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.
That’s not to say that Return of the Durutti Column is a purely homey listen, though it frequently is. There are two songs named for girlfriends, and one dedicated to his father. The very first sound on the album is Hannett’s synthesized bird tweets, and while Reilly makes liberal use of delay, the effect is cozy rather than cavernous. On the tracks without accompaniment—the richly melodic “Beginning,” the aptly titled “Sketch for Winter”—he sounds like he’s tracing ice castles on a frosty windowpane. A different set of hands might have turned these compositions into exercises: maybe a post-punk gloss on ECM austerity, or Windham Hill sentimentality. But Reilly’s stores of technical, stylistic, and emotional dexterity made for a document that was as beautiful as it was cerebral.
Return’s spare arrangements and short runtime (a tick over a half-hour) belie how much ground it covers. Even in his stillest moments, Reilly hums with the restlessness of a jazz explorer. The plucked chime that opens “Katherine” suggests a pastoral Popol Vuh, an idea he carefully draws out until—with the deceptive ease of a magician shuffling a deck—he drops one hand to a slow blues crawl, while the other digs out a high-velocity, surprisingly funky gutbucket solo. A brief proggy passage shuttles him back to the beginning.
“Katherine” is followed by the brilliant “Conduct,” which is the closest the Durutti Column gets here to post-punk’s spirit of grandiose despair. Initially, everything’s daybreak: For two minutes, Reilly homes in on a three-note theme so sweet you can almost hear Hannett’s birdies again. Then he’s knocked back by a cymbal wash from Toby Tomanov (the drummer in Reilly’s first band, the Nosebleeds, and later the drummer for Screamadelica-era Primal Scream). The temperature plunges; Reilly’s trills harden into an Old World dirge. When the intro re-emerges, it sounds hardened by the experience: The trip back has become a hero’s journey. Tomanov appears on two other tracks, both jazzy workouts. “Untitled” is a post-punk thwack at “Take Five,” while “Jazz” sees Reilly—whose life was changed as a child after acquiring an LP by the Brazilian guitar duo Los Indios Tabajaras—incorporate some picado into his soloing.
As pleasurable as it is to hear Reilly craft industrial-grade fusion with a human drummer, Hannett’s rhythmic contributions loom larger in Return’s legend. On Unknown Pleasures, the producer had taken Joy Division’s dense goth-punk sound into a frozen field and detonated it. With this new Durutti incarnation offering so much space, Hannett was content to work the edges. His programming on “Katherine” is an almost subliminal scratch: the sound of socks on carpet. On “Requiem for My Father”—a gorgeous spiraling galaxy of fluid fingerpicking and flamenco accents—the producer adds a four-on-the-floor thump that purrs like an old cat. Given more time and material, it’s quite possible that Zero would have left a bigger stamp on things. As it stands, his modest instrumental contributions ground Reilly’s virtuosity, and the homespun nature of his drum tracks anticipates vast swathes of bedroom pop and downtempo—if not lo-fi beats to study to.
Still, Hannett’s beatmaker moonlighting isn’t a patch on his production. Whether it’s the baroque solo workout of “Collette” or the ecstatic trebly strut of “Sketch for Summer,” Zero renders The Return of the Durutti Column in three full dimensions. Even Reilly’s hazier moments have an astounding immediacy. Factory saw Hannett as being so crucial to the Durutti project that they credited him as a band member (playing “switches”) on the label of the record. Some early editions of the album were even bundled with a Hannett single. “The First Aspect of the Same Thing” is static synth modulation, and “The Second Aspect of the Same Thing” drags guitar chords slowly through the ocean. It’s mellow machine music that may have been more fashionable (at the time, at least) than Reilly’s brand of ambience, even if it’s far less vigorous.
The reissue replaces the “Aspects” from the original tracklist with the far better pair, “Lips That Would Kiss” and ”Madeleine.” Released in the fall of 1980, the Hannett-produced single inches toward dream-pop. Engineer/musician Eric Random is credited with the rhythm box programming both here and on the collection of unreleased demos, which are more like a series of alternate takes. These new textures don’t bring any major revelations: With the added syncopation, Reilly plays less fluidly, more rhythmically. But they further validate Hannett’s—and Wilson’s—vision for the Durutti Column, and they suggest what a fuller collaboration might have sounded like. (If you want to glimpse down a darker path, try “Won’t Look Out” from Reilly’s brief late-’70s stint in Gammer & His Familiars, which constructs an entire prog-folk ballad from what would become the middle section of “Conduct.”)
Still, the interplay isn’t the source of The Return of the Durutti Column’s magic, as wonderful as those moments can be. What sets Return apart is its perfect self-containment. The media-savvy label with world-beating aspirations, the producer with the mad-scientist rep, the frail guitarist given a second chance at stardom with his own project: Together, somehow, they made an album that sounds like a room that sounds like the world. Neither he nor the Duruttis ever became household names, though in the decades to come, Reilly’s lucid dreaminess would be heard in everything from Windy & Carl to Dean McPhee to Nobuo Uematsu. Reilly would arrange and perform on Morrissey’s solo debut, make major contributions to the Balearic sound, and become John Frusciante’s guitar god. But for all his contributions to the dialogue of pop, the gorgeous internal monologue of The Return of the Durutti Column still produces a unique echo.
