It’s not the first time that ouija boards have figured in rock music. Morrissey released a 1989 single on the subject. But The Mars Volta have now used the arcane method of channeling the voices of the dead to create their latest album.

Speaking to Samanthi on Friday’s QPM show the band’s Cedric Bixler-Zavala told how his colleague Omar Rodríguez-Lopez bought him a board as a gift which helped to focus his thoughts lyrically.

Cedric said: “It’s a really old antique one. We like to call it the talking board because some game company owns the term ‘ouija’. Talking board sounds very mature, he bought it for me because he knows I like things like that.

“I played it obsessively and I wrote down all the messages that came from it because I was having a bit of writers’ block and I thought this is better than me so I wrote down everything and the more and more I pieced it all together, the more it had this storyline involved in it.”

The results have been used to make up the band’s latest album The Bedlam In Goliath. You can hear the band on Samanthi’s show by heading to Q Radio here
Or you can hear the Cedric here.