Fleapit Revisited:John Was Trying To Contact Aliens.

"My mind was travelling. Travelling the cosmos" - John Shepherd.

John Shepherd from rural Michigan wasn't like other boys. His relationship with both his parents went from difficult to non-existent, he was gay at a time (and in a place) where it wasn't easy to be so, and he spent the best part of three decades trying to contact extra-terrestrials in a quest to gain extreme knowledge.

Something he felt aliens could help with. But John Shepherd, in Netflix's short (just sixteen minutes - with a warning of "emotionally intense scenes") film John Was Trying To Contact Aliens, doesn't come across as some crackpot, whackjob, or conspiracy theorist but as a kind, amiable, curious, and visionary autodidact stuck in a small town surrounded by people he couldn't identify with and who couldn't identify with him.

Matthew Killip's film shows how Shepherd, on his own, set about sending messages into outer space in the hope of some kind of salvation and those messages came in the form of music. Which Shepherd believed, as do I, as does Stewart Copeland, is the strongest form of communication humans have yet invented.

The music's not your standard rock or pop either. Not that there's, necessarily, anything wrong with that. Shepherd's choice of music (which he broadcasts on his Earth Station One shows - where he even chats like a proper DJ between tracks) is more, for want of a better word, transcendental. More universal - or at least global, it being hard to know what kind of jam ET would get his groove on to.

Tangerine Dream, Steve Reich, Harmonia, jazz, reggae, afrobeat, and gamelan are all favourites (there's an entire show you can, and should, listen to for free on theQuietus website which includes tracks from artists like Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, and Cluster) and as his love for music spread out into the endless black void of space his mind, too, journeyed to other realms.

Interviewed now with grey beard and ponytail in blue jeans and brown shirt, and shown as a younger man not looking all that different, Shepherd tells of how his recording equipment (a retrofuturist's dream of dials, screens, oscillators, and attenuators) first filled his bedroom before migrating into his grandparents' living room and finally into a specially built extension.

Over Polaroids and footage of Shepherd looking pensive in the deep Michigan snow a story is told of how that thirty year search to contact extra-terrestrial intelligence may have proved fruitless (that's not a spoiler - you would have heard if he had made contact) but his efforts were not worthless. They changed his life, he found meaning within himself, and he gave himself the opportunity to find some things he thought he may never find. Love and warmth.

John Was Trying To Contact Aliens is both, quite literally, short and sweet (and the music is fantastic from start to finish) but, to me, it was an important story. A story about how the only life worth living is one in which you are true to yourself. If you quest for knowledge hard enough you will, I believe, eventually find it - and it may not be what you expect.