By the mid-1980s, Vini Reilly had already been cast, somewhat against his will, as Factory Records' resident neo-classicist, the guitarist whose fragile arpeggios had been dressed up in string sections and pitched as serious contemporary composition. Circuses and Bread, released in the spring of 1986, opens as if to confirm that reputation: “For Pauline” arrives on a sweeping viola line courtesy of composer John Metcalfe, all the hallmarks of the chamber-pop Reilly had been making since Without Mercy. It's a bit of a feint. Within a few tracks the record has swerved into “Dance II,” built on hard, unglamorous electronics, and by the time “Royal Infirmary” arrives — a solo piano piece unsettled by the sound of automatic rifle fire buried in the mix — it's clear Reilly wasn't interested in repeating himself.
The reason was practical as much as artistic. Tony Wilson, who had spent years steering Reilly toward orchestras and cor anglais players, switched tack and simply bought him a pile of electronic instruments, sequencers and drum machines included. Reilly, by his own account, had never planned on becoming an electronic musician and found the gear genuinely difficult to wrangle, staying up past dawn fighting with it until something clicked. What emerged wasn't an attempt to chase Factory labelmates New Order into the club; Reilly was explicit that he wanted a way of sequencing that belonged to him alone, closer to his own harmonic instincts than to any dancefloor logic. That distinction matters. Where New Order's sequencers drove songs forward with metronomic insistence, Reilly's electronics on this record feel improvised and slightly at odds with themselves, machines being coaxed into something closer to his guitar playing's natural rubato.
Recorded at Strawberry Studios and Revolution Studios with longtime drummer Bruce Mitchell alongside Metcalfe and trumpeter Tim Kellett, and self-produced by Reilly, Circuses and Bread ended up being the most genuinely eclectic record in a catalogue that had already refused easy categorization. Contemporary critics were divided, more comfortable with the delicate instrumental writing than with Reilly's occasional, wavering vocal turns, but the record's real achievement is structural rather than vocal: nine tracks that refuse to settle into either the ambient-classical mode of the Without Mercy era or a tidy new electronic identity, instead holding both in uneasy, interesting suspension. It's the sound of a famously solitary guitarist being handed new tools and simply working out, alone and at odd hours, what he could make them say.
