Read an extract from Moby's autobiography

I was too tired and scared to protest. It was the last night of a terrible tour and I was being asked by the local Mafia boss to throw cassettes into the crowd. Cassettes of a song that had been on my previous album.

“Okay I throw them in during ‘Feeling So Real’ is encore,” I said in suddenly broken English.

“Great!” he boomed. “Oh this is my stadium, you like?”

“It’s great.”

“Also I own MTV here, so do good show for them,” he instructed me. “And this is my girlfriend,” he said gesturing to an absurdly tall and bored model. “She wanna be Miss Bulgaria.” Constantin, the aspiring Miss Bulgaria, and his bodyguards left. I lay back down on the bench and passed out.

At 9pm, Ali woke me up. “Get your throwing arm ready, the kids want their free cassette singles.”

I walked on stage, my eyeballs hot with fever. The arena was almost half-full, and the audience was excited. We were mainly going to play older songs, as clearly the audience didn’t want to hear anything from ‘Animal Rights’. During the first song I felt my flu abating a little bit. By the third song I was banging my Octapad and yelling into the microphone. Was this the cure for the flu? Being compelled by mob bosses to play old rave anthems?

As the set was ending, Ali brought the box of ‘Feeling So Real’ cassettes on to the stage. He mimed throwing one into the crowd and and said in his best Eastern European accent, “Is promotion,” and I laughed.

“Thank you for a great night!” I yelled, and the crowd even yelled back. “This next song is ‘Feeling So Real’,” and the three thousand people in the arena yelled even more, as ‘Feeling So Real’ had been a hit throughout Eastern Europe. As the song started I took a handful of cassette singles and hurled them into the crowd. The people in the audience scurried to pick them up as if I were throwing millet into a UN refugee camp.

I looked over at the side of the stage. Constantin had taken his jacket off. He and his bodyguards and his girlfriend were smiling and dancing like little kids. I smiled, happy that I was going back to New York with all my fingers.

Moby’s book Porcelain is out now