Live at the Witch Trials

Despite the title it is a studio album. The Fall recorded it at Camden Sound Suite on 15 December 1978 and Bob Sargeant mixed it the next day. They had been booked in for five days, but Mark E. Smith fell ill and cancelled the first three. Alvin Clark engineered it, and the front cover was by John Wriothesley.

Some of the songs date from earlier versions of the group and carry writing credits for former members Tony Friel and Una Baines. The lyrics take on the music industry in "Music Scene", poor jobs in "Industrial Estate", and drugs in "No Xmas for John Quays", "Like to Blow", "Frightened" and "Underground Medecin". The driver's voice calling the time at the end of "Music Scene" ("six minutes!", "six forty!") belongs to the son of Peter Adamson, the actor who played Len Fairclough in Coronation Street. No singles were taken from the album, a habit the group kept until 1986.

By the time it came out, drummer Karl Burns had left, and Martin Bramah quit soon after, leaving Smith as the only founder in the group. In the US the album appeared with different artwork and without "Mother-Sister!" and "Industrial Estate", replaced by "Various Times", the B-side of "It's the New Thing". It was reissued by I.R.S. in 1989, in an expanded edition by Castle Music in 2004, and by Cherry Red in 2019.

Reception

Dave McCullough of Sounds praised its rich, mature music and called "Frightened" a monster of a song. Chris Westwood of Record Mirror likened it to a rebellious jukebox, while Allan Jones of Melody Maker was less impressed, especially with the rhythm section. Robert Christgau first found it too tuneless and crude, then played it beside Public Image Ltd one night and for a few bars could hardly tell the difference.

Looking back, Jason Heller of Pitchfork called it "the liminal space between punk and post-punk", and Ned Raggett of AllMusic wrote that a first Fall album that did not sound very punk at all fitted Smith's contrary mind. Billboard ranked it sixth among the band's albums in 2018.