The DJ before Moby played in a wedding dress.
That was Sofia Kourtesis, who held the slot directly ahead of the headliner on the closing Saturday of Labyrinth on the Thames. It is the image from the day that keeps coming back. A woman in full bridal white behind the decks, Wren’s domes either side of her, the Thames moving past behind the stage and ten thousand people on the grass in front. It should have been cheesy. It was not. By the time the light started to go, she had the whole site with her.
Moby’s show on Saturday 15th August was his only London date of the summer and the second to last night of a series that sold out every date. He arrived off the back of Future Quiet, his 23rd album, released in February. The venue is the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it remains one of the more improbable settings for a night of electronic music in London.
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Last Night On Earth invites Reset Robot back for his latest EP ‘Simple’Gates opened at two. King Booo took the first slot and kept things warm while people found the shade. Planningtorock followed at twenty past three with a hybrid live set that pulled the afternoon somewhere odder and more vocal. SWIM held the middle of the day on records before Kourtesis came on at ten to seven, Moby at half nine.
A word on the site, because a lot of London events this size get it wrong and this one did not. Entry was quick. It was busy all day and the flow never became a problem, including down the front, where the crowd stayed loose enough to move in. Two long bars run either side of the main floor, and there was rarely a queue of more than a couple of people. Food was good and not silly money, and there was a genuine choice for those with dietary requirements rather than the usual single sad option. The weather held all day, sun from the afternoon and still warm at eleven.
Moby came on with a full live band and 90 minutes to cover 35 years. Bodyrock first, then straight into Go. Playing Go second is a statement. Next Is the E kept things in the early nineties before In This World, with Nadia Duggin singing, shifted the set into something warmer.
Then it went somewhere else entirely. In My Heart and We Are All Made of Stars led into Memory Gospel, played over a video tribute to Jane Goodall, who died on 1st October last year at 91. The people around me stopped talking, which at ten o’clock on a Saturday night takes some doing. Moby followed it by speaking about David Bowie, his friend and for a time his neighbour in New York, before a cover of Heroes that quietened the crowd further still. He also stopped to say something about British rave culture and what it had given him. “The world owes you a debt.” Coming from a man whose whole catalogue runs back through UK hardcore and Chicago house, it did not sound like empty flattery.
After that it was the hits, and nobody wanted anything else. Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad? got the singalong. Raining Again in Steve Angello’s vocal mix, and Disco Lies put the tempo back up. Flower ran into Find My Baby. Honey took the whole place back to 1999. Lift Me Up and Extreme Ways finished the main set.
The encore is what people will talk about. Porcelain opened it into a very still night. Jacob Lusk of Gabriels then came out for When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die, stayed on for Natural Blues with Kiko Franco, and for ten minutes it stopped being a nostalgia set. Lusk has the voice for that material, which most guest singers do not. Feeling So Real closed it, on time for the eleven o’clock curfew.
High Scream handled visuals and lighting across the whole series, and this was the best of it. They left the buildings alone until the sun had gone, then used them properly. Beams out over the courts, the skyline behind, the domes lit on either side of a screen that never overwhelmed the band in front of it.
The promoter’s end-of-season figures put the series at 76,000 people across eight sold-out dates, up from 57,000 across six last year, with 47 artists and over seventy hours of music. More than £40,000 was raised for Greenwich and Bexley Community Hospice, the official charity partner, alongside 3,500 food bank donations. Michael Bibi closed the run the following night, with U-God and Young Dirty Bastard of Wu-Tang Clan appearing as guests.
Moby has spent thirty years being two things at once: the rave producer and the man who sold twelve million copies of Play. They sat next to each other all night without either one looking out of place, which at this stage of a career is not a given.
Labyrinth on the Thames 2026 ran from 31st July across three weekends at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. All eight dates sold out.
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