So Here’s A Thing: Moby And Lana Del Rey Used To Date

The producer looks back in his new book...

Moby has revealed that he and Lana Del Rey used to date.

The producer is currently preparing his new book, with Then It Fell Apart billed as “a journey into the dark heart of fame and the demons that lurk beneath the bling and bluster of the celebrity lifestyle.”

It follows the year's after his phenomenally success 'Play' album, with Stereogum able to preview a section.

Moby discusses meeting a pre-fame Lana Del Rey, and Lizzy Grant – as she was then known – out on a date.

The two visited a vegan macrobiotic restaurant in 2006, before heading to a bar. He says: “We’d kissed at the bar at 4 a.m., just as the place was closing, and I’d asked her to come home with me. She’d smiled and said no, she wouldn’t go home with me after just meeting me, but she would happily go on a date if I called her and asked her out. I called her the next day, and we talked for thirty minutes about music and politics and growing up in the suburbs.”

“She was beautiful, smart, and charming; making plans to meet up with her was both what I wanted to do and what my new therapist had told me to do.”

The two continued to see each other, with Moby inviting Lizzy Grant to his fifth floor penthouse apartment.

Lizzy Grant laughed and called him "the man" before adding: "You’re a rich WASP from Connecticut and you live in a five-level penthouse. You’re ‘The Man.’ As in, ‘stick it to The Man.’ As in the person they guillotine in the revolution."

She played a song for him on the piano, and agreed to become a backing singer for his group Little Death – sadly for Moby, she left almost immediately to focus on her work as Lana Del Rey.

The memory clearly still lingers for Moby – his book Then It Fell Apart will be released shortly.

– – –

UPDATE
Well, it might not be as straight forward as that. Stereogum shared another segment from the book, in which Moby described briefly dating Natalie Portman in the late 90s, shortly after she gained fame in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

“We had just finished a show in Austin, playing to four hundred and fifty people at a venue that held five hundred. I walked to the backstage door, sure that this was a misunderstanding or a joke, but there was Natalie Portman, patiently waiting. She gazed up at me with black eyes and said, ‘Hi.’”

“I was a bald binge drinker who lived in an apartment that smelled like mildew and old bricks, and Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star. But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me.”

Natalie Portman has now issued a statement, completely contradicting this version of events. She wrote: “I was surprised to hear that he characterised the very short time that I knew him as dating because my recollection is a much older man being creepy with me when I just had graduated high school”.

“He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18. There was no fact checking from him or his publisher – it almost feels deliberate. That he used this story to sell his book was very disturbing to me. It wasn’t the case. There are many factual errors and inventions. I would have liked him or his publisher to reach out to fact check.”

She continued: “I was a fan and went to one of his shows when I had just graduated. When we met after the show, he said, ‘let’s be friends.’ He was on tour and I was working, shooting a film, so we only hung out a handful of times before I realised that this was an older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate.”

Moby's book actually seems to corroborate elements of Natalie Portman's statement – in it, he described meeting her at the MTV Awards in 1999, when the actress would only have been 18 years old, not 20 as he states in the book.

Moby has yet to respond.

Join us on Vero, as we get under the skin of global cultural happenings. Follow Clash Magazine as we skip merrily between clubs, concerts, interviews and photo shoots. Get backstage sneak peeks and a true view into our world as the fun and games unfold.

Buy Clash Magazine

-
Join the Clash mailing list for up to the minute music, fashion and film news.