Durutti Column

[Robert Stanzel <apollo!rps@WONKO.MIT.EDU>]

Tempus Fugit...  a Durutti Column discography

01 *FAC2 (A Factory Sampler) 1978
    ?

02  FAC14 (The Return of the Durutti Column) +CD 4/79
    Sketch for Summer, Requiem for a Father, Katharine, Conduct
    Beginning, Jazz, Sketch for Winter, Collette, In "D"

03  FBN5 [Factory Benelux] 12" 6/80
    Lips that Would Kiss (Form Prayers to Broken Stone), Madeleine

04  TWI007 Crepescule (From Brussels With Love) double album+cassette+CD 6/80
    Jez & Vini - Sleep Will Come [w/Jeremy Kerr of ACR],
    Weakness and Fear [album only],
    Piece for an Ideal ["It's true, one won't deny, in these difficult times,
        one doesn't die for an ideal.  Vini Reilly wrote this piece of music
        on Halloween.  He was very cold."]

05  FAC24A (A Factory Quartet) double EP 12/80
    For Mimi, For Belgian Friends, Self-portrait

06 *Sordide Sentimale limited 7" 3/81
    Danny, ?

07  FBN10 (Deux Triangles) 12" 1982
    Favourite Painting, Zinni, Piece for Out of Tune Grande Piano

08  FAC44 (LC) +CD 11/81
    Sketch for Dawn 1, Portrait for Frazer, Jacqueline, Messidor,
    Sketch for Dawn 2, Never Known, The Act Committed, Detail for Paul,
    The Missing Boy, The Sweet Cheat Gone

09  FAC74 (Another Setting) +CD 12/82
    Prayer, Response, Bordeaux, For A Western, The Beggar, Francesca,
    Smile in the Crowd, Dream of a Child, Spent Time, You've Heard it Before,
    Second Family

10  RedFlame22B (Anne Clark - Hope in a Darkened Heart) 4/83
    Echoes Remain Forever, All Night Party, Pandora's Box, Feel,
    The Last Emotion [VR wrote/performed the music, AC wrote/spoke the words]

11  Fundacao Atlantica (Amigos em Portugal/Dedications for Jacqueline) 11/83
    Amigos em Portugal [Friends in Portugal], Menina ao pe duma Piscina
    [Girl Near a Pool], Lisboa [Lisbon], Sara e Tristana [Sarah and Tristan],
    Estoril a Noite [Estoril at Night (Estoril is a town near Lisbon)],
    Vestido Amarrotado [Crumpled Dress], Wheels Turning, Lies of Mercy,
    Saudade, Games of Rhythm, Favourite Descending Intervals, To End With

[  *Live at the Venue, London (bootleg) 1984 ]

12  FAC84 (Without Mercy + Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say) +CD 6/84
    Without Mercy I, Without Mercy II, Goodbye, The Room, A Little Mercy,
    Silence, E.E., Hello

13 *FAC114 (SWYM, MWYS) 12" EP 6/84

14  FACD144 (Domo Arigato [Live in Tokyo]) CD+video 4/85
    Sketch for Summer, Sketch for Dawn, Mercy Theme, Little Mercy,
    Jacqueline, Dream of a Child, Mercy Dance, The Room, E.E.,
    Blind Elevator Girl, Tomorrow, Belgian Friends, Missing Boy,
    Self Portrait, <Audience Noise>

15  FBN36 (Circuses and Bread) +CD 4/85
    Pauline, Tomorrow, Dance II, Hilary, Street Fight, Royal Infirmary,
    Black Horses, Dance I, Blind Elevator Girl (Osaka)

16  FBN51 12" 1985
    Tomorrow [15-2], Tomorrow [14-11], All That Love and Maths Can Do

17  Materiali Sonari (Greetings Three) EP 1986
    Florence Sunset [similar to 15-3], All That Love and Maths Can Do,
    San Giovanni Dawn, For Friends in Italy

18  FAC164 (Valuable Passages) +CD Compilation 1986
    2-1, 2-4, 2-7, 3-1, 5-2, 6-1, [7-3,] 8-6, 8-3, 8-9, 9-1, 9-9,
    12-excerpts, 13-1, [?14-9,] 15-2

