> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hwaelmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Durutti Column: Listening to Vini Reilly in Five Pairs - URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/the-durutti-column-listening-to-vini-reilly-in-five-pairs/ - Published: 2026-10-24T22:35:04.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-24T22:35:04.000Z - Description: Essay on Durutti Column: Vini Reilly, the catalogue and five listening pairs. - Author: Hwael Mag - Tags: Essays, 2026, Electronica, Ambient Folk, Fingerstyle Guitar ### In 2024, for the thirty-fifth anniversary of *Vini Reilly*, the reissue added “Otis (No Samples)”: the same track, without the voices borrowed from other records. Choosing and bending those voices had been Reilly’s work too. Taking them away doesn’t uncover a truer Reilly. It gives us another way of hearing the piece. --- The Durutti Column began as a band. In 1978 Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus put together a line-up with Reilly, Dave Rowbotham, Chris Joyce, Tony Bowers and Phil Rainford; within a few months the others had gone, and the name stayed stuck to the guitarist. Since then the story has been told in the singular. One man, fragile, in Manchester, playing an electric guitar as though it were made of glass. That man always had someone next to him, in the studio and outside it. His music first took shape among producers, drummers, arrangers, and a label boss with firm ideas about form. Then it took shape again, in the catalogue. In 1996 the Factory Once series reissued the early albums in new sleeves by 8vo, designed as homages to the originals, and those sleeves have travelled with the records ever since. Factory Benelux has rebuilt sessions left in a drawer, doubled albums with live recordings, restored an abridged live album to the full ninety-minute performance. On 31 July 2026 London Records put *Vini Reilly* back in the shops on the same day *Renascent* came out, the first new album in sixteen years. Whoever listens to The Durutti Column meets them already curated. What follows adds one more arrangement, openly: five listening pairs, each setting two recordings side by side so that a hand becomes audible. Reilly’s touch is the constant, recognisable after a handful of notes. Everything else, heard in pairs, stops sounding like garnish. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6b/c4/6bc44280-60e0-4784-b78b-3377713d3254/content/images/2026/10/Ragazzo-accovacciato-in-una-stanza-vintage-1.png) ### I. “Conduct” and “Jacqueline” *The Return of the Durutti Column* came out on Factory in January 1980, in the famous sandpaper sleeve. Accounts of the record tend to stop there, at the situationist gesture, at the object that scratches its neighbours on the shelf. Inside was Martin Hannett, who handled recorded space as something to compose with. “Conduct” should be heard for its distances. A phrase seems to come closer, then the sound sets it down somewhere else; the guitar has an almost tactile clarity while the room around it changes size without warning. You picture a private performance, and the room was built at the mixing desk. The seasonal titles, “Sketch for Summer” first among them, encouraged the idea of a music that grew by itself, like grass after rain. Follow the attacks, the tails, the way the planes are kept apart, and you start counting the decisions that hold that naturalness up. “Jacqueline”, on *LC* (November 1981), comes from somewhere else. The material had been born at home, at night, and was later worked on at Graveyard Studios with Stewart Pickering; Hannett was gone, Reilly added piano, and Bruce Mitchell came in on drums and percussion. Two compositions, two rooms, two years: the difference between them can’t be pinned on one person. Still, the pair leaves an impression hard to shake, of a designed space giving way to an inhabited one, with less artificial depth, more of a room’s air, and a second musician breathing alongside the guitar. On the same record “The Missing Boy”, written for Ian Curtis, carries Reilly’s uncertain voice. It comes in when the instruments have already said enough, and that very insufficiency introduces a friction the guitar would have smoothed away with too much grace. ### II. “Duet” and *Without Mercy* *Amigos em Portugal* appeared on Fundação Atlântica in 1983, with dedications and proper names that sketch a geography of friends between Lisbon and Estoril. Those who know it only through the tracks added to reissues of *Another Setting* get a different story; the form in which a record reaches us has already been chosen by somebody else. That November Reilly recorded in Brussels with Blaine L. Reininger, Alain Lefebvre and Anne van den Troost, among others. The record, *Short Stories for Pauline*, was shelved when Wilson decided that one of its pieces, “Duet”, should be developed into a whole album. *Without Mercy* came out of it in 1984\. The Brussels sessions were released in full only in 2012, by Factory Benelux. It