Durutti Column

Like a dead bird in the dirt

Like a rusty can on the ground

I don’t believe in stardom

Machinery in action

Full of experts

Same old order

It was 40 years ago, in November 1981, that one of the most significant and influential albums in the English music scene was released: "LC" by Durutti Column. Behind this moniker lay the talent of Vincent "Vini" Reilly, a guitarist and composer who, emerging from the English post-punk scene, transcended the genre's typical sound to create a dreamlike, melodious musical expression, pioneering in anticipating several traits of later genres such as dream-pop and post-rock.

His music places strong emphasis on instrumental progressions, most evident on the debut "The Return Of The Durutti Column", where all the attention is on guitar and rhythm section, which build the atmospheres and carry the artist's message. There are no vocal parts on the first album, which instead appear precisely on "LC", though not on every track and never overshadowing the instruments. Another difference is that the arrangements tend to be more refined, without ever veering into the baroque. The debut is simply a bit more essential, while on the second album the English artist adds a series of sonic details, having broken the ice. But the most substantial difference lies in the replacement of the drum machine with real drums, courtesy of the talented Bruce Mitchell: a dynamic, precise jazz drummer with a firm but never heavy-handed touch, who would become one of Reilly's closest friends and who lends colour, vitality, even verve, without clashing with the underlying melancholy, but accompanying it.

Reilly came of age within the post-punk and new wave milieu, and that heritage is most perceptible in the rhythm section, with the pulsing bass played by the multi-instrumentalist himself. The closest points of contact are, in all likelihood, with Joy Division, and for good reason: Reilly was for a long time Ian Curtis's flatmate, with whom he had forged a solid, brotherly friendship. When the tormented Curtis took his own life in 1980, driven by severe depression and the epileptic seizures that plagued him, Reilly, who himself suffered from serious depressive episodes, was deeply shaken. The gorgeous "The Missing Boy", perhaps the peak not only of "LC" but of the English artist's entire career, is dedicated to his late friend: a hypnotic tribute to a companion in music and in mental suffering alike, built on reverbed guitars, a mournful, desolate voice and an exceptional pulsing drumbeat courtesy of the magnificent Mitchell. The melancholy here is more vibrant; rather than sounding defeated and bleak, it almost seems to reaffirm the will to keep Ian Curtis alive in everyone's memory.

But Durutti Column are not simply a post-punk band, unless one wishes to lump under that label the countless groups and movements that emerged from the 80s onward. At first glance, seeing the name, one might expect something subversive: the project's name, in fact, refers (with a misspelling) to the Durruti Column, an irregular anarchist militia that fought during the Spanish Civil War. The militia in turn took its name from the revolutionary José Buenaventura Durruti Dumange, who had founded it. Vini Reilly seems to have been quite fascinated by the far left, so much so that the album's title, "LC", is an acronym for Lotta Continua, the Italian extra-parliamentary group active between the 60s and 70s. And yet his compositions have nothing of the explosiveness or subversive charge one might expect. His albums are far removed from genres with similar ideological connotations, such as anarcho-punk or certain hardcore-punk strands inspired by left-wing political activism. Instead, his music is ethereal and delicate, built from layered guitars drenched in delay, arpeggios, glissando touches, even jazz-derived counterpoints and harmonisations (partly stemming from Reilly's classical training too) and contrasting moods, blending sunlit melodies with veils of melancholy. "LC" is thus an intimate, tender and moving work.

The distinctive tone Reilly adopted for his guitar, as well as the compositions themselves — made of melodious phrasing touched with atmospheric effects — anticipates the trademark sound of Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins, considered the founding fathers of that genre, itself an evolution of post-punk, which would soon come to be called dream-pop. The albums released under the Durutti Column name, "LC" above all, are to all intents and purposes forerunners of it: there are clear similarities with records released shortly after by the Scottish band, such as "Garlands" and "Treasure". As mentioned, Durutti Column's melancholy is more vibrant and less desolate than that of bands like Joy Division: to weigh up the affinities and differences, compare their songs, starting with "The Missing Boy", against the far more spectral "The Eternal", one of the defining statements of Ian Curtis's band, which would go on to inspire darkwave and goth-rock rather than dream-pop (which followed a parallel track from shared roots). Cocteau Twins were initially very much a darkwave band, but their transformation can be said to owe something to the path traced by Durutti Column, who sound like a dawn contemplated in solitude as a way of fleeing the funeral echoing in one's own head, acting as a sonic bridge.

