The Durutti Column: The Return of the Durutti Column (Expanded & Remastered) Album Review

The title read like a joke: How could the Durutti Column return if they were never here? Only plugged-in fans of the Manchester scene or the British music press might have remembered the band’s initial incarnation, and even then they might have needed their memory jogged. But what scanned like sardonic pomposity was actually a reflection of the regard in which the Duruttis were held by their label. From the very start, Factory intended the Durutti Column to be load-bearing. The band was assembled by label co-founders Alan Erasmus and Tony Wilson, who envisioned the Duruttis as a sort of psychedelic post-punk act: their own world-historical rock group in the mold of Malcolm McLaren’s Sex Pistols or Andy Warhol’s Velvets. The Durutti Column led the label’s first showcase in May 1978. They were slotted after Joy Division on the label’s first release, 1979’s A Factory Sample. And after Joy Division’s debut Unknown Pleasures inflamed the UK music press, it was the Durutti Column who were tasked with making Factory’s second-ever LP. That the Durutti Column no longer existed was only a minor complication.

They hadn’t survived their first recording session. Wilson had sacked their singer and replaced him with an aspiring actor who turned up in full punk gear. This new singer recited turgid poetry over his new bandmates’ compositions, which erred towards brittle reggae and boogie. The whole mess was dutifully tracked by a contracted producer named Martin “Zero” Hannett. Three Duruttis quit: In the Factory Sample packaging, the departing members were credited alongside their end dates, “as if victims of a purge,” noted Factory biographer James Nice. The only original member left was lead guitarist Vini Reilly. He and the actor played a few live dates to excoriating reviews; disillusioned, Reilly quit. In poor mental and physical health, he broke off contact with Factory, moved into his girlfriend’s house, and started working the late shift at a gas station.

One day, Tony Wilson dropped by. Though the Durutti Column had been a disaster, Wilson was fascinated by the guitarist, who admired punk’s willfulness even though his own musical taste tended toward jazz, blues, and the classical tradition. Wilson persuaded Reilly to return to the studio; from then on, the Durutti Column would be Vini’s alone. Still, Wilson remained the mastermind: He sent Reilly back to Hannett, newly celebrated for his transformative work on Unknown Pleasures. But Hannett no longer seemed interested in playing the auteur, largely ignoring Reilly to tinker with drum machines instead. After a couple days of parallel play, Reilly pulled out of the project. He was floored when Factory sent him a test pressing: The label scraped together enough material for an album, and they would issue it with as much savvy as anything else in their burgeoning catalog.

But nothing else in the catalog sounded like The Return of the Durutti Column, recently reissued with a slew of studio and home demos, live performances, and recordings from Vini’s pre-Durutti years. In a modernist era of abrasion and velocity—the now and the next, chasing each other at warp speed—Reilly offered a work of radical non-provocation. The dominant sound is his meditative fingerpicking: rippling and crystalline, like a river in winter. No poetry this time, not even singing. “I don’t mind stuff being rubbish—all my albums are rubbish—but at least they’re my rubbish,” Reilly said in 2008. “But the Factory Sample wasn’t even me.” Return, however, was the ideal introduction to Reilly: a selection of flow-state guitar compositions that sounds perfectly centered, in part because it feels equally removed from everything happening around it. Compared to his Mancunian peers, whose output conjured images of decaying industrial plants and mutant discos, this new Durutti Column suggested the domestic.