Live at the Witch Trials is the debut studio album by 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