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Factory Records’ other legendary group.
IN JANUARY 1979, The Durutti Column’s vinyl debut on the A Factory Sample EP presented full-band, post-punk awkwardness dominated by thespish vocalist Colin Sharp. One year on, with only guitarist Vini Reilly remaining, revelatory instrumental long-player The Return Of The Durutti Column was a sudden teleport to an entirely different realm of imagination, feeling and sensation. A unique and uncompromising 30 years of music had begun.
Reilly’s own beginnings were in south Manchester, where he was born in 1953. He was raised in a pop-and-TV-free, but jazz, classical and opera-rich, household. Musically adept from a young age, and struck young by Albatross and Abbey Road, early endeavours included a spell in Wythenshawe punks Ed Banger And The Nosebleeds. After he found his vehicle, and assisted by his dauntless friend, confidante and percussionist Bruce Mitchell, the following decades saw explorations into avant-rock, chamber music, flamenco, programmed dance tracks and sampling, with Reilly’s acutely emotive, finger-picked guitar always at centre. Empowered by the patience and patronage of his manager, Factory Records boss Tony Wilson, Reilly was never a popular choice and had
more success playing on recordings by Morrissey, Holly Johnson and John Cooper Clarke. Admirers still place his music alongside the hypnagogic likes of Talk Talk or Arthur Russell in terms of its otherworldly grace and power. Throughout, Reilly had contended with ill-health and recalled being medicated and threatened with being sectioned 12 times in 1979 alone. Beginning in 2010, he suffered three strokes which, he says, made it impossible for him to play. An informal YouTube clip from 2020 of him unwinding a typically Durutti-esque extemporisation, however, sparked hopes that there may yet be more. Such a return from a seemingly impossible place would befit this doughty, inspirational figure. “You can’t separate your creative process from your life,” he told this writer in 2006. “My life’s determined my music and my music’s determined my life.”
10 The Durutti Column
Time Was Gigantic… When We Were Kids
FACTORY TOO, 1998
You say: “The best of his ‘song’ albums… heartfelt, sometimes brutally so.” Tim Worth, via e-mail
Reilly had been hit with a huge tax demand and his 20-year association with Wilson was soon to end. Despite all that, this ruefully titled final album of the ’90s features some truly honeyed-sounding recordings. Vocalist Eley Rudge, whose voice is not far from Harriet Wheeler of The Sundays, sings on the easy-come I B Yours and five more songs.
