The Return of The Durutti Column

Product Information

Liner notes to "The Durutti Column Live at the Bottom Line, New York" by A.H. Wilson". Users.rcn.com. 24 January 1978. Archived from the original on 5 October 2013 . Retrieved 4 October 2013.

While Reilly can’t be drawn on the greatness of his own music, Mitchell is happily forthcoming on his behalf. “I’m in awe of him,” he tells me. “When we would play For Belgian Friends live, I never wanted to play on it because it was like taking a spade to a souffle. I just wanted to watch it in the audience. It was such an astonishing thing. When he played it on his own – a whole room would hold its breath.”

Continuing to experiment with various approaches, Reilly incorporated a cor anglais (English horn) player on Another Setting. The first of the two side-long pieces that comprise Without Mercy is like modern chamber music, an ambitious and shifting mixture of piano, horns, strings and electronic percussion. The second, which favors guitar, employs an entire studio group, including Blaine Reininger of Tuxedomoon. In 'D'" is actually a different mix of "Sketch For Winter", and the label of side 2 is the same for both pressing.

Self-produced by Vini Reilly at Strawberry and Revolution studios, the album saw Durutti playing as a quartet, with Reilly on guitar, vocals and keyboards, Bruce Mitchell in drums and percussion, John Metcalfe (viola) and Tim Kellett (trumpet). Someone at Factory decided it would be good idea to send Vini Reilly in to Cargo with Martin as an experiment,' adds John Brierley, who owned Cargo. 'I don't think Vini had any real ideas as to what he wanted to do, it was just sort of a solo jam session over three days to see what would happen. Over the first two days we recorded bits of stuff from Vini, who sat on the studio floor with his guitar. Martin had arrived with much more than his usual amount of effects, I had a job fitting it all in the control room then we spent what seemed an awfully long time connecting it all up and getting it all fed into the desk. In hindsight Martin should have been in studio two days before Vini arrived, one day to get all the gear in and connect it up and a second, because a lot of the gear was new to him, to work out how it all worked. While Martin and I were sorting all this out Vini was turning out ideas in the studio, Martin showed little or no interest in what Vