Helios Creed, the former guitarist of Chrome, continued a saga as solitary as it was creative, becoming through his monumental work one of the greatest psychedelic musicians of all time.

Barry "Helios Creed" Johnson began his solo career with X-Rated Fairy Tales and Superior Catholic Fingers, albums that realize an explosive fusion of heavy metal and psychedelia.

X-Rated Fairy Tales (Subterranean, 1985 – Cleopatra, 1994) presents him at the head of a quartet with guitar, synthesizer, bass, and drums. The compositions are driving and demonic, but the momentum is tempered by the vocal parts, which are decidedly not Creed's strength. His psychedelic ego is best expressed in Descent, among galactic guitar and electronic glissandos and martial drum cadences. The raw violence of the old Chrome surfaces in the supersonic punk-rock of Blood Red, the garage-rock drive of Showdown, the epic riff of Money Man, and the pounding rock and roll of Johnny. The instrumental Un-Human Condition, a tangle of ultrasonic hisses and beastly cries, and the title track, attempting an improbable hybrid of folk ballad and Western soundtrack from a gothic angle, leave a sense of blur and unresolved tension. The dissonant funk-rock of Mystery Room and the macabre/erotic disco of Sex Voodoo Venus offer a danceable version of his bizarre musical philosophy. The sound, in effect, continually denies itself the satisfaction of being as violent as it could be. The result is more a notebook of sketches than an organic work.

Creed's animalistic instinct, only glimpsed in that debut, erupts fully on the second album. Superior Catholic Fingers (Subterranean, 1988), with the lineup reduced to a trio, is a far more desperate collage of tapes, noise, and electronics. Creed handles the sampler as he handles the guitar. Monster Lust opens with industrial clangs before launching into a dizzying rock and roll gallop, the guitar twisting into epic distortions. Creed focuses on the most visceral emotions: the bouncing riffs of Too Bad, the punk-rock epilepsy of Weekends, and especially the formidable progressions of the instrumental Cookie Jar. The metallurgic syncopations of the title track and Who Cares serve only to paint the dark and gloomy landscape of post-industrial civilization. Once again, the singing (monotonous and minimally melodic) is the only weak point of the work. The rest—the piercing guitar timbres, relentless drum charges, lugubrious dissonances—is a perfectly oiled detonating mechanism.

These works, though quite loquacious, retain the drive of Half Machine Lips: violent hallucinations, perverse rituals, metronomic dances, piercing distortions, horror vocalizations, mangled tapes, abrasive and nervous harmonies, cadaveric chants, infernal cadences.

Fresh from the orgiastic triumphs of X-Rated Fairy Tales and especially Superior Catholic Fingers (recorded between 1985 and 1986, though the latter was only released in 1988), Creed reached a mature synthesis of his primary "gestures" (the uncontrollable frenzy of punk rock, the "martian" drive of Chrome, tornadoes of electronic disturbances, obsessive Neu-style rhythms) and the new psychedelic inspiration (spatial melodies, hypnotic cadences, wild distortions) on the 1989 album Last Laugh (Amphetamine Reptile). The album is a wild ride through the slamdance of Some Way Out, the chorus of The Diplomat, the hard rock of Where The Children Are, and the tribalism of Beef. At the harmonic extremes of the work are Nirbasion Annasion, where a pop theme is sung in a filtered, android-like register over a continuous hum of intergalactic buzz, and the horror catalepsy of Late Bloomer, his Schizoid Man, also loaded with extreme sounds. The multitude of guitar effects, the deafening violence, and the sheer quantity of cacophony tear apart the rock song, transforming it into a liberating ritual, a monumental exorcism, an incomprehensible and superhuman gesture. A titan of the highest frequencies and most ruthless distortions, Creed may never again reach that magical balance between Pink Floyd, Hendrix, Neu, Popol Vuh, Hawkwind, and all the other deities presiding over his devastating sonic excursions.