is the most instructive pair in the discography, because here the outside hand decides the form itself. In “Duet” an idea has found its compact form. Someone standing next to Reilly heard a larger work in it, imagined more instruments, asked for development; the catalogue grew, and for almost thirty years the setting in which the idea had first taken shape went missing. *Without Mercy* pushes the language towards the chamber suite, and makes you follow returning themes and passages between timbres. It works where the expanded arrangement creates friction: instruments looking for each other, a phrase coming back with a different weight, the guitar forced to elbow out some room. Elsewhere the ensemble grows too attentive, a host who fills your glass before you have finished, and the emotion arrives before it has been prepared. Hearing “Duet” first makes that eagerness measurable. You hear how much of an idea’s strength depends on its size, and the answer shifts from one movement to the next. ### III. “Sketch for Summer”, 1980 and 1985 On 25 April 1985 the group played Kan’i Hoken Hall in Tokyo: Reilly on guitar, piano and voice, Mitchell on percussion, xylophone and drum machine, Tim Kellett on trumpet, John Metcalfe on viola. The concert opened with “Sketch for Summer”, the piece that five years earlier had opened the first album. Played next to the studio version, it lets you hear what a body does to a sketch. In 1980 the piece floated inside a space shaped at the desk, timeless almost by design. In Tokyo it has a hall, an audience, three other people who have to come in at the right moment, and a length that has to be held from the stage. The phrasing loses some of its weightlessness and gains a pulse that comes from someone sitting behind a kit, deciding when to hold a beat back. The record that reached the shops is a curated object in its own right. The original mix was done in a hurry, overnight, before the band flew home; Wilson appears among the engineers, and the album became Factory’s first CD-only release in Britain, while Japan also received a vinyl edition. In 2017 the soundboard tapes were remastered and the concert restored to its original running order, about ninety minutes, with pieces such as “Conduct” and “Never Known” coming back from the cut. The *Domo Arigato* many listeners grew up with was, in other words, a night’s edit of a longer evening. ### IV. “Otis” and “Otis (No Samples)” Machines came first. For Christmas 1985 Wilson gave Reilly a set of electronic instruments; Reilly later spoke about the effort of learning them and finding his own way with a sequencer, and *The Guitar and Other Machines* (1987, produced by Stephen Street) is the result. Some of its sounds still carry their purchase date. For *Vini Reilly*, released in March 1989 and again produced by Street, the working title was *The Durutti Column Sampler*. Reilly described the method precisely: collect loops and voices, then bend them until the sample sang his melody. “Otis” is where the procedure is most exposed. A recognisable voice takes a new place in the arrangement and carries a history the record leaves untold. The reissues, in 2024 and again in 2026, set the version without samples beside it. Whatever the reason for including it, the effect is curatorial: the catalogue now offers the piece with and without the voices of others. The two are best heard back to back, in either order, listening for what changes in the guitar once the people it was talking to have left the room. The comparison lets you separate what the instrumental part holds up by itself from what it borrows from the fragment. It also shows the risk the fragment carried, a ready-made intensity, and how much work went into making it sit there. The choice of voices belongs to the composition as much as any chord, and once they are taken away the piece becomes a sketch of itself. The following years kept to the same line. *Obey the Time* (December 1990) took on house and techno and, according to Factory Benelux’s reissue notes, the harmonic possibilities of sampled, transposed chords. In April 1995, talking to *Keyboard*, Reilly explained that he recorded the guitar straight into the sampler, and remembered a thunderstorm taped from his window for *Sex and Death*. *Fidelity* (Les Disques du Crépuscule, 1996) handed production and programming to Laurie Lexicon and two songs to the voice of Eley Rudge; its polished surface at times makes it hard to hear why some pieces needed to exist. ![Vini Reilly](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6b/c4/6bc44280-60e0-4784-b78b-3377713d3254/content/images/2026/10/Giovane-uomo-nel-salotto-vintage-2.jpeg) ### *V. A Paean to Wilson and Renascent* From 1998, with *Time Was Gigantic… When We Were Kids*, Keir Stewart takes on a production role that over the years becomes central. In 2003 *Someone Else’s Party*, dedicated to Reilly’s mother, lets grief pass through the voice of Rebekah Del Rio lifted from *Mulholland Drive*, one more voice arriving with its own scene