19  ROIR A152 (Live at the Bottom Line, NYC) cassette 10/86
    Arpeggiator, Our Lady of the Angels, Pol in B, Miss Haymes, For Mother
    Requiem, Jacqueline, Elevator Sequence, Missing Boy, Tomorrow

20  FAC184 (The City of Our Lady) 12" 1987
    Our Lady of the Angels, White Rabbit [Grace Slick cover], Catos con Guantes

21  FACD194 +CDV 1987
    Our Lady of the Angels, When the World (Newsome Mix), Catos con Guantes

[   Morrissey (Viva Hate) Winter 1987 -- VR & John Metcalfe personnel ]

22  FAC/Virgin (The Guitar and Other Machines) +CD 1988
    Arpeggiator, What Is It to Me (Woman), Red Shoes, Jongleur Grey,
    When the World, U.S.P., Bordeaux Sequence, Pol in B,
    English Landscape Tradition [similar to 19-8], Miss Haymes,
    Don't Think You're Funny [CD missing child's blurt at end] //
    Dream Topping, You Won't Feel Out of Place, 28 Oldham Place
    [ 12, 13 w/Jeremy Kerr of ACR ]

--
* I don't have these, and I'd welcome information about them or anything
else I've missed, modulo gratuitous redundancies like the 4-cd album set.
I know there's at least one more cut available on Crepuscule compilations
but I don't have the info, and there are tantalizing references to four
other cuts in the copious Japanese CD booklet notes; alas, yomimasen.


-----

"Durutti Column's Beautiful Anarchy"
Interview by Maria V Montgomery, Option 1-2/87

Formed in Manchester, England in 1978, Durutti Column were one of the
first non-punk underground bands to emerge from the aftermath of the
British punk explosion.  Over the better part of a decade they've
charted the far reaches of ambient pop in various lineups, the one
constant being guitarist Vini Reilly.  Originally a five-piece, the
band had boiled down to just Reilly by the time Martin Hannett
produced the first Durutti Column LP in 1979.  Afterward, Reilly began
his partnership with percussionist Bruce Mitchell, adding piano and
voice to his repertoire on the albums "L.C." and "Another Setting".
In 1984 Durutti Column added spare brass and strings for "Without
Mercy", a musical setting for the Keats poem.  An elegant form of pop
was also the order of the day on 1986's "Circuses and Bread", though
the group here was reduced to four pieces, with John Metcalfe (viola)
and Tim Kellett (trumpet) joining the Reilly-Mitchell duo.

Throughout these shifts, the one constant has been the delicate, spare
and haunting quality of Vini Reilly's music.  With his plucked
guitars, gentle keyboards, and velvety timbres, Reilly evokes a kind
of post-modern chamber music that bows to no trends.  Musically
treading the fine line between preciouness and pungency, Durutti
Column continues to shift personnel and expand its instrumental
approach.  Reilly in particular has begun to experiment with
sequencers and other digital equipment.  We spoke to Reilly at the
L.A.  stop of the group's US tour in November.


    How did you come to use Durutti Column as a name for your work?

There was a guy called Buenoventuri Durutti and Durutti was a Spanish
anarchist.  His anarchist brigade during the Spanish Civil War was a
bit unusual.  One of his ideas was when he went through a town, he
razed the whole town to the ground, everything.  His idea was that you
had to start again from the beginning, just leave nothing at all.  And
then there's a group called the Situationists International, who were
kind of an anarchist group.  They've been going for years and years.
And they organize various kinds of events like, kind of demonstrations
almost, but not the silly march sort of...  a bit arty, actually.
Their ideas weren't so new, they kind of applied it to... an example
is a slogan they use, "Music is the best commodity.  It's the one that
helps us all be ordered."  The way that music and art is sort of used
by the media and business.  They sort of used the Durutti Column as a
metaphor for their activities.

Malcolm MacLaren, who was managing the Pistols, and the designer of
the Pistols' posters and clothes and all that, Jamie Reed, were into
Situationism.  And in fact, a poster for "Holidays in the Sun" is
taken straight out of Situationists International.  All the designs,
all the ideas, were the Situationists'.  They just applied them to
rock.  Because rock at that time was just totally controlled by
businessmen.  You just had no opportunity.  If you went to a record
company and they actually did listen to a tape, if the tape didn't
sound like something that was already proven to sell, then they
weren't interested in you at all.  So all musicians were controlled,
music was controlled and very stagnant.