In the 1990s, Creed continued to preach his gothic and sadistic brand of heavy psychedelia on Boxing The Clown (Amphetamine Reptile, 1990), featuring Ray Washam (ex-Scratch Acid) on drums, creating a more "industrial" (Black Hole) and terrifyingly violent (Got Me Floatin') atmosphere. The incendiary atmospheres he is accustomed to are in fact tempered by a constantly boiling imagination, albeit always perverse: from the tribal and blazing raga of Sunspots to the Stooges-style litany Hyperventilation, reaching the peak in the most sinisterly "grunge" delirium of Sister Sarah and finally plunging into the vortices of surreal effects in Big Clown. The vocals are reduced to a hushed, filtered speech, reverberated and distorted to the point of complete incomprehensibility. The album, perhaps the most delirious of his career as a Hendrixian apostle, adds another tile to the mosaic of perverse sonic phantasmagorias of one of the great visionaries of modern rock.

If Creed’s sound is proto-grunge and industrial, and his universe cyberpunk, his metaphysics even extends beyond that, toward a post-human scenario that is not so much apocalyptic as a comical detonation and reconstruction of the current reality.

From this collision of gothic and grotesque emerges in 1991 Lactating Purple, the first album on which he also uses a synthesizer in addition to his usual sampler: slowly but methodically wringing the sound on the title track and weaving the most irritating noises into the amorphous clamor of Big Bang, Creed reaches unrestrained distortion Sabbaths at ultrasonic speed like Ub The Wall and epic psychedelic-cosmic flights like Flying Through The Either and Modular Green. The dreamlike and supernatural fog enveloping his entire work, and the savage, brutal land in which it is set, have never been so dense and so hostile, respectively.
But Lactating Purple represents an extreme point of arrival, a watershed beyond which only the embankment makes sense, not the water.

On the subsequent Kiss To The Brain, tracks like Malavia Millenium and the title track highlight new harmonic perspectives, less bound to the stereotype built over the previous five albums—the first with its “industrial” syncopation and unusually refined guitar noises, the second brushing even the “cosmic” atmospheres of Pink Floyd in an unreal ether of filtered voices, organ chords, and almost metaphysical harmonic voids.
Thanks to the skillful use of dissonances (no longer simple cacophonous tornadoes but carefully considered timbral pastiches) and the assimilation of sampling techniques, compositions like Acid Rain suddenly gain the depth of learned avant-garde exercises. With the powerful heavy metal chords and epileptic thrash rhythms gone, Creed descends into a semi-narcotic state. Even XL-35, the pinnacle of violence, seems more concerned with consolidating ten years of guitar experiments than producing new musical revelries. For the first time, Creed has loosened his grip.

When his music is rediscovered by younger generations, Busting Through The Van Allan Belt (Cleopatra, 1994) celebrates Creed as both a precursor and a guru, but it is actually the most fragmented and hazy work of his career (it collects recordings from four different line-ups). Anubis Warpus and Monster Lust are not enough to tie together the thread of a discourse that no longer exists; they are purely a pretext.

Creed is the true “cyberpunk”: he combines the nihilistic violence of punk with the resources of high technology and sets his exploits in a universe populated by aliens, androids, and assorted monsters. The technique of this Hendrix of the grunge era is as aberrant as it is elementary: each song is built on a hard rock riff repeated with punk dynamism, submerged by abject vocals and guitar effects. If there is such a position as a master of ceremonies in Hell, no one can steal it from him.

Cosmic Assault (Cleopatra, 1995) displays the old furor in The Master and Pounders, but also introduce Creed to trance/ambient music in Altered States and Leaving The Body.

The same pattern permeates Planet X (Amphetamine Reptile, 1995), now violent (Kurt Zombie and Television) and then droning (Dog Star).

After Damon Edge's death in 1995, Creed re-formed Chrome.

Creed also released the electronic albums Seeing Strange Lights (1996), credited to Dark Matter, and Dark Matter II (1998).