Watching journalists and Redditers attach themselves to myths about Aphex Twin like flies to shit has long been an entertaining sport. Bored of interviews and harnessing a truth-smearing spirit to rival Machiavelli, through the 90s and 00s Richard D James spread any number of harebrained rumours about his live shows, living quarters and life experiences. In this interview from 1994, he tells an MTV journalist of his plans to hire a cruise ship, cast an Aphex pirate flag into the sky and perform in ports around the world. Later, he worries about the kids in his Welsh childhood town sawing off the guns on his army tank and “using them”. While he did own a small armoured vehicle that resembled a tank – his very own “womb with a gun” – the cruiseliner was sadly just another RDJ phantasm. 

What sets James’ music apart, I think, is its strangeness, its unknowability, the way it shifts and swirls like an unspooling oil slick. Obfuscation, in different forms, is a game that James plays with his fans, and the rumours, threads, blurred lines and soft truths about his personal life are an integral part of the Aphex Twin journey. Like his music, it’s the feeling of unreachability that keeps us reaching out, and whether or not he actually owns a submarine, or witnessed a man die in a greasy spoon in the old Elephant and Castle shopping centre, is moot at this point. Ahead of his upcoming Field Day set (his first live performance since 2019) we pick through some lesser-known Aphex myths.

HE DJED A ‘MILLENNIUM RAVE’ IN STRANGE DAYS

Kathryn Bigelow’s sprawling Strange Days is the quintessential pre-millennium tension movie. Who better to DJ its goony NYE rave than RDJ, a musician whose permeative obsessions with build-and-release have long sent dancefloors into the sky. For the scene, Bigelow and producer James Cameron shut off four LA blocks and invited 12,000 Angelinos - recruited via a local newspaper - to drop a pill. The only problem? RDJ is nowhere to be seen in the clip. Was it all just another Aphex press stunt? Did he hire Alastair Campbell to convince us he was pivoting to video at the click of 2000? Reporting from the scene in 1994, LA Times’ Steve Hochman recalls a despondent and “personality-less” Aphex “sculpting beats and carving wondrous soundscapes” at the event. Certainly sounds like our guy.

HE POSTED HIS BEARD TO HIS DAD, FOR NO REASON 

This interview with Sonic Envelope is perhaps the pinnacle of RDJ’s mid 90s shithousery. Here’s a handful of some of his best fibs that day: Jim Thirlwell, “the bloke from Foetus”, once threatened to kill him; he has a friend who talks to dogs; he once fell asleep standing up in an airport, only for one of the “Donkey Rhubarb” Teddy Bears to catch him on the way down ("Don't mention it," RDJ recalls the bear saying, "That's what we're here for - to protect you."); he was trying to make a bed that shot up and down using hydraulics, Exorcist style (“For when you get bored”); as a kid, he used to ride home from school on the back of his pet dog. But perhaps the maddest claim of them all was that, for some inexplicable reason, he decided to send a chunk of his hair to his dad. As easy as it is to shrug this one off, he has noted his bent for hair-posting on various separate occasions: in this NME interview from 1995, he mentions chopping his beard hair off and attempting to grow it on his toes instead; then in 1996, he claimed the first 100 copies of the Richard D. James album would come with strands of his greasy ponytail. “At first I wanted to send pieces of my beard – but at that very last moment I realised I had already sent my beard,” he says.

THERE WAS A HATE CAMPAIGN AGAINST HIM ON THE STREETS OF ISLINGTON 

With wall-caving belters like “At the Heart of it All” and “AFX 6/B” under his belt, it isn’t difficult to believe that RDJ can party criminally hard, and for days on end. His old flat on Southgate Road in De Beauvoir - the address in which he wrote ambient masterpiece Selected Ambient Works II - became a rave vortex in the mid 90s. Parties would distend like some of the time-stretched vocals that made Drukqs so gorgeously nightmarish, prompting, according to RDJ at least, a local hate campaign. “My windows have been smashed and my neighbours have hung denunciatory notes on the trees warning me that if I am too loud one more time…” he told Sonic Press in 1996. He tells MTV the same thing, almost word-for-word, in the aforementioned clip - albeit with a trademark smirk. He’s either remembering his lies (a worthwhile skill, it must be said), or this one’s legit. Revenge, he figured, is a dish best served loud. Asked by the Sonic Press reporter about his next houseparty, he retorts, “The only thing I’m still waiting for is to get a qualified person to certify that the floor will be able to bear the weight of so many people...”

HE PERFORMED IN A WENDY HOUSE

Not a myth, really, but a functional cog in this great mythology. Despite the various accounts floating around online of his ‘Wendy House’ shows of 97/98 - in which he was wheeled onstage in a tiny children’s playhouse – only one image exists of the setup (and even that looks photoshopped). Attendees still talk about the Richard’s Paedogeddon-esque spectacle – one fan recalls seeing him crouched in the plastic house wearing a mask of his own face, while others, namely a user called Tompty, speculate on how much it would sell for today. “I heard it went for 15 grand on eBay… it’s key for that plastic-y bass sound.”

HE USED TO WORK IN A COAL MINE 

In episode four of John Peel's Sounds of the Suburbs series - first broadcast on Channel 4 in 1999 and dug up, to the delight of RDJ diggers everywhere, in 2015 - Aphex and fellow Cornish musician Luke Vibert visit some local landmarks. Squatting in the circular recesses of the mythologised Gwanapp Pit amphitheatre, James discusses watching his dad work semi-naked in an overheated coalmine as a kid. “I did a bit of work in a mine when I was about 17 - that’s where I got money to buy my first equipment,“ he says. You can sort of see a myth-building pathology bounce across his vision in the clip. The claim sits neatly alongside scenes from Chris Cunningham’s Come To Daddy music video, in which miniature Aphex clones bash up a car park with sticks in southeast London’s Thamesmead estate. “All the miners walked around with pants on or just their belts and nothing else,“ he says. This Reddit thread theorises that in a Vice documentary, you can see a picture of RDJ in a mine with his father Derek James, who was supposedly interviewed for the short. “Not him. Not even close to the same face,“ writes user ’freshshadowban.’ “When did Rich have a massive fucking chin?“

Aphex Twin headlines Field Day, Victoria Park, on August 19