Early Life and Career
He was born in Schlüchtern, West Germany. At the age of eleven, he began training to become a classical pianist. As a teenager, influenced by rock and soul music, he began experimenting with electronic music. In the mid 1970s, while a student at the Berlin Music Academy, he supplemented his studies of classical music with studies in musique concrète and early electronic music and was influenced by Miles Davis and Frank Zappa.
In 1977, Heil met a dissident artist from Communist East Germany, the young Nina Hagen, who was electrifying Berlin's punk world with her powerful operatic voice and genre-defying musical style. Hagen asked Heil to join her band as her keyboardist, co-writer and co-producer and for the next few years he honed his craft what became the legendary Nina Hagen Band. After Hagen left the group to pursue a solo career, the remaining band members formed Spliff, one of Germany's most successful rock bands of the 1980s. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was known as one of the best keyboardists in Europe.
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