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”.
