Education Quote by Richard D. James

He turns childhood difference into a battery metaphor, and in doing so smuggles a whole thesis about how identity gets manufactured. “I had loads” is deliberately vague - loads of what? Energy, attention, trouble, ideas. The punchline lands on “red hair… like Duracell,” a brand shorthand for relentless charge. It’s funny because it’s mildly absurd, but it’s also a self-myth in miniature: the weird kid explained through a consumer logo.

Richard D. James (Aphex Twin) has always played with the gap between the human and the engineered, the intimate and the synthetic. This line frames that tension as something learned early, in the small theatre of primary school where traits become narratives fast. Red hair becomes a social trigger: you’re marked, so you get read as hyper, mischievous, “too much.” The Duracell reference isn’t just a joke; it’s a commentary on how kids get branded by their peers and how those labels can harden into personality.

There’s an extra kink of irony in using an advertising icon to describe an organic feature. It suggests the way culture teaches us to understand ourselves through product language, as if temperament were a spec sheet. Coming from a musician whose work often feels like electricity given emotions, the metaphor doubles as origin story: not “I was gifted,” but “people treated me like a constant power source, so I became one.”