The big thing about punk was independent labels.  Independent labels
meant that almost anyone could make a record.  And suddenly, for maybe
six months, music was back in the hands of musicians.  That was
wonderful, a wonderful six months.  But then, the independents
gradually started to sell out to the majors, so you could say, after
six months, it was more or less destroyed.  It's like any revolution,
at the end it's always absorbed by the mass market, exploited and
disarmed, made useless.

In 1978, we finally realized, we're back to square one, it was dead.
There were all sorts of punk bands, all over, screaming about being on
the dole, and they're actually doing it to make money.  I thought I'd
do what I really wanted to do, which was my own music, which I had
always been doing, for years and years.  To return to the original
anarchic ideas, to do what you wanted to do.  So hence the title
Durutti Column.

    Did you want to raze everything?

It's not so much that.  The idea is not to even bother competing.  We
don't even want to play that game.  So we're just going to ignore the
whole thing and do what we want to do.  Actually how it happend was
Tony Wilson, [the director] of Factory Records, was left a legacy from
his mother's death of 2000 pounds, and with that he paid for the
initial pressings of FAC1, a poster, and FAC2, a Factory sampler, a
double EP I suppose, with a track from Joy Division, a track by
Durutti Column, Cabaret Voltaire.

    What about the album "Amigos En Portugal?"

What's sad was that there was this guy, Miguel, a Portuguese man,
studying in Manchester, writing a thesis on music, who befriended Tony
Wilson and myself.  He was a very nice man.  Then it was time for him
to go back to Portugal and he said that he wanted to start his own
independent label to help Portuguese musicians.  They booked the
studio time, it was originally eight hours, and then twelve hours.
That was the album, recorded and mixed in twelve hours.  It's very
very simple.  So they get an album for a very small amount of money,
outright, and made a lot of money from it.  It's still distributed.
It's still in all the shops.  And we never received a penny from it.
They also used that to establish themselves as a record company.  I
mean, that would have been fine, at least these young Portuguese
musicians, who are very poor, would get something.  But I found out
that they ripped off their own musicians.  That's the bad part.

    Didn't you release some of the same music later on, with a
    different percussion track?

I was very annoyed, because the whole reason d'etre of doing that was
to help these Portuguese musicans.  So I wanted to reclaim my music.
That album was Tony Wilson saying to me, "You've done so many albums
the way you wanted to do them, and when you wanted to do them, so just
this once make this my record and do it my way."  He's one of my best
friends, so of course I said yeah.  And that's "Without Mercy."  There
were all these studio classical musicians involved.  For me it doesn't
actually work.  It was more of a learning process really.

    I was also curious about that one piece, "All That Love and Maths
    Can Do," from your recent EP.

I'm very pleased with that.  This guy called John Metcalfe was the
viola player.  He was studying in Manchester.  At that point he was
probably the top viola player in Manchester.  Now he's based in
London, still studying.  We were in a tiny tiny studio, the kind you
do demo tapes in, just a real cheap studio.  I got John in and we
recorded some tunes.  And that was one of them.  All I was doing was
this guitar riff.  That was actually John's piece of music.  He never
heard the pieces of music before, it just came.  That was used for a
12-inch for Factory Benelux.  I actually wanted to give him dual
writing credit, but they had already got all the work done.

    When you write music, do you ever do as he did at that moment?
    Are you inspired, or is it an arduous process of going over
    something many times?

