All music was recorded on a 4-track cassette machine under the guidance of Alex Fergusson, an original co-founder of the group, with Genesis P-Orridge. A Pagan Day was subtitled Pages From A Notebook as the material was a sketch of the songs, revealing of the process itself. All songs were written by Genesis P-Orridge and Alex Ferguson, with the exception of Translucent Carriages written by Tom Rapp of the group Pearls Before Swine. "Cold Steel" is a demo version of "The Orchids", originally released on 1983's Dreams Less Sweet. Different arrangements of "We Kiss" and "Baby's Gone Away", and a completely rearranged "New Sexuality" with new lyrics appeared on 1988's Allegory and Self.
Release
This recording was first released as TOPY 003 on 23 December 1984 at 11pm as a picture disc, limited to 999 copies. It was only available at the Rough Traderecord shop in London. One side of the original vinyl was a full color photograph of Carresse P-Orridge as a baby, the other side had text in red on white. It was only available to shops and distributors between 11 am and 12 am on launch day. The 1984 picture disc release was limited to 999 copies and had the scratched message "Just Like Arcadia". High collector prices being paid for the original picture disc. In 1986, the band re-released the album in a non-limited edition. The 1986 black vinyl unlimited edition had the scratched message "TOPY 017: for Alex". Cleopatra Records records re-released it in 1994 as "Genesis P-Orridge & Psychic TV – Pagan Day", with a cover incorrectly noting the original release date as 25 December 1986. Pagan Day and the related 1988 album Allegory and Self were re-released in 2017 by Sacred Bones Records and Dais Records.
Reception
described the album as "less extreme" than previous albums, writing "Song structure is observed, and Orridge and cohort Alex Ferguson keep a fairly tight rein on things. The 14 songs include two untitled fragments originally released as a seven-inch single with early copies of the album, and most of them have a clearly defined musical logic and progression. Fans of Psychic TV's more out-there work might find this distressingly restrained, but it's a remarkable performance nonetheless." Pitchfork, reviewing the 2017 re-issue noted that Pagan Day and Allegory and Self represent extremities in the early Psychic TV catalog—the former was once the rarest and rawest of their recordings, the latter was their most pop-oriented and commercially successful. But these two oppositional records share a significant amount of DNA".
