Heldon – A Dream Without Reason

At the record shop I worked at we had a customer named Al who was just filthy – he was Filthy Al. He would only buy records that had women singers, and he always said they were for his friend, he was a character. I was listening to Hawkwind at the shop once, and he came in and said, “I saw Hawkwind.” So he tells me about seeing Hawkwind, and I start asking him about other bands he was into at the time. He used to be into a lot of krautrock and progressive stuff, so he brought me Space Ritual and this Heldon record, both filthy, covered in dirt. I still own both of those copies – those are my forever copies. Al also gave me these six-hour VHS tapes of krautrock – he had dubbed all of his krautrock albums onto reel-to-reel and sold them, then he dubbed all the reel-to-reels onto VHS, so that's where I first heard a lot of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream.

I had no idea who Heldon was and that record just blew my mind. It was just so hectic and but tight and put together. That got me excited about synthesiser music, and then years later to get to play with him was pretty incredible. Richard gets more wild as he gets older, playing with him you start out chilled, but then it's straight up, full-on noise within about one minute.