To me Live At The Witch Trials sounds like one of those debuts where a great band is almost there but not quite. The competent (yawn) drumming doesn't have that tribal, manic quality you get with The Fall at their best, the rough edges feel smoothed out, the atmosphere is not quite there.

This, on the other hand, is where it's at. A paranoid horror story sprinkled with gnomic utterances about "old golden savages" who "killed their philosophers", set to some deliciously primitive percussion, everything dripping with darkness.

Part of the problem for me is something about the way the drum sound is mixed in the Trials.

But I also suspect that he took several beatings from MES in order to make him less of a rock drummer (a very good one) and more of a Fall drummer. He does sound different on Hex. Maybe just part of the band refining their identity.

Burns is monstrously great on that album - and just about everything else he did.

I haven't listened to Trials in a very long while, true. My issue was never with the quality of the drumming but with the overall feel - it's likely that I overstated the extent to which the drum sound contributes to it.

One day I'll have another go at overcoming the boredom this album brings about in me. Not today though. Today I'm perfectly content to be wrong about it.

The track that got me into the Fall is Burns at his brilliant best.

He might sound different because Hex featured a two-drummer lineup - Burns and Hanley. That said, I would agree that The Fall hadn't entirely come into their own on their first album. Regardless, their first album is downright excellent. Dragnet is better. And so is Grotesque. Of their massive discography, there are maybe two Fall records I don't legitimately enjoy listening to.

I dunno, I like Witch Trails but I much prefer the few next ones. I love the drumming though, it's prominent but that's a good thing to me. But that's partly just my personal preference, I'm very partial to percussion.

Witch Trials also featured, IMO, the best Fall keyboard player, Yvonne Pawlett. Her playing was integral to the sound, not an afterthought. Witch Trials was a fine debut but the band really started coming into its own on Dragnet.

Yeah, I had heard some singles on the radio when they came out:
Bingo Master’s... Totally Wired and ...’Elastic Man’, and loved them,
but the band didn’t really hit me until later in 1980 when the distributor
I was working for picked up Rough Trade. Both Grotesque... and Slates
came thru the door and were plopped down in front of me to sell and,
holy crap, I was immediately hooked!

The next year, they came to our city and the engineer at our radio station
named Tim Powell recorded them and two tracks were later released
on A Part of America, Therein (N.W.R.A. & Hip Priest).

Since that first gig, I’d seen them at least a dozen times.

You're lucky as hell dude. What shows were the best/worst?