One interviewer described the 14-track record as "cosmic folk-rock", which delights Williams, who maintains that "No one uses the term folk-rock anymore, but I love the term and the likes of the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield".
In a happy accident organised by Rushdie at the beginning of The Satanic Verses, a jumbo jet explodes above London, extruding two characters who float unharmed to earth, delighting in the cosmic chaos that the bomb has revealed to them.
These songs can vary greatly in style and structure: "She's Always Watching You" is spacious funk, with a rhythm guitar scrubbing the upbeats; "Unearthly Delights" is twinkly, cosmic and drumless, with a 12-string guitar; "No I Don't" a kind of morose dubstep.
His is a poetry of what Ezra Pound termed "logopoeia", "the dance of the intellect among words", delighting in complex word games and cosmic visions in the garden centre or the charity shop.
Psychology, Joseph Campbell and archetypes, personal transformation, Abraham Maslow and self-actualization, spirituality, yoga, Stanford--we zinged through topics like kids on Christmas morning, delighting as we opened one gift after another to find a cosmic meeting of the minds.
So while it was certainly pleasantly immersive to have a nice little influx of THC into my endocannabinoid system while experiencing the sensory delights all around me, it wasn't anything more than a cosmic tickle.
