Psychic TV

Live At Thee Ritz is Psychic TV's first concert as a full live band, recorded at the Ritz in Manchester on 6 November 1983. It came a year after their appearance at The Final Academy with William S. Burroughs. Issued in 1989 as a single LP, it is presented here by Cold Spring as the complete show over two CDs, rebuilt from rare tapes.

This is the classic early line-up: Genesis P-Orridge, Alex Fergusson, John Gosling of Zos Kia, and Peter Christopherson and Geff Rushton, who would soon form Coil. Paula P-Orridge was also present, as the LP notes record. The Manchester date was arranged at short notice, after a planned show at Prestwich Mental Hospital was cancelled. It belongs to the series of concerts that followed the album Dreams Less Sweet.

The first disc opens with a short Welcome and the two-part Intro To... and ...Thee Ritz, then moves through Roman P., heard here months before its 1984 single, and the brief Thee Mad Organist. Its centre is Thee Full Pack, more than sixteen minutes long, followed by Oi You Skinhead. The second disc starts with Eleusis and ends with In Thee Nursery, both from Dreams Less Sweet. In between come Twisted, New Will and a ten-minute Unclean. Taken together, the twelve tracks run about 82 minutes, split almost evenly between the two discs.

The original LP was released by the band's own Temple Records in 1989 in 5000 copies, as number 13 in a series of 23 live albums announced by the band. Cold Spring calls this edition “the complete, mostly unheard document” of the first full-band show. Seventeen days later the same core group played Reykjavik, the concert released as Those Who Do Not. Other stops of that tour have surfaced as N.Y. Scum and as the Berlin Atonal recordings.

Double CD released by Cold Spring (CSR173CD) in November 2012, mastered by Martin Bowes in June 2012. It includes liner notes by Simon Woodgate written between 1989 and 2012, the original cover art by Val Denham and previously unseen photographs. As on the LP, the live sound is credited to Popular Demand.