Lyric Sheets: The Psychedelic Detective

If certain music magazines are to be believed, we may be headed for a third wave of psychedelic music, spearheaded by bands such as Super Furry Animals, Regular Fries and The Flaming Lips, who've just made one of the best albums of the year so far.

I woke up in my office three decades later, with an atomic comedown and a taste like someone had been seeding clouds in my mouth.

I shimmied into a paisley shirt and some hipsters, sparked up a Players No 6 and considered the situation:

Syd and Jimi had hopped the blue bus, right? But where was the dame in the Granny Takes a Trip dress and the Day-Glo specs?

Somewhere down the hall I could hear the zupp zupp phhtt of some juvenile playing a backwards drum kit. The radio was making pink noise. I was hungry.

Two blocks down, at the Take'n'Babble, a walrus in a blazer soughed in a slowed-down voice: "What's yer poison, Bunky?" I ordered sky on rye. Heavy on the moonbeams, easy on the clouds, hold the horrors. To go.

What if the dame was right? Supposing a new breed of bent-brain brats had broken into the rehearsal bunkers and were fooling around with tape- loops, backward guitars and mellotrons?

Back at my office I had a visitor. She slid in through a crack in the skirting board and draped herself on to a beanbag. "Steady with yer psychic aura Toots. You're leaking ectoplasm over my Book of the Dead.

Her eyes were like a 14-hour Technicolor happening. Which had happened. In a voice like clocks melting, she grated: "It's like this Johnny. The kids are sick of the baby-food. They wanna nix The Corporation's Tommy Tippee."

I slung her a No 6 and spat: "What's new, treasure? The Corp have got time. They'll note the brand of brain candy. Scarf up the sonics. Buy up the boys and sell it all back to the kids at twice the price.

She fell into my arms. All eight of them. A teardrop plished on to the linoleum and broke into millions of tiny crystals. Her kiss tasted of stars but her breath was like a dead planet. The Nu Psychedelia, huh?

She cooed: "D'y'ever get that sensation of deja vu Johnny?" I blinked.

She cooed: "D'y'ever get that sensation of deja vu Johnny?" I blinked.