Leading up to Chrome playing a rare show in London later this month, Chrome's main talisman the legend that is Helios Creed has been interviewed by our very own Jimmy Martin from Teeth of the Sea for The Quietus:
A Scrap Metal Colossus: Helios Creed Of Chrome Interviewed
Spawned unto the world in 1976 like a mutant beast from an unearthly morass of twisted steel on a splatter movie, San Franciscans freaks Chrome have loomed large ever since as a triumph for murky noise alchemy – borne of technology gone wrong, and thriving in a blizzard of information overload. Forced to lurk in the shadows of relative obscurity for the vast majority of the last four decades, the fevered brainchild of twin ne'er-do-wells Helios Creed and Damon Edge, in the band's most celebrated incarnation, created post-apocalyptic junkyard chic still unmatched for outtasight dementia and Stoogian/Stygian bliss well into the twenty-first century. Somehow a band beyond both punk and psychedelia, their twisted racket came closest to the sound of Martians attempting to reinterpret earthling rock music with a load of old washing machine parts, home-made effects pedals and a copy of the Fill Your Head With Rock compilation on scratched vinyl, played backwards.
These enlightened dirtbags possessed a genuine capacity to bewilder unlike any others. Gritty, crotch-level rock abandon, yet allied to a bracing vortex of aural anarchy that seemingly rendered street noise, cultural detritus and TV scree unto DMT-addled plateaux unknown, frequently all within the same couple of minutes. Accidentally analogous to the irreverent yet synapse-shattering literary dimensions of the likes of Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut in Marshall-stack and four-track form, the classics of Chrome were as much about the silver of Iggy Pop's Raw Power-era strides as they were the hue of a 1930s Flash Gordon spacecraft…
Read the rest of the interview here: The Quietus
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