The singer Robbie Williams had, in his spare time, developed an interest in magic and the occult and, in 2005, he got in touch with me in my capacity as a “chaos magician” to ask if I could walk him through some of the basics. <...>

He asked if we could turn him into a superhero for his next tour, so Frank Quitely drew up some Super-Rob sketches before we all decided he’d look ridiculous in a cape and circus suit and went to work devising a more twenty-first-century Elizabethan “occult” approach for the record sleeve, which would be packed with secrets and hidden meanings in the Magical Mystery Tour puzzle tradition. He would become a British superhero in a coat and scarf, a time-traveling shaman, the “Good Doctor.”

Quitely and I created a sequence of “alien abduction” tarot cards for the album Intensive Care, but far from provoking the hoped-for tabloid screamers—“Robbie in Black Magic Shock!”—the talismanic images and witchy hieroglyphs were completely overlooked by a usually prurient media. Not a single “What’s he gotten himself into now?” story. Even when I wrote my own article for the Sun newspaper, it was rejected on the grounds that no one would be interested in Robbie Williams’s dalliances with the powers of the pit!

I planted a sigil on the cover, which can be activated by finding the CD in the shops or pulling the cover up on-screen and pressing Rob’s finger. If enough of us do this the world will most certainly enter a new Golden Age of peace, creativity, and prosperity!…