents this chaos with so little circumspection (especially compared to the chapters on his youth), that it becomes a chore to read after a while.

Well, you certainly can't accuse Moby of trying to make himself look good in this book! :-) In a way, his second memoir tells an archetypical story: We hear about his rise to superstardom with "Play" which seems to finally fulfill his wish for boundless validation, but money, sex and drugs can't fill the void within the guy - and believe me, he's trying. With this realization dawning upon him, his life starts to unravel. What makes this book quite good is that although we've all heard this story before (and even though this particular reader cannot identify with the author's personality the least bit), Moby makes you wonder how you would react if you had to walk in his shoes - and frankly, I would not bet on myself to gracefully manage a situation like this.

The story is interspersed with flashbacks to the author's childhood that help the reader understand what drives our protagonist: Moby was a small child when his father committed suicide, and his young hippie mother was often unemployed, stoned and generally in over her head with her life as a single-mother and widow. As a lonely, neglected and abused child, Moby started looking for ways to be seen and loved - cut to platinum-selling records - cut to insane amounts of alcohol, drugs, and sex - cut to depression and suicidal tendencies. None of this is pretty, and Moby will give you details you won't forget, although you would certainly love to get some of those images out of your head. The text sometimes walks the thin line between honesty and flashy self-exposure feat. some serious bragging, which is of course also a way to seek validation, but then again, this is a purge of a memoir that stays true to its (anti-)hero.

I know it's contradictory, but what captivated me was how obvious it was where all of this was going, but Moby makes you understand how it can happen anyway - he is not a stupid guy, and still, he makes the same mistakes as ca. 66,347,494,658 music stars before him. I wasn't bored for one second while reading this account - and have I mentioned that I've never even been a fan of Moby?

People who are looking for a detailed account of what inspires this musician or how he recorded his albums and all the other music-related facts should stay away from this book, because it's about Moby, the man. He's maybe not the nicest man around, and he would be the first one to admit to that, but he's trying, and this book talks about just that.

Moby's first autobiography, "Porcelain", covered his life in New York City from 1989 to 1999. This book carries on from 1999, slightly onwards until 2008.

Most autobiographies by pop musicians capture glib, filtered-out moments in a musician's life, for example, Neil Strauss' book on Mötley Crüe, and others plod along while losing the plot to what a ghostwriter hoped would be glimmers that would carry a book over any obstacles, e.g. that very same book.

Moby circumvents this slightly. First, I believe that this book is better than the first one; this is not due to the fact that this book is far more sensationalistic than the formerly released one, but this one shows how alcoholism and other types of addiction lead to the same result, despite his hanging around celebrities and making millions of monies.

<blockquote>I was a lonely alcoholic, and I desperately wanted to love someone and be loved in return. But every time I tried to get close to another human being I had crippling panic attacks that kept me isolated and alone.</blockquote>

At times, I almost felt his paragraphs of rich-boy-weeping-over-fame-and-money style felt nearly jeering, but as they bulked up and went on and on—in a good way—one can easily see that yes, money does not buy you love. It buys you expensive drugs and drink, yes.

<blockquote>I’d had a few successful years of making music, and sold tens of millions of records, but now my career was sputtering. I couldn’t find love or success, so I tried to buy happiness. Three years earlier I had spent $6 million in cash on a luxury penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It had been my dream home: five stories on the top of an iconic limestone building overlooking Central Park. Having grown up on food stamps and welfare, I’d assumed that moving to a castle in the sky would bring me happiness. But as soon as I moved into my Upper West Side penthouse I was as sad and anxious as I’d been in my small loft on Mott Street.</blockquote>

One of the boons throughout this book, is Moby's ability to jump between timeslots throughout his life, for example between his starting his first punk band in 1984, intertwined with his inability to stay straight when attending a David Lynch retreat.

Also, Moby digs a bit deeper into his childhood in this book.

<blockquote>My father drove into a wall and killed himself. He and my mother had been living in a basement apartment in Harlem with Jamie, their dog, Charlotte, their cat, three rescued lab rats, and me. One night after a bad fight with my mom, my dad got drunk and drove into the base of a bridge on the New Jersey Turnpike at a hundred miles an hour.</blockquote>

There are tautly kept paragraphs that seemingly contain oodles of after-the-fact-attained wisdom, so easily packed in-between notes of sex and drink, that sleepy readers might miss them.

