The Durutti Column’s debut album does not have an auspicious origin story. The band whose name it bore had split acrimoniously just before they were supposed to record it. Their guitarist Vini Reilly was so poleaxed by depression that he was virtually unable to leave his house: 12 different attempts were made to section him over the course of 1979. Believing that Reilly was “going to die”, Factory Records boss Tony Wilson intervened, buying him a new guitar, then suggested he visit a studio with the label’s troubled but visionary producer Martin Hannett as “an experiment”. The sessions were a disaster. Hannett ignored Reilly in favour of tinkering with a vast amount of cutting-edge electronic equipment he had brought with him. Reilly fitfully played something on the guitar, but eventually stormed out with the words: “I’m fucking sick of this.” He did not return.
Unaware that he was making an album, Reilly was “mortified” when Hannett handed over a finished product, and “absolutely hated” what he heard. The solitary upside, as he saw it, was his sense that it would never find a wider audience. The music on 1980’s The Return of the Durutti Column bore no relation to the workmanlike post-punk that the original band had contributed to the label’s compilation EP A Factory Sample, put together the previous year. (Although Reilly thought they were “complete and total rubbish”, too.) Grasping for comparisons, the music press likened it to the atmospheric jazz of the German label ECM and Reilly’s guitar playing to that of Mike Oldfield and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia – neither of them having much musical cachet in the post-punk world of 1980. Even a positive review in the NME suggested listeners would consider The Return of the Durutti Column “hippy noodling”.
And that should have been that. Another Factory curio, a name on the list of wildly obscure artists on whom the label briefly alighted: Tunnelvision, Ad Infinitum, Shark Vegas, Abecedarians. Instead, here we are, 45 years on, staring down a version of The Return of the Durutti Column given the classic album deluxe treatment. It comes with a plethora of lo-fi home demos and recordings from gigs in Leeds and Brussels that reveal Reilly’s early attempts to turn the Durutti Column into a live act were as fraught as you might expect. “You’re a very nice audience,” he mutters at one juncture, before swiftly changing his mind: “You’re a fucking awful audience.”
For music that could seem as fragile as the man who made it – one critic compared the sound of Reilly’s dextrous guitar lines, turned into intricate latticeworks by the use of echo, to “frost on a windowpane” – the sound of the Durutti Column has proved surprisingly robust. It has appeared on the soundtracks of The Bear and video game Grand Theft Auto and been hailed by everyone from Red Hot Chili Peppers to Frank Ocean. An interpolation of their 1998 track Sing to Me lent a very English melancholy to Blood Orange’s wonderful recent single The Field.
Listening to The Return of the Durutti Column today, its longevity and influence is easy to understand. What counted against it in 1980 was its distance from everything else happening at the time. That ultimately worked in its favour: other than the sound of the primitive rhythm tracks, there’s nothing to tie the music here to a specific era, which means it hasn’t dated. And perhaps the peculiar circumstances of its creation – people experimenting for their own benefit, rather than actively making an album for public consumption – helped forge its distinctly beguiling atmosphere.
There are sonically richer and more expansive albums in the Durutti catalogue, which built on the blueprint established here and grew to encompass everything from sampling to flamenco. But from the moment Reilly’s guitar appears on opener Sketch for Summer – its languid echoing tones a perfect evocation of a long, sun-dappled July afternoon – you feel drawn into a secret world, filled with private feelings. It rarely sounds anguished or pained, but you wonder if the desperate circumstances in which Reilly was operating have some bearing on music that, for all its lush melodiousness, feels emotionally raw, without filter.
You don’t need to know that Collette and Katherine were named after Reilly’s former and current girlfriends to sense the tracks’ respective sweet sadness and delicate euphoria; Lips That Would Kiss would sound like an expression of yearning regardless of its title; the unspeakably lovely Requiem for a Father is so shrouded in reverb that it seems to be transmitting from a vast distance, like a fading memory. For all the undoubted technical skill on display, the most striking thing about the music is its power to move you rather than simply dazzle: only the self-explanatorily titled Jazz – recorded with a live rhythm section – slips into the realm of background music. The rest is exquisite, an album its author never intended to be heard, that you suspect people will discover and fall in love with for decades to come.
This week Alexis listened to
Overmono – Paradise Runner
We’re entering the period when the charts and airwaves gum up with Christmas sludge, so here’s a sleek, sparkling palate cleanser in the form of a speeded-up R&B vocal, shivering synthesisers, powerful house rhythm.