The tightly-bound relationship between Ian Curtis and Vini Reilly thus becomes all the more significant, having provided artistic inspiration for entire scenes and movements to come, in a crisscrossing web of references, convergences and reciprocal divergences.

Both directly and indirectly, the echoes of Durutti Column would go on to live in bands like Slowdive, Galaxie 500, Low, My Bloody Valentine, influencing on multiple levels a generation of neo-psychedelic, slowcore and shoegaze artists. Compare "The Missing Boy" once more with a track like Slowdive's "Souvlaki Space Station", this time not to highlight differences but similarities, in particular the reverbed opening attack and the bittersweet contrast of the arrangements, present in both.

Even from the cover of "LC", a seemingly childlike watercolour combining warm and cool tones, one can glimpse Reilly's sensibility. The metaphorical links with painting also surface in some of the track titles, as with the marvellous guitar trills of "Sketch For Dawn", in two parts (which also picks up the natural/landscape theme referenced on the previous album with "Sketch For Summer" and "Sketch For Winter"), or with "Portrait For Frazier" and "Detail For Paul" (and on the 2013 reissue, with bonus tracks, "Self-Portrait" and "Favourite Painting" are added). These are evocative references, whose interpretation is left entirely to the listener, not least given the largely instrumental nature of the compositions.

The music released under the Durutti Column name is like an expressionist painting rendered in sound, made of faint sonic brushstrokes, guitar strings gently plucked like a light rain over a natural landscape, liquid, intermittent basslines underpinning the melodic turns, varied percussion with an exotic aftertaste, faint piano chimes chiselling the flow of notes. In short, it's a palette of personal sensibilities and impalpable sonic textures: from the stirring acoustic tremolo of "The Act Committed" to the piano coda of "The Sweet Cheat Gone", by way of the magic of the all-too-brief "Messidor" and the aching "Never Known". Reilly claims to have composed the entire record in a single morning, riding the inspiration of the moment.

But Durutti Column's compositional approach is also influenced by the concept of ambient music introduced by Brian Eno with albums like "Music for Airports" a few years earlier. Reilly is a great admirer of Eno, whom he reinterprets in his own way (Eno would return the compliment by naming "LC" his favourite album). The influences are perceptible not just in the sound but also in the attitude, taste and feeling. While the instrumental foundation of the record firmly maintains the guitar-bass-drums trio, the structure of the songs lets the imagination drift, depicting landscapes, sensations and moods, allowing them to unfold like an ideal soundtrack to a journey among different people and places. Though pared down to a minimum, the vocal element occasionally surfaces in fleeting moments, with an understated tone that lends the sound greater intimacy, but without ever stepping into the foreground (though Reilly doesn't always seem entirely at ease behind the microphone, and his voice is neither especially engaging nor flawless).

A trajectory that might bring to mind that of another important English band, Mark Hollis's Talk Talk, initially a synth-pop outfit but destined to radically change their style from the late 80s onward, offering largely instrumental rock that was rarefied and hushed, rich in ambient and jazz influences, echoing Durutti Column themselves. Specifically, records like "Spirit of Eden" and "Laughing Stock" marked astonishing turns, running entirely against the grain of audience expectations. Music journalists would go on to coin the (perhaps overused) term "post-rock" for bands like Talk Talk and others who followed (such as Bark Psychosis), who deconstructed rock's stylistic conventions to give rise to new sonic forms, each different from the other but united by a shared underlying approach. Vini Reilly, in a sense, anticipated and prepared the ground for the creative genius of Mark Hollis: "LC" breaks away from the post-punk scene to serve as a guiding star for countless post-rock bands, marking the connecting point, the crossroads between new wave/post-punk and the instrumental rock of the 90s and 2000s.

Perhaps it is precisely here that the English artist's nonconformism reveals itself, having always moved against the grain of the trends of his time, following only his own personal inspiration. A continuous struggle, Reilly's, against rigid stylistic formalism and against his own inner demons.

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28/11/2021