Excerpt: The Return of the Durutti Column
“Truthfully, I don’t know why anyone would want to listen to my record.”
Vini Reilly (1980).
Seeking to expand the catalogue beyond Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division, and the debut singles by A Certain Ratio and Orchestral Manouvres in the Dark, in August 1979 Factory and in-house producer Martin Hannett set about recording the label’s second album, The Return of the Durutti Column.
Since the disintegration of the five piece band around which Factory was initially founded, by his own admission Vini Reilly had done little except ‘sit around feeling depressed’. In frail health and taking prescribed medication, the guitarist was living with the family of girlfriend Katharine, signing on, and even came close to being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. ‘The original band was complete and total rubbish, and not me,’ he avers. ‘I don’t mind stuff being rubbish – all my albums are rubbish – but at least they’re my rubbish. And that’s what’s important to me. But the Factory Sample wasn’t even me. So I left, very disillusioned, only to have Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus keep coming round to see me saying, “You are the Durutti Column”, which I thought was incredibly loyal of them. The great thing about Factory is that they never gave up on me.’
The M24J management duo more or less forced the guitarist into the studio. ‘It was a risk,’ allowed Wilson. ‘We had to make him step out of his illness to work on the album. The boy was very ill. If you’d seen the boy you’d know. He had this problem with his stomach. Sometimes you have to talk to him before five o’clock, because that’s when he eats. Afterwards he’s usually violently sick. I thought, “That boy is either going to die or he’s got to get better.”’
With the Durutti project now more an ‘umbrella concept’ than a functioning band, The Return of the Durutti Column was recorded over three days on 8 track equipment at Cargo, with Hannett providing minimal electronic backing for Reilly’s airy guitar sketches, performed on a custom Gordon Smith guitar. ‘Martin arrived with these great big black cardboard fronted machines,’ wrote Wilson. ‘Synthesizers. For two days, the Monday and Tuesday, Martin did nothing but create strange rhythm/noise tracks. Occasionally Vini would strap on the guitar and play some notes onto the tracks. But it was hard to get Martin to notice as he pored over the primitive electronics. By the second night Vini had had enough.’
Despite the irregular circumstances in which it was created, the resulting album was perfectly realized, correctly ambient and inventive music. ‘Martin and I didn’t sort of click together at first,’ Reilly admitted, ‘but we worked as a team and I really liked him in the end. On the album he just played about with knobs, he’s not at all technical [sic]. He got synthesized drums and things for me. Also, some of it was spontaneous. ‘Sketch for Summer’ was made up in the studio because he’s managed to get these bird noises on the synthesizer… Martin reproduces echoes, finds a rhythmic pattern on the synthesizer. I gave him twenty tracks and he selected the ones he could work with best. I didn’t really hear the album from playing the pieces until the finished plastic.’
In the meantime, Reilly again withdrew into less than splendid isolation. ‘Vini had not turned up for days two and three,’ Wilson wrote of the album designated Fact 14, ‘and retired to a bedroom and a woman somewhere, while the psychiatric staff at the local bin continued to investigate the uninvestigable: the relationship between Mr Reilly’s stomach and his cerebral cortex. The relationship between genius and being fucked up.’ As with Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Unknown Pleasures, Reilly did not much like The Return as a finished sound recording, and only later came to appreciate the value added by Zero. ‘It took me years to realize that what he’d done was to give the album as a whole an identity, which it would have lacked otherwise. It would have just been a few guitar tunes.’
Seeking a suitable sleeve, Wilson again borrowed from Situationism. Unique in both form and content, the exemplary music and irregular recording process heard on Fact 14 would be matched by a cover assembled from coarse sandpaper sheets. By Wilson’s account, the first idea was to house a record in a film canister – a novel concept rendered obsolete by the release of Metal Box by Public Image in November 1979. Thwarted, Wilson recalled that Mémoires, a Situationist text published two decades earlier by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, came wrapped (but not bound) in sandpaper, this with the object of damaging neighbouring titles on the host bookshelf. That Vini Reilly’s melodious music stood in direct opposition to this hostile gesture served to perfect the concept. Four thousand sheets of sandpaper were duly sourced from Naylor’s Abrasives in Bredbury, and 2,000 surplus album sleeves purchased from printer Garrod & Lofthouse.
While the sandpaper sleeve offered the twin attractions of novelty and cheapness, it was also another bespoke artefact which had to be assembled by hand. The piece work was undertaken by various Factory workers at the Palatine Road office, including Joy Division, Ratio and youthful Liverpudlian Nathan McGough, stepson of poet Roger, whose mother Thelma was a friend of Wilson. The production line followed the model established for the Factory Sample. ‘Joy Division did about 500 of them,’ recalled Wilson, ‘because Ian needed money more than the rest of them. The other three watched porn movies while Ian did all the slapping and pasting. The strange thing about wallpaper paste is that it looks rather like semen. Coming back to the flat at midnight, finding the other three staring at the porn video, and Ian slapping this semen everywhere, is one of those great memories.’
Initial pressings of Fact 14 came with a free flexidisc of electronic drones and pulses by a solo Martin Hannett. Though Vini Reilly may have disliked Hannett’s treatment of his music at the time, reviews were ecstatic, Max Bell praising ‘perfectly realised, correctly ambient and inventive music’ in NME, and Richard Williams of Melody Maker deeming it ‘consonant, memorable, poignant’, and comparable to the seam of ambient, minimalist works mined by the ECM roster. Reilly’s fragile health precluded him from playing live dates to support the album, but in January the recording of an improvised piece with Hannett and fellow Invisible Girl Steve Hopkins was filmed for new Granada TV arts programme Celebration. Interviewed in NME the following month, Reilly displayed a delightfully idiosyncratic candour, dismissing elitist music as boring and ‘crap’, questioning why anyone would want to listen to his own album, and declaring himself most satisfied ‘when aunties and uncles hear it and you see them tap a foot’.
Words: James Nice.
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Shadowplayers: The Rise and Fall of Factory Records by James Nice is published by Faber on 9 October 2025.
• Buy a copy from the Heavenly Recordings Bandcamp store. •
New vinyl and CD editions of The Return of the Durutti Column, replete with extended essays by James, Bobby Gillespie and Ian Harrison, follow via London Records on 28 November.