People, Places, Products and Praxis

“And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. Now that’s finished. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.”

Christopher Gray Leaving the 20th Century
(with text appropriated from the Formulary for
a New Urbanism by Ivan Chtcheglov)

R is for Vini Reilly

The Durutti Column took their name from Spanish revolutionary Buenaventura Durruti. Another inspiration for the name of the group was Le Retour de la Colonne Durutti, which was a 4-page Situationist comic by Andre Bertrand, given away at Strasbourg University in October 1966. The image of the two Situationist cowboys from Le Retour de la Colonne Durutti was also used, in a slightly modified version, on a poster, Fac 3.11, given away to members of the now defunct ‘Durutti Database’.



Vini Reilly

Centred around Vini Reilly, a classically-trained pianist and virtuoso guitarist, the then five-piece band recorded two tracks for A Factory Sample, Fac 2, the first music release on Factory Records. The band’s debut album, released in 1980, The Return of the Durutti Column, Fact 14, featured a sleeve made of sandpaper; this, like the title of the record, was inspired by a Situationist joke: an artist’s book made by the French artist and theorist Guy Debord in collaboration with the Danish artist Asger Jorn, Mémoires – which had a sandpaper cover, designed to destroy other books on the shelf (The sandpaper sheets, glued by hand – by a strapped-for-cash Joy Division – to the cover of fact 14, dried in warped peaks and troughs and were potentially even more damaging to other records).



Fact 144 The Durutti Column Domo Arigato 1985

Always at the forefront of technology thanks to Factory’s innovative – but sometimes misguided – policies, The Durutti Column released the first CD-only popular music album with their album Domo Arigato, Fact 144, recorded live in Tokyo. Later, The Guitar and Other Machines, fact 104, was the first ever commercially available album to be released on Digital Audio Tape. Perversely it was also promoted with a 7-inch flexi-disc – a relic of a bygone age. In 1995, the Factory Too album Sex and Death, Facd 2.01 also appeared in interactive CD-Rom format.



Fac 214 The Durutti Column The Guitar and Other Marketing Devices 1989

Musical experimentation, too, has always been the keynote of The Durutti Column’s music. Able to flit from classical on Without Mercy, Fact 84 to house on Obey The Time, Fact 274 via opera on Vini Reilly, Fact 244, it has never been possible to pin Vini Reilly down. Tony Wilson recalls trying to discourage Vini from singing on Durutti Column releases (his voice is, famously, an acquired taste) by getting him an Akai S500 sampler: “It’s expression and you can’t forbid it; it’s his dance. And there are even Durutti fans who like Vini’s singing. But they’re off their heads. and there are things you can do, like get him a sampler and stand back. Which is what we did, and we stood back in amazement.”
Texts and images re-structured from various sources - respect and thanks to those I have sampled. The output of Factory Records inspired me as a teenager and still inspires and informs me today: thank you, Tony Wilson.
Contact: afactoryalphabet@hotmail.com