Moby's dried out now

But after eight years, fans' patience is about to be rewarded as their hero is back with a set at the Liquid Room tomorrow night. Hopes will be high that he proves worth the wait.

As the Festival gets ready to swing into action and with the weather likely to show a marked improvement on his last experience, the event should be a sell-out, with around 1000 revellers gaining entry to the party.

The inspiration for the comeback, apart from his documented love of Scottish audiences, is the star DJ's new album, Last Night, released here in May. To make the point, tonight's set has been given the title, 'Last Night in Edinburgh'.

The latest album is a conscious attempt to make something a bit more authentically Moby than his last few albums.

"My strong suit is not being a singer-songwriter, and so after I made Hotel, I was like, 'You know, this is a pretty good record, but I've done it. I don't need to do that again'," he says.

"I wanted to make a record that involved musical idioms that I've always really loved. You know, whether it's more soulful, disco or piano-driven rave anthems or quiet ambient music.

"These are genres that I've worked in a lot in the past, and one of the

reasons is that I really love them. It's music that speaks to me, so rather than push myself too much stylistically, I just wanted to make a record that I really like."

One thing Moby really likes, apparently, is going on epic nights out with his mates in his native New York City. These nights are what animate the album. The intended effect is of a drunken, blurry, 12-hour nocturnal chaos distilled into 65 minutes of sound.

"In the last couple of years, I just found myself living in lower Manhattan, going out a lot and very simply I wanted to make a record that reflected that," he says.

"I spend a lot of time with my friends, just going out drinking and getting into trouble and dancing and so the record is very much a product of that. Hopefully a relatively honest record, because I wanted it to sound – maybe as narcissistic as this is – sort of like what my life actually is."

It may have been inspired his nocturnal habits, but Last Night is not about Moby personally. He seems keen to avoid the impression of navel-gazing, drafting in a range of collaborators including Grandmaster Caz, ex-pat Brit rappers 419 Crew and Aynzli, and Radiohead producer Dan Grech-Marguerat.

"The last record I made was very self-involved", he admits. "It was me playing all the instruments and me singing songs that were very personal, and this album is ideally maybe a little bit less about me and a little bit more about just making a dance record that hopefully people will like."

All of which bodes well for those with tickets for tomorrow night who are hoping to do some serious dancing.

Though Moby claims he lacks the stamina these days to get through the kind of massive night that inspired the album, he should cope well enough with a set expected to last two to three hours. And he will be playing in the kind of place he likes best these days.

"I really came to hate touring," he sighs. "I just like going to small clubs and DJing. After years and years of being on the road, just being able to go out with a box of records, it's so liberating and so much fun. You get to have contact with people."

Apart from his music, Moby is well known for preachiness. He inspired vitriolic ridicule from Eminem when he criticised the rapper's lyrics for homophobia and racism, and of course he is a committed and vocal vegan and anti-war activist.

But Last Night is a move to a more understated politics. "I had a long didactic period in my life," he explains. "When I was 15 years old I was a militant punk rocker and then I became a militant dance music person. I was a militant vegan and I was a militant Christian and at some point I sort of stepped back and realised the only thing that these phases had in common was their militancy.

"The more I see other people engaged in militancy – whether it's right-wing militancy, left-wing militancy, Islamic militancy – it just makes me want to have nothing to do with fundamentalism and militancy at all.

"So maybe that's sort of the impetus behind the record, saying like everybody else in the world is so militantly committed to their causes and all these militants are actually ruining the world. Why not just make a fun dance record for your friends?" he adds.

Though it's easy to read that as a kind of despair, it's also a highly authentic statement for a man with such a deeply liberal nature. Peculiarly immune to musical classification, Moby is surely one of the most diverse musicians performing today.

His eclecticism is as tolerant as the 1980s New York club scene that was his genesis, and which he recalls today with affection. "You know, you'd go out and it'd be white and it'd be black and it'd be Latino, it'd be Asian and half the people would be straight, half the people would be gay." he recalls.

"The DJs would be playing hip-hop into freestyle into dancehall reggae into house into weird electronic music.

"It was just a really open, amazing time and it was just a world that I feel really, really grateful to have come of age musically during that time."

Moby – Last Night in Edinburgh, Liquid Room, Victoria Street, tomorrow, 9.30pm, 16, 0131-225 2564