No, it's not actually work.  The music really writes itself.  What
happens is, it's like some kind of romanticizing.  It seems a bit
silly.  For example, we're in Osaka, in Japan, getting in this
elevator.  It's very crowded with all these Japanese businessmen
talking about distribution deals, and going on and on.  On this lift
was a beautiful Japanese girl, in an immaculate uniform.  Each floor
we arrived at, she starting talking Japanese, obviously saying what
was on each floor.  And we went higher and higher, and finally we get
to the top.  And then, sort of walking out the elevator, I suddenly
realized she was blind.  She could not see a thing.  It really really
upset me, not because she was blind.  What got to me was, that if I
was blind, to say this is my world, to be stuck in a box all day.  I
mean, she was pretty intelligent.  If it was me I'd do myself in, I
couldn't handle it at all.  Whereas she was doing it as well as she
could do it.  It was just remarkable.  It was like the ultimate
demonstration of the human spirit.  It got to me, this girl.  It was
incredible, I was actually crying in the massive hotel in Osaka.  So
maybe a day later, I was thinking about that, and the whole tune came
out.  And every single piece of music is like that.  The only one
that's different is a tune called "Requiem For Father," which was, my
father died when I was 17, and it took me a long long time to write
this music.

    Do you like to have an emotional reaction from your audience?

If it happens, yeah.  It does happen quite a lot.  People say it's a
bit sort of psuedo classical, what you do sometimes, why don't you
play classical gigs?  And we've done classical gigs in the past.  And
it's all been taken seriously and people said nice things.  But you
see, I can't bear it, it's awful.

    People have a hard time with music they can't put a convenient
    label on.

I get a bit frustrated.  The nearest thing people can find to label it
is ambient music, or new age music, which is just sort of boring.  A
great example would be the ECM label.  There's an Argentinian guy who
plays a bandoneon, and he's called Dino Saluzzi.  And someone gave me
a tape of this guy the first time we were in Japan, three years ago.
And this tape was just ridiculously good.  It was just beautiful,
there were beautiful melodies, I don't know what label it was on, some
obscure label.  The next thing I know is that there's an ECM record.
And I bought the ECM record and it's like every single other ECM
record.  Suddenly there's no melody, there's no actual piece of music,
it all sort of drifts along in big long spaces.  It's the same thing
as like the ECM bass player and drummer doing their mindless ECM bass
playing and drum thing.  They destroyed it.

    Who are the people working with you?

Bruce Mitchell is the drummer.  He's a bit like a big brother.  What
happened was that I was looking for a drummer.  I had played with just
about every drummer in Manchester.  The drummer, bass player and
trumpet player I had are now playing with Simply Red.  I tried just
about every drummer that was going and then I saw Bruce around, but I
never really knew him.  He was sort of a legendary character in
Manchester.  I asked him to play on a record for this French guy on
this label Sordide Sentimental.  That was like a special record, and I
wanted it to be right.  It was commissioned because this guy, Jean
Pierre Turmel, his girlfriend was dying of leukemia.  All lovers have
their special record, and theirs was "The Return of the Durutti
Column."  So he rang me up, and I was in Belgium, and he asked me to
do a record for his girlfriend, not as a kind of requiem but as a
celebration.  So it's not sad.  So I wanted a drummer who was
interesting.  Bruce lived, although I didn't know, about two doors
from Factory Records.  So I went, and before I even finished the
question, he said yes.  Then three months later I was actually living
in his house with him and his wife and his children.  And it was like
family, a very nice relationship.  Now I have my own place, but I'm
still just around the corner from Bruce and his wife and family.

And John Metcalfe, who... we had a brass section to do the album
"Without Mercy" from the Manchester Northern College of Music, and we
were using a viola player named Blaine Reininger from Tuxedomoon.  But
he wasn't good for some stuff, so the brass section kind of...  John
Metcalfe was a fan of Durutti Column, he had gotten everything we had
done, I didn't know this until quite recently, but the brass section
said they knew this viola player who might be interested.  In fact the
whole thing was rigged by the brass section to get their friend into
Durutti Column.  It worked out really well.  John is quite amazing.
This is not your standard classically trained viola player, this is
quite an unusually gifted player.  He dresses like a complete tramp.
He's an English eccentric, that sums him up.  He's really really wild.
To have the combination of someone who's so clever and so good and yet
who's a wacky guy and can go on the road with us is enjoyable.

