Drawing on his books The Durutti Column: A Life of Reilly and Shadowplayers: The Rise and Fall of Factory Records Factory historian and Durutti catalogue curator James Nice traces The Durutti Column’s enduring influence and the intriguing stories behind it.
Like so many bands to emerge from Manchester’s post-punk ferment, The Durutti Column – the project helmed by waif-like guitar virtuoso Vini Reilly – would go on to exert an outsized influence on countless artists. Yet even from the beginning, The Durutti Column stood apart. The monumental miserablism of his peers was out; in its place, Reilly tilted towards shimmering melancholy through delay-drenched guitars and gnomic lyricism.
His influences were diffuse and, like Reilly himself, quietly spoken: jazz, folk, classical music. Little wonder, then, that The Durutti Column’s sound travelled so widely – from slate-grey Manchester to the violet-blue haze of the Balearics, and further still: into pop, into electronic music and into the present moment, via a sample on Blood Orange’s recent single, The Field.
Here, Factory historian and Durutti catalogue curator James Nice draws on his books The Durutti Column: A Life of Reilly (Burning Shed) and Shadowplayers: The Rise and Fall of Factory Records (published by Faber on 9 October) to explore the enduring influence of Reilly’s music, and the endlessly intriguing stories behind it.
Factory Records’ ground zero
Looking to break into band management in the aftermath of punk, Granada TV journalist Tony Wilson and actor friend Alan Erasmus put together a ‘new psychedelia’ quintet in January 1978, featuring ex-members of Fast Breeder, Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias and The Nosebleeds. The new group was named after Buenaventura Durruti, who led an anarchist militia column during the Spanish Civil War. In May 1978, Wilson and Erasmus began Factory as a club night to promote the band, and by the end of the year, it had expanded to become a label. The Durutti Column, however, were reduced to just one member: virtuoso guitarist Vini Reilly.
A Quiet Authority
Debut album The Return of the Durutti Column arrived in January 1980, sleeved in coarse glass paper intended to damage adjacent discs. The destructive intent of the cover stood in direct opposition to the melodious, ambient music created by Reilly and producer Martin Hannett. “After punk, you could do anything you wanted,” Reilly reasons. “There were no rules… you could just mess about and experiment and be yourself. The idea of doing very personal guitar pieces, pre-1977, would be a joke really – stale and boring, consigned to the folk-rock thing. But post-punk, it was something else.”
"Special music asserts itself and shrugs off criticism. Vini is an astonishing talent in all sorts of ways." - Bruce Mitchell
Fragile Beauty
Reilly – and his manager Wilson – made no secret of his fragile mental health and chronic struggle with debilitating clinical depression. “When Tony decided to record my first album, nobody would have touched me with a barge pole,” Reilly says. “I wasn’t even a going concern. I mean, I was on my way to the psychiatric hospital. ”For several years, Reilly was treated by psychiatrist Sidney Gottlieb, whose client list also included Spike Milligan, Peter Cook and Ronnie Scott. “My life’s determined my music, and my music’s determined my life,” Reilly continues. “You can’t separate your creative process from your life. It’s a two-way mirror.”
Art with a capital A
Several former members of The Durutti Column later wound up in Mick Hucknall’s super-smooth pop-soul behemoth, Simply Red. Original rhythm section Chris Joyce and Tony Bowers played on the first three albums, while the entire Durutti horn section, led by Tim Kellett, also jumped ship. Unsurprisingly, there was no love lost between Wilson and Hucknall. “His music’s rubbish,” Wilson carped. For his part, Hucknall took pride in being “the complete antithesis of everything Factory. It was very much a Manchester clique and we were never part of it because we were quite happy people… They were culture with a small c and art with a capital A. For me, it’s the other way round.”
Feeding The Myth
On their 1992 song Cowboy Dave, Happy Mondays paid tribute to original Durutti guitarist Dave Rowbotham, murdered after drifting into Manchester’s murky drug scene. Seven years earlier, Reilly had tried – in vain – to produce the Mondays’ debut EP. “I like Vini and he’s a great guitarist,” Shaun Ryder said. “But he’s a weird one and everyone knows he’s a bit fragile. He once told everyone that I’d spiked him at The Haçienda, and the next morning I got phone calls from Wilson and other people at Factory having a go at me, saying stuff like,‘Why did you do that to poor Vini? You know what he’s like,’ when I hadn’t even fucking done anything. It was all in his mind.”
Streets ahead
After The Smiths’ producer Stephen Street helmed his 1987 album The Guitar and Other Machines, Reilly found himself providing guitar and keyboards on Morrissey’s first solo album, Viva Hate. “What I liked was the extremity of his beauty, and the erratic quality,” Morrissey said. “He’s also extremely humorous.” Street returned to produce the next Durutti album, one of the first to fully embrace sample culture. “The idea for Vini Reilly preceded Moby’s idea of taking snippets from old records and rewriting them,” Street asserts. “Although there are no credits on the album anywhere. The reason we got away with it is because it didn’t sell very many copies.”
Reilly Renascent
After a hiatus following several strokes in 2010, Reilly has been working on his first new album in years with long-time collaborators Bruce Mitchell and Keir Stewart, along with guest vocalist Caoilfhionn Rose. “It ties in nicely with a recent resurgence of interest,” says percussionist Mitchell, Vini’s musical foil since 1981 and still sprightly at 85. “The Blood Orange sample is just the latest manifestation. We’ve had songs in The Bear and Grand Theft Auto, then there’s the biography, A Life of Reilly. Why? Special music asserts itself and shrugs off criticism. Vini is an astonishing talent in all sorts of ways.”
Shadowplayers: The Rise and Fall of Factory Records is published by Faber on 9 October.
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