There was a boy…

I’ve been sporadically looking at your website hoping to catch the right time to order DC Chronicle before it sells out.

I noticed your call for personal accounts etc.

I’ve followed Vini’s progress since the first sandpaper production of the Return. I was most gratefully introduced to the music of Vini by Davy Goldworthy of the Chesterfields (RIP). I then saw Vini play quite a few times as DC in London in the 80s including with Pauline Murray/ Invisible Girls.

A group of us piled into a van and headed to the DC concert at Dingwalls in Bristol in 1986?

Unusually boldly for me I asked for an interview with Vini and Bruce and spent a good hour in the dressing room in conversation which I recorded on cassette tape – still have it somewhere. Also recorded the gig.

I asked them to sign my copy of SS Enigma/Danny which they were reluctant to do because they didn’t want to spoil the packageDidn’t matter because desperate to get this I had ordered 2 from different places and both had come. So I now have a signed copy.

I transcribed the interview for a fanzine (Feeding the Fish) article and also took some v.poor photos that were so bad that I decided to do a drawing to accompany the article (attch) based on a photo from NME

A most memorable moment was the last tune they played – a Shadows number – Apache I think.I was a great Shadows fan in my younger days so this was a fantastic joining up of dots.

Summer 1989, 15 years old, in the Sticks. New Order sink their hooks into me, aided and abetted by the artwork and no-information packaging of Factory Records. The NME, devoured every week as a link to something more exciting, publishes FAC 227, a label catalogue with a picture of one Vini Reilly, known to me as the guitarist on Morrissey’s “Viva Hate”. Thus I first read the name The Durutti Column, but in these pre-internet days there’s no way of hearing the music. Forward a year to Summer 1990, Cornwall. A trip to Truro Woolworths, where three burgundy red linen boxes are displayed prominently among the cassettes. I pick out “LC”, taking it back to the caravan where I’m staying, shove the tape into the communal cassette player expecting the angry guitar of “Viva Hate” but instead being greeted by a gentle, hushed thing of great beauty, hiding beneath hiss and a hesitating vocal. My friends are non-plussed, I feign unimpressed cool but really I’m hooked, awestruck. Back home in the Sticks, I rush to buy “Vini Reilly” and “Obey the Time”, then spend the next year wishing I’d bought the other two boxed cassettes when I saw them on their shelf. Summer 1991 and miraculously they’re still there, “Return Of…” and “Without Mercy” joining the others and making the obsession complete and utter, just as it remains now. The lark spirals upwards in perfect pitch …

1980- is that possibly thirty four years ago?
Remember hearing Hannett’s opening skuf beats on The Return of… hooked since then and sideways too on much of the factory scene but Durutti Column always seemed the heart of it. How many people realize that Manchester was one of those twentieth century flowerings that make up a short discrete list?
Waiting for the next Durutti album became a kind of Christmas- you didn’t know what to expect and were always pleasantly surprised. Each so different and framing the times in which it was made and yet always remaining a little timeless. If I played these for a novice they couldn’t tell me if it was the years of long hair, red hair or shaved heads. Sampling before most, playing against and off himself and seemingly anything in the air… staying in its own line, it’s own time, Durutti was/is a ‘thing’- not just Vini although, of course, it’s all Vini.
His music all woven in now with the visual memory of the times, my small record store with the plywood bins, bent up posters, the latest cuts from England, when even the word ‘indie’ was new. And I’m still waiting for Christmas. That guitar which floats with the best in the world will always ring in my head.

I was browsing the indie racks at my local record emporium and came across LC, I fell in love with the cover and took a chance that the music would be at least as good as the paintings are. I got lucky. An incredible album that is still revealing new brush strokes over 30 years later. Why is this man not universally recognised for the sublime talent he is?

Brooklyn, early 90s. Exhausted due to third-world shadowplay, rife with corruption & financial downfall, I left. Gave up all, searching for an existential balance in an unknown land. Reality begins to bite so very hard; with not a penny to my name, I wonder about the years ahead. Alone in my apartheid, in my cell, within the Spartan space I have managed to put together, I drop a taped compilation of the Durutti Column – the songs of up my youth, when life was simple and innocent. A gust of cold wind comes through a half-opened window, announcing the end of New York autumn. As the delicately crafted cords from Vini’s guitar embrace the afternoon and the last rays of sun gradually die out, I momentarily slip into oblivion and become one with the music.

