Sterling Roswell, better known as ‘Rosco’, grew up in Africa with The Beatles red and blue albums, Curtis Knight and Hendrix. His teenage years found him returning to Rugby, the place of his birth, embarking on a crash course in The Cramps, Devo and skiving art school. Around 1983 he first met Pete Kember (aka Sonic Boom) in the local record shop and they struck up a friendship based on a mutual appreciation of the MC5, The Who and The Velvet Underground.

Rosco already knew of Jason Pierce and soon found himself sharing a house with Pierce and Booker – Pete was a regular visitor, and so Spacemen 3 were born, Rosco providing the lightshow for the band’s early gigs. Booker left the band after ‘Sound Of Confusion’, and Rosco stepped in, complementing the band’s live and studio line-up for the next two years. The destructive course of Spacemen 3 is well documented. Tensions within the group reached a climax at the end of a gruelling 35-date European tour. A year later the band finally disintegrated.

Rosco then teamed up with Pete Bassman’s Darkside, and signed to Beggars Banquet. A few years of touring, and a couple of albums that sold well all around the world, gave Rosco wider horizons than he’d had in the Spacemen set-up. But the song-writing partnership floundered for simple musical direction reasons, and the band broke up.

A while after that event Rosco ended up living in Rome, Italy at the start of 1997, where he was to remain for the next three years. DJ-ing regularly and playing live occasionally, Rosco took up employment in posts as unlikely as restaurant porter and TV presenter. Rosco: ‘It was cool... I’d get to talk about electro-magnetic space travel and cathode ray universe theory.’ Quite what thousands of Italian viewers made of this excitable and eccentric Englishman is anyone’s guess!

Aside from his keen interests in comic book art and sci-fi, music was always the main drag and soon his friend Barney Stoppard - son of Tom Stoppard - was asking him to provide a soundtrack for a film he was working on starring Jude Law and Ewan McGregor (pre-Shallow Grave). Holed up at his flat and immersed in Philip K. Dick novels (one of which incidentally provides the album’s name), Rosco began work on what was to become ‘The Psychedelic Ubik’, although the film was never completed.

A live band came together with Italian producer Ingo Schwartz on bass and Londoner Danny Payne on drums. The band has made a few low-key live appearances, including at Julian Cope’s Kosmiche Club at the Garage and a pilot TV show, and Rosco continues his DJ-ing activities. The album enjoyed the assistance of the Morricone String Quartet in Italy; in London Rosco also employed producer Neil Brockbank, drummer Bob Irwin and guitarist Steve Donnelly. Rosco describes this enchanting Ubik album as ‘Space Age Pop’.