Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

Reckon you're dead right, and a good analysis. I realised yesterday Tago Mago should have gone on my list as well as Movies. There's a very good band interview originally from Mojo seemingly confirming Irmin's intake here: http://www.thing.de/delektro/mojocan.html

I'd nominate "Tago Mago", in the sense that I always suspected it was specifically sequenced to replicate the ebbs and flows of a trip (a trick also attempted by Todd Rundgren on "A Wizard, A True Star", but with less musically far-out results). Obviously, it had to be condensed in order to fit within the time constraints of a double vinyl album, and it IS pure speculation on my part admittedly, but it makes sense.

"Paperhouse" is the anticipatory moment when your skin begins to tingle and your heart starts to beat just that little bit faster. "Mushroom" is the point after an hour or so when full-blown disorientation begins to kick in and you think "better batten down the hatches - it's going to be a bumpy ride". "Oh Yeah" is the point where you surrender to the flow and the chair you're sitting in starts to feel like a bottomless pit of jelly.

By the time "Halleluwah" starts up - curse those old-fashioned record-players, because you dropped the sodding thing and scratched it whilst trying to turn it over - your perception of time has gone all awry, to the extent where it ceases to matter whether the track you're listening to is four or eighteen minutes long. By "Augmn", your surroundings appear as distorted as if you were viewing them in a fairground mirror, and the synaesthesia becomes so overwhelming that everything - even the water you're drinking - feels like it's being processed through a vintage analogue delay pedal that's somehow lodged itself in the centre of your frontal lobes.

"Peking O", meanwhile, is when your ego shatters, you bark at the moon, and laugh hysterically at everything and everybody (including yourself) and bark at the moon, whilst "Bring Me coffee or Tea" is the serene and reflective comedown. Then some asshole gets up and puts on Back to the Planet. Thanks a bunch, former flatmate.

I could also regale you with colourful tales of the time when me and two colleagues at the studio I used to work in attempted to negotiate the Flaming Lips' "Zaireeka" whilst zonked on shrooms, but that would probably require one of those "331/3" books to do the experience justice.