Moby has used one of his recent live shows to explain how the UK helped shape rave culture.
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The electronic music icon made the comments during his landmark set at On The Beach Festival – closing out the 2026 edition of the live event with a huge headline set that marked his first in nearly 25 years.
At the show, Moby broke out fan favourites including ‘We Are All Made of Stars’, ‘Extreme Ways’, ‘Porcelain’ and ‘Natural Blues’, and closed out the set with 1994 track ‘Feeling So Real’.
Before the final track of the set, Moby took a moment to share how he was “such an Anglophile” when he was growing up, and “obsessed” with British culture from when he “was six-years-old, because I could watch Monty Python on Channel 13”.
He added that his deep love for music came after discovering UK acts including Sex Pistols, The Clash, Public Image, Joy Division, Echo And The Bunnymen and more, and later saw how the UK helped invent rave culture.
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“You guys did something fascinating,” Moby shared, adding how while his friend, DJ and producer Frankie Knuckles, “invented house music [when] he moved from New York to Chicago,” it was “the originators like Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling and Pete Tong and Carl Cox” who “invented rave culture”.
“I don’t think I’m overstating it. I don’t think it’s hyperbole,” he added. “I remember coming to the UK in 1990 and 1991. In ’91 I played my first ever rave called Rain Dance, and there were 10,000 people just celebrating. They were joyful.
He continued: “I remember one of the greatest moments: the DJ played ‘Everybody’s Free’ by Rozalla, which had just come out, and everyone threw their hands in the air and it just felt like perfection.”
He went on to share that he would be playing his last song of the night, and dedicating it to “the spirit of rave culture that you invented, and have kept alive” since the ‘90s.
Moby also shared his love of UK artists in an interview with NME in 2023 as part of our Does Rock N’ Roll Kill Braincells?! series, where he revealed some of his favourite artists over the years.
“After David Bowie, my second favourite band was Joy Division,” he said. “My high school band covered multiple Joy Division songs, and my yearbook quote was from ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.
“I was so desperate to not be seen as a sad, suburban aspiring punk rock, new wave kid that I — Madonna-style — pretended to be British,” he added. “The problem was my English accent was a subpar version of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, and I was pretending to people I’d already been in school with for the last eight years!”
The post Moby on how the UK invented rave culture appeared first on NME.