-----

Liner notes to ROIR A-152 "The Durutti Column Live at the Bottom Line,
New York" a.h.wilson [tony wilson, manager of d.c. and factory]

it began, most of it on the 24th January, 1978.  I don't remember the
weather, just my accountant asking me why I was so poor, and he was
talking about groups, the ones I put on t.v. at 'granada', the ones
his daughter had told him became rich and famous just a few months
later.  maybe he knew that old line from joyce "a merchant is he who
buys cheap and sells dear, be he gentile or jew".  my accountant was
jewish and I was a catholic, and I knew that there's nowt as cheap as
avant-garde art when it's young, and nowt as dear when it gets to
auction.  and I remember driving that night to see some friends who'd
just been thrown out of their group, that was dave and chris, one of
whom, years later would lay down his beat for hucknall to dance on.
and their manager erasmus had been wiped out in the coup.  and I said
I'll join the team, and then there were four.  and it was the fifth
that this tape is all about.  we needed a lead guitarist.  two nights
later erasmus took me to a big victorian family house in
south-manchester.  there was this guitarist -- he was living with his
girlfriend in her father's house.  I remember the room -- it was
white, that's all I remember, and vini, vini reilly.  those frail
features -- as frail nine years on.  he didn't play any guitar.  it
seemed irrelevant.  his music would clearly be him and he was in.  the
fifth.  the dominant fifth.  and so we tried to build a group, adding
bass and voice, rehearsing in a scout hut through spring of 1978.  we
took our name from a situationist poster compaign that had happened in
strasbourg at the dawn of the last revolution, 11 years before.  no
real reason, except wilfulness, in our music, in our politics, in our
scout hut.  and who was to know -- it might make people aware of the
two horsemen, and as it happened, it did ("art forum", 1986, greil
marcus).  from then on it was praxis all the way.  a venue was
required.  no stale or pre-owned room, we took a black club in hulme
for a bunch of friday nights.  and called it the factory.  "no-one
will come" they said.  they were of course, wrong.  a record was
required and we took our lead from the being-born post-punk
mercantilism, from boone and last and ryan and the rest.  and so there
was a record label.  and it was called factory records.  but there was
no 'durutti column'.  by the time we got to plastic the group had
exploded in the kind of management-musician strife that makes it all
such fun.  I think the row was about producers.  it was probably about
personalities.  the musos split.  I haven't talked to the bass player
for eight years.  I see his videos on m.t.v. -- but I don't talk to
him.  what remained in the cold winter of '78 was 2 managers, an
obscure advert for a bizarre offshoot of the anarchist canon and a
sick guitarist.  vini specialises in being ill, playing guitar like no
one else in the world, and being ill.  he was ill then.  anorexia
would be a gross oversimplification, sensitivity, idle flattery, he
was ill.  and there was no band.  and then, as it would happen, a
little wilfulness.  an album without a group, an album in which a
man/boy who could play the guitar, played the guitar.  and martin
hannett, the finest producer in the world in that year, 1978, coaxing
obscure beat box sounds out of a primitive sequencer.  "the return of
the durutti column" it was called.  it started what is still
unfinished, the durutti column, and the musical life of vini reilly.
if I have to choose a memory or two here -- these "roir" people seem
to like multiple fold out liners -- I would choose the room full of
semen.  the first 2,000 copies of the aforementioned album were
packaged in sandpaper, a marketing device that really fucked on the
opposition.  each white cardboard liner had to have two 12" square
pieces of sandpaper gummed on.  "joy division" were low on cash at the
time and volunteered at a reasonable piece-rate.  they did it on the
big table in the factory flat, while a porn movie played on the v.h.s.
-- brush fulls of white mucus paste slapped onto the flesh coloured
abrasive.  slap, slap, suck, hour after hour, a fine memory.  you
could have the night in helsinki, when a grand piano wheeled from the
wings brought vini back to the instrument he deserted at 15.  the boy
had wanted to grow the fingernails of his right hand.  wilfulness you
see.  or the night in tokyo when we couldn't get served our nippon
stew cause the little waitress was having a fit that "vinee" was in
_her_ restaurant.  or in l.a. playing "white rabbit" note perfect,
first take after the briefest of acquaintances with the airplane
original; genius or party game; party game and genius.  or in my home
looking after my little son who, adores him.  the two of them walking
in the park, pals.  or every time he's ever played "missing boy",
old-man mitchell on the drums belying his years, and reilly embracing
them and pinning them to.  memories.  for you here, one night in new
york.  I wasn't there; I'm an l.a.  boy now.  This is someone else's
memory.  I'm sure it's one they won't forget.