Hip Clown Rag

Martin's notes: Like ‘Catweazle’, I wrote this sitting on my bed at my mum and dad’s house sometime in 1988. I think it was just after hearing My Bloody Valentine on the Peel Session they did in between ‘You Made Me Realise’ and ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’. The lyrics and the title are me trying to do the Ginsberg/Dylan thing that characterized pretty much all of our first album. I didn’t know what I wanted to say yet so I said nothing. When it came to recording this for the first album I insisted on recording it faster which was the wrong thing to do. I can still remember Gordon’s face at Action Records in Preston when we played it to him. He really liked the demo version. We recorded the album in Manchester at Out Of The Blue studios. The engineer was a great guy but hadn’t recorded anything quite so out of control before. I had no idea about how to make a record. I was just screaming. Sice and I came up with the title Ichabod and I in the Cosmos club on Seel Street in Liverpool. I loved that club. We played there with Levellers 5 one night, a great band. Peelie said it was the only place to be in Britain on his show that evening; magic. We loved the film ‘Withnail and I’ and I had always been a fan of ‘The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow’ (Ichabod Crane being the main character).