The Durutti Column served chiefly as the outlet for Mancunian multi-instrumentalist and composer Vini Reilly, whose distinctive guitar style has influenced players across multiple generations. Among Factory Records’ earliest signings, the group diverged sharply from the label’s harder-edged post-punk and dance-rock acts; its 1980 debut LP The Return of the Durutti Column featured sparse electronics alongside Reilly’s lucid, flowing guitar lines. Reilly and successive collaborators kept pushing boundaries thereafter, adding further instruments along with intermittent vocals and percussion while absorbing elements of jazz, folk, classical, and other traditions. Sampling surfaced on the 1989 album Vini Reilly, and dance rhythms appeared on later efforts such as 1996’s Fidelity. Though Reilly stayed prolific through the first ten years of the 2000s, health problems curtailed his output after the reflective 2010 release A Paean to Wilson.
Born in Manchester, England, in 1953, Reilly began on piano as a youngster, taking cues from Art Tatum and Fats Waller before picking up guitar at age ten. Despite an early affinity for folk and jazz, he was drawn into punk; in 1977 he entered Ed Banger & the Nosebleeds. The following year Factory founder Tony Wilson asked him to participate in a project named the Durutti Column, a title drawn from Spanish Civil War anarchist Buenaventura Durruti and a 1960s Situationist comic. The initial lineup paired Reilly with guitarist Dave Rowbotham, drummer Chris Joyce, vocalist Phil Rainford, and bassist Tony Bowers. After several shows Rainford was dismissed; following two tracks cut for the EP A Factory Sampler, Rowbotham, Joyce, and Bowers departed to form the Moth Men, leaving Reilly as the Durutti Column’s only remaining member. (Joyce and Bowers would later join Simply Red.)
Cut with session support and packaged in a sandpaper sleeve, the atmospheric instrumental debut The Return of the Durutti Column surfaced in 1980. On 1981’s pastoral LC, made with drummer Bruce Mitchell—who became a recurring partner—Reilly sang on several pieces. He broadened his range further with the chamber-oriented Another Setting (1982) and Without Mercy (1984). Electronic pulses took center stage on 1985’s Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say. After the live set Domo Arigato that same year, Circuses and Bread returned to densely layered guitar work, while the wide-ranging 1987 album The Guitar and Other Machines ranked among the project’s most ambitious statements. In 1988 Reilly supported Morrissey—another Nosebleeds veteran—on the solo debut Viva Hate before resuming Durutti Column activity with the 1989 LP Vini Reilly, which wove in vocal samples from Otis Redding, Annie Lennox, Tracy Chapman, and opera singer Joan Sutherland.
The harder-edged Obey the Time appeared in 1990, followed in 1991 by Lips That Would Kiss Form Prayers to Broken Stone, a set of singles, outtakes, and unreleased tracks. Following an extended hiatus—during which Rowbotham was murdered by an axe attacker, an event that inspired the Happy Mondays’ “Cowboy Dave”—the Durutti Column resurfaced with 1995’s Sex and Death and 1996’s Fidelity, the latter blending Reilly’s guitar with dance rhythms. Reilly issued multiple projects throughout the 2000s, ranging from archival live discs to studio works such as the experimental-theater soundtrack Treatise on the Steppenwolf and the stark 2009 album Love in the Time of Recession. The instrumental suite A Paean to Wilson, written in 2009 as a personal tribute to his late friend and champion Tony Wilson, received limited release that year before wider distribution in 2010.
Reilly premiered Chronicle in 2011 as a commission for Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall and made the recording available as a limited CD at the concert. The previously unreleased fourth album Short Stories for Pauline, shelved by Wilson in favor of Without Mercy, emerged as a limited vinyl edition in 2012. Two years later Kooky issued Chronicle LX:XL, an expanded version marking Reilly’s sixtieth birthday. He made occasional live appearances and contributed to a track on Holly Johnson’s 2014 album Europa, yet three strokes earlier in the decade left him unable to play guitar as before. In interviews he described ongoing financial hardship, difficulties securing health benefits, persistent depression, and the frustration of hearing finished pieces in his mind that he could no longer perform or record. Although no further material appeared, Reilly’s catalog continued to attract listeners, with most of the Durutti Column’s extensive discography staying available through frequent remasters and expanded reissues. Factory Benelux compiled M24J (Anthology) in 2018 and followed with a four-CD box set centered on 1984’s Without Mercy plus live and supplementary recordings; Vini Reilly received a deluxe edition in 2020.