<blockquote>For all my life I’d wanted nothing more than to love and be loved. But whenever I found someone to love the panic intervened, screaming at me until I retreated to my solitary world. Some very deep part of my brain was protecting me vigilantly and wanted me to be alone. As soon as I did the panic’s bidding and ended whatever relationship I was in, the panic abated. This tautology of panic had been going on for years now. I held onto the increasingly naive hope that someday I’d meet a perfect, kind woman, and with her I’d finally break the cycle.</blockquote>

Some short lines stay in my memory due to the fact of how they stick out from the rest of the text, for example "I filled a glass with Coke and small slices of ice that came from the front of the refrigerator. I took a sip. The bubbles hit my nose and smelled like roses and fruit."

What does not, however, make this book truly spring into the annals of music literature, is that Moby is seemingly still an animal who is trapped by his own nerddom, needily namedropping at any moment's notice, such as with this vapid paragraph:

<blockquote>After the show I drank champagne and vodka in my dressing room with Ewan McGregor. After a few drinks I decided that he and I should go out and drink more, but that I should be naked. Sandy, my tour manager, urged me, “Moby, at least put on a towel.”

So I went out in downtown Melbourne wearing a towel. No shoes. No clothes. Just a towel. Ewan and I stumbled from bar to bar, getting drunker and drunker. At the end of the night we ended up in a subterranean bar filled with Australian celebrities. I’d had ten or fifteen drinks, so I went to the bathroom to pee, and found myself standing at a urinal next to Russell Crowe.

He zipped up his pants, and then pushed me against the wall of the bathroom and started screaming at me. “Uh, we’ve never met,” I tried to say. “Why are you yelling at me?” He never told me, but he kept me pinned against the wall while he shouted and screamed. After a minute he lost interest, cursed a few times, and stumbled out of the bathroom.

I went back to the bar and told Ewan, “Russell Crowe just yelled at me.” “Fuck, mate,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry about it. He yells at everyone.”</blockquote>

Despite those moments, it's obviously sublime to Moby, that he has managed to play "New Dawn Fades" live together with New Order.

The book continuously picks up momentum through paragraphs like the following one, making me think of Emperor Nero as Rome was burning to the ground:

<blockquote>While the last samples were slowly loading, I walked down the hall to the bathroom. My hallway was filling up with framed gold and platinum records. Before Play I’d never received a single one. And now Play had gone gold or platinum in twenty-five different countries, so more framed awards were arriving every week. I didn’t know what to do with them, so they were stacked on top of each other and leaning against the wall in my long hallway.</blockquote>

The book does suffer from the many namedrops, the oodles of times spent drinking, having sex, and doing drugs, plus all of the downfalls from that; I wish it had gone on as it begun, but still, I will gladly read a third autobiography from Moby. There is surely one in his head, and hopefully in the works.

"As I was leaving my hotel the receptionist asked, “Do you need validation?” She was asking if I wanted the hotel to stamp my valet-parking stub, but for a second I got excited, thinking she was offering to give meaning to my life."

I chose this quote for my review because I felt that it sums up Then It Fell Apart quite nicely. In fact, most of the book seems to be Moby, both at the highest highs and the lowest lows, ever seeking validation from friends, acquaintances and total strangers. An admitted narcissist, he lays himself bare with some truly rock and roll stories but at the same time, amidst the constant name dropping and cataloguing of material wealth I never got the sense that this book was anything but a personal catharsis. The stories about using up and abandoning women, demanding drugs and shambling from place to place are shared almost like collected badges of honour. At no point did I really feel any regret behind the words that were written. But then I thought, maybe I am focused on the wrong thing, and maybe there is no reason for regret. Maybe these experiences were necessary, as a journey- not a final destination nor the sum of one man's parts. As the book came abruptly to a close, with simple and familiar words that take a lifetime for some to say, I realised that it finished not at Moby's end, but at his beginning.