The Durutti Column began almost by accident, a footnote to Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus's plan to build a Manchester supergroup out of the city's punk scraps. What they got instead, after the rest of that lineup peeled off to form the Mothmen, was one guitarist: Vini Reilly, whom Wilson had spotted playing with the Nosebleeds and refused to let go even after Reilly quit in disgust at how ordinary the early recordings sounded. Reilly came back as the sole permanent member of a band named, with typical Factory mischief, after a misspelled Situationist comic strip that had once papered the streets of Strasbourg. That configuration, one restless guitarist and whoever Wilson put in the room with him, became the whole template.
The room, in 1979, held Martin Hannett, and the results, cut at Cargo Studios while Reilly was in poor health and deep in depression, became The Return of the Durutti Column, an album of arpeggios suspended in Hannett's delay like something underwater, sold in a sleeve made of actual sandpaper so it would scar whatever record sat next to it on the shelf. Two years later Reilly took the controls himself, producing LC alone on a four-track in his mother's house, running guitar and drum machine through a Roland Space Echo and singing, for the first time, in a voice as unguarded as his playing. By 1984's Without Mercy, an album built around an actual chamber ensemble, Wilson had started billing him as something closer to a composer than a guitarist, and the results earned it.
None of that made a new Durutti Column record, once Reilly's touring years ended, look likely. He has spoken candidly about the strokes that left him struggling for money, and as recently as a couple of years ago said flatly that playing again did his head in. Renascent, out today on London Records, is what happened anyway: eleven pieces assembled in fits and starts since 2017, much of it captured not in a studio but in Reilly's own kitchen, with longtime drummer Bruce Mitchell and producer Keir Stewart building arrangements around whatever Reilly could give them. Singer and pianist Caoilfhionn Rose turns up on a couple of tracks, and the record's penultimate piece reworks an old Durutti sketch, “For Belgian Friends,” into a small orchestral coda, a quiet echo of the string-laden ambitions Wilson once had for him, before the album closes out on a separate track carrying a guest vocal turn. It's a modest way to reappear after sixteen years, which is exactly why it suits him.
