Live at the Witch Trials (1979)

Live at the Witch Trials is the debut studio album by the English post-punk band the Fall. It was released on 16 March 1979 through record label Step-Forward. It is not, despite its title, a live album and was recorded in a studio in a single day and mixed by producer Bob Sargeant.

Production and content

The album was recorded at Camden Sound Suite on 15 December 1978 and mixed by producer Bob Sargeant on the 16th. The group had been booked into the studio for five days but Mark E. Smith had fallen ill and cancelled the first three days.

Some of the songs date from earlier incarnations of the group and feature writing credits from former members Tony Friel and Una Baines. Lyrical subject matter includes a tirade against the music industry ("Music Scene"), low-quality jobs ("Industrial Estate") and drugs ("No Xmas for John Quays", "Like to Blow", "Frightened", "Underground Medecin"). "Frightened" was described by Dave McCullough in Sounds as "a breathtaking, ominously culminating monster of a song". "Rebellious Jukebox" was described by Pitchfork as "one of the first self-aware Fall anthems", with the title viewed as "[summing] up The Fall's stance against prevailing trends".

Release

Live at the Witch Trials was released on 16 March 1979 through record label Step-Forward. The U.S. release of the album featured different artwork and removed "Mother-Sister!" and "Industrial Estate", replacing them with "Various Times", the B-side of the group's second single, "It's the New Thing". All subsequent editions have followed the original UK track listing.

No singles were taken from the album, a practice that would be commonplace for the group until 1986. By the time that the album was released, drummer Karl Burns had left the band and guitarist Martin Bramah also quit shortly afterward to form Blue Orchids, leaving Mark E. Smith as the sole remaining founding member.

The album was available in its original form through the late 1980s, reissued on vinyl, cassette and CD by I.R.S. Records in 1989 (with the title misspelled Live at the Witch Trails on the disc). In 1997, Smith's own Cog Sinister label issued a CD edition that was poorly mastered from a below-standard vinyl copy. In conjunction with Voiceprint, Cog Sinister reissued the album in 2002 as Live at the Witch Trials +, which was claimed to have been remastered but was, in fact, simply a clone of the I.R.S. disc with the group's first two singles added, "Bingo-Master's Break-Out!" and "It's the New Thing". In 2004, Castle Music released a two-disc CD "Expanded Deluxe Edition" of the album, mastered from the original tapes and with a vastly expanded track listing. However, the Castle Music reissue used a vinyl source for the three "Bingo-Master's Break-Out!" EP tracks, as the original tapes have been lost.

The album was reissued on vinyl in 2016 on the Superior Viaduct label, and again in 2019 by Cherry Red Records as part of its Fall Sound Archive series. Cherry Red also released a three-disc CD edition with the same bonus tracks as had appeared on the 2004 Castle Music edition.

Reception

Live at the Witch Trials was met with a very positive reception from critics upon its release. Record Mirror's Chris Westwood described the album as "a rugged, concerned, attuned, rebellious jukebox", while Sounds reviewer Dave McCullough called it "an album of staggeringly rich, mature music, inner questioning hand in hand with rock and roll at its fiercest, its finest, its most honest, rock and roll at its naked, most stimulating prime." Robert Christgau of The Village Voice said he initially found it "too tuneless and crude", but later "played it in tandem with Public Image Ltd. one night and for a few bars could hardly tell the difference", concluding that "in this icky pop moment we could use some ugly rebellion." Allan Jones of Melody Maker was less impressed, being especially negative about the group's then-rhythm section of Marc Riley and Karl Burns.

In a retrospective review, Tiny Mix Tapes praised Live at the Witch Trials as a "fully-formed, instant-classic debut album". Trouser Press said that it showed the band "at once leaning towards punk's directness and charging headlong into poetic pretension". Pitchfork's Jason Heller stated that the album was "the liminal space between punk and post-punk" and that it established the Fall as a musically "far more wobbly and toxic" band than their post-punk contemporaries. AllMusic critic Ned Raggett wrote: "That the first Fall album... would not only not sound very punk at all but would be a downright pleasant listen seems perfectly in keeping with Mark E. Smith's endlessly contrary mind." In 2018, Billboard ranked Live at the Witch Trials as the sixth-best Fall album; in an accompanying essay, Geeta Dayal wrote that "there were more ideas on this album than there are in some other bands' entire discographies."

Personnel

The Fall

Mark E. Smith – vocals, guitar ("Live at the Witch Trials"), tapes ("Music Scene")

Martin Bramah – guitar, backing vocals, arrangements, production