Musician, curator, but foremost — a skateboarder, Helena Long has had to ease off the gas lately. “I’ve always been slightly distracted,” she says, smiling, gazing upwards for a moment as if watching her thoughts tick over, on a video call from her London home. “Skateboarding was the main focal point but now I have to shift it. With drumming, I couldn’t play for the first couple of months because my leg wasn’t allowed to bend.”
SHE’S REFERRING TO HAVING KNEE surgery, the cause for which began after jarring it on a cold spring day in 2021. “I rested it for a couple of weeks, iced it, all that jazz,” she explains, but it continued to play up. Bouncing between physiotherapists, accumulating a comical amount of resistance bands along the way, by the time Helena secured an MRI, a year had passed; during which she’d carefully managed the injury enough to work on videos with Vans, Poetic Collective, and Slam City. “I was actually really excited for surgery,” she says of finally getting an operation date locked in to repair a torn meniscus and cartilage deterioration in her left/right knee.
A little down the line,