still attached. *A Paean to Wilson* came out on Kooky in January 2010 and grew around the death of the man who had decided the shape of *Without Mercy*, and had engineered the night mix in Tokyo. It opens on Wilson’s own voice, looped, asking whether this music is an art or merely a technique. Stewart produces, mixes and masters; Mitchell is executive producer, on drums and marimba; the writing is credited to all three. Poppy Morgan plays piano, Kate Williamson and Ruby Morgan sing, the Livingstone Chamber Ensemble plays strings arranged by Ian Livingstone and Stewart. Kellett is on trumpet and Metcalfe on viola, the same two who stood beside Reilly on the Tokyo stage twenty-five years before. Reilly himself never sings. The record is uneven, and its unevenness is a matter of arrangement: around the guitar sit parts written by people who had known that guitar for decades, and each piece answers the question of how close to stand. “Brother” is usually named as the album’s emotional peak. It runs past eight minutes on a looped fragment of Marvin Gaye, and the same fragment returns, almost unchanged, in “The Truth” near the end; much of what moves the listener there arrives already moving, carried in from another record, and the guitar is left to agree with it. The distance is right in “Along Came Poppy”, where Reilly leaves the guitar for the piano and Kellett’s trumpet takes the line. For four minutes the man the record is built around steps aside, and the others don’t fill the gap so much as hold it open. It is the one moment on the album where the question of proximity is answered by the guitarist himself, by absence. [*Renascent*](https://www.hwaelmag.com/the-durutti-column-renascent/), produced by Stewart, arrived sixteen years later, and we have written about it at length. Two facts from its credits belong here. Mitchell plays on two tracks only, “Agonistes” and “Your Shadow at Evening”, so the drummer who stayed for forty-five years is present as a name on most of the record and as a hand on two pieces, and that proportion is itself a decision. And “For Friends Everywhere” closes the vinyl by rebuilding “For Belgian Friends”, a piece from 1980 that was also in the running order in Tokyo in 1985, as a chamber piece with strings, clarinet and horn gathered around the old melody. The title moves from a place to everywhere, and the band curates its own catalogue from the inside. Heard after *Paean*, *Renascent* shows the work of those who stayed, and part of that work is knowing when to be absent. On the same day, in the shops, the reissue of *Vini Reilly* stood beside it. That summer Meltdown gave the band a tribute called *For Vini*. Producers, reissue labels, designers, tribute programmers: the catalogue of others keeps gaining names, and Reilly’s guitar keeps arriving through their hands. RECORDS ON THE TRACE / 01 01 02 03 04 05 1980 · FACT 14 · FACTORY *The Return of the Durutti Column* The credits list Pete Crooks on bass, Toby Toman on drums and Martin Hannett on "switches". The first two thousand copies came with a flexi disc of two pieces signed by the producer alone. As Reilly remembers it, the people who glued the sandpaper onto the sleeves were Joy Division. 1981 · FACT 44 · FACTORY *LC* The two letters stand for Lotta Continua, the Italian far-left movement and its slogan, the struggle goes on. The most private record in the catalogue carries the initials of a collective organisation. The tour that followed took the group to Italy and Spain, among other countries. 1987 · FACT 204 · FACTORY *The Guitar and Other Machines* The machines included the format itself: the album is remembered as the first commercial release on Digital Audio Tape. To promote it, Factory pressed ten thousand flexi discs for countertop boxes in record shops. The digital tape and the thinnest plastic in the catalogue went out together. 1989 · FACT 244 · FACTORY *Vini Reilly* On the record that carries his name Reilly never sings. The sampled voices belong to Otis Redding, Tracy Chapman, Annie Lennox and Joan Sutherland, named in the reissue notes as his father's favourite singer. Beside them is Liu Sola, the only voice that doesn't come from another record. 2026 · LONDON RECORDS *Renascent* Keir Stewart says he still feels like the new boy, nearly three decades in. Much of the record grew out of informal sessions in Reilly's kitchen, with Mitchell and Stewart in the room. "For Friends Everywhere" is, by Stewart's account, the Durutti Column piece that took longest to finish. The sixth pair is left to the reader. Next time you put on *LC*, hold “Jacqueline” back for a few minutes and play “Future Perfect”, from *Fidelity*, first: its length, the voice of Eley Rudge, the programmed backing. Then go back to 1981, to Mitchell’s percussion under a guitar recorded at night, and listen for what the fingers kept between the two tracks, and what they learned to share. --- [Durutti Column is on bandcamp](https://thedurutticolumn.bandcamp.com/?ref=hwaelmag.com) --- Last revised: October 2026 ---