I remember her arresting, isolated beauty, and her lofty unreacheable I am here/I am not here.
We had left, a group of us, packed in a rattling R4, heading towards the mountains in South Tyrol.
We had rented a chalet just outside Bruneck, overlooking an orderly green slope. It was in summer. The summer of ’83, maybe. Our hearts were young and gay.
During breakfast, over cups of intense black coffee and bowls of fresh farm-house yoghurt and muesli, we would listen to the latest of the times. Home-made tape compilations, mostly: Talking Heads, The Cure, Righeira, Nena… Stuff we had sung along loud during the interminable car journey from the Adriatic coastline to the mountains in North Italy.
Secretively, she took out of her bag a cassette which some friend had decorated with the image of two grazing cows on pasture. It sounded different, then very different. It sounded simple, and then it touched right there where things like desire, longing, (con)-fusion, brainstorms, heartbreaks and presentiments reside.
Those simple tunes had the quality of permanence and the sparse, melancholic words that came with the music were a story already written down in the future. They were never really mine, those elegant, dissolving smiles she gave away, so easily. She came so close and I could never really blow away her colourful wing scales.

Back in 1987 aged just 16 I wandered into WH Smiths and was confronted by a huge display of ‘The Guitar and Other Machines’ LP sleeves.

I absolutely loved the design of the sleeve (designed by 8VO) but new nothing of the Durutti Column at the time.

I bought the LP there and then and have never looked back.

WH Smiths is probably the most un-cool place to find music but I will never forget the moment I saw those sleeves as the The Durutti Column have soundtracked my life ever since.

Being based in Australia, I’ve never had the opportunity to meet Vini or see Durutti Column live, but I can honestly say that his beautiful music resonates globally, influences and changes lives. I was first exposed to DC in 1980 when Gap Records / Factory Australia released the Durutti Column Single with Sketch for Summer (& Winter). This starkly presented artifact gave no clues to the exquisite and wonderful music thereon. What a discovery! What a perfect case of “less is more…”. Sketch For Summer sounded like nothing else at the time, and struck me as a pure artform and the personification of the Factory aesthetic. When I first saw Vini perform on A Factory Video, I finally understood that this delicate and shimmering music was being channeled through a genius. ‘Sketch’ set me off on many years of discovery and admiration for Vini’s work; highlights have included LC, Vini Reilly, Our Lady Of The Angels, Obey The Time, Sex and Death, and Fidelity. Vini has no peers, and I respect and thank him utterly for his work.

Growing up in Nebraska (6675 km from Manchester Google Maps tells me) I had to find something to differentiate myself. Don’t get me wrong it’s a great place to be from but when the rebellious teens kick-in Nebraska is a tricky environment — it’s very samey. My solution — jump right from my Winnie the Pooh records to the Sex Pistols. Unfortunately, I had to work too hard to be a Sex Pistol in Nebraska — too much drama. Then one day I picked up a black textured album cover, turned it over and read, “Factory Records, produced by Martin Hannett.” Good enough for me. Sold.

I don’t remember playing it the first time — it wasn’t like the Sex Pistols — nothing overwhelming no doubt — but something happened because I kept playing it. It wasn’t a record my mom ever told me to turn down but ironically enough that somehow made it rebellious — that and the title — The Return of the Durutti Column. “I need to get their other albums,” I mistakenly mused.

Nevertheless, I did get their ‘other’ albums. I got them all for 35 years and I love each one because each is an expression of just that — love. And in my case, love was the requisite rebellion.

So thanks Vini and thanks Bruce. You got me through the tricky environments.

I’ve been a follower of Vinnie and all his works for a very long time.

A Few memories:

That first Factory double single (A Factory Sample?) – long lost, haven’t heard that music in a long, long time.

The sandpaper cover of “The Return of…” – buying a plastic cover so it wouldn’t destroy the covers of all my other albums – I was such a conventional git!!!

Then building my collection as I came across new albums – that loose leaf on the Without Mercy album? Never quite knowing when the next album or single would be out – pre-internet days, eh?

But that was nothing compared to waiting to see the band live? Someone wrote Dingwalls in Bristol in 1986? Didn’t even know about it – those pesky pre-internet days again! And most famously hearing that there might be a show at The Bierkeller in Bristol (1987/88?) because he was in Bath sessioning with Morrissey on his first post Smiths album Viva Hate…. but it never happened. And throughout the intervening years, gigs announced: Cardiff, Ilfracombe – but all cancelled at the last minute – and not because Vinnie cancelled them for other unexplained reasons?

Then, all of a sudden from the late 90’s, a whole gaggle of shows – a couple in Bristol, a show I won a ticket for on Cerysmatic for the Glee Club in Birmingham. But the first time, well it was nearly like losing my virginity, except a lot less awkward and less damp – Ronnie Scott’s in London. I remember queuing-up (and saw a still playing Pat Nevin in the crowd) and wondering if I’d get a reasonable seat – wondering what the place is like as well. And, do you know something, I was in the exactly the right place in the queue – my seat was front row and centre. And the show? …was perfect? I remember one of the band saying that the sound was fabulous, it was to us fans as well.

I remember a couple walking out after two songs at the St Georges, Bristol show, ‘cos I don’t think they realised Vinnie played quite that loudly.

Finally, even though I’ve never spoken with him (I did see him and Bruce eating an early evening meal at that self-same St Georges Bristol show) I want to thank you Vincent Patrick Reilly, you’ve been an important part of my musical life.

Chris Butler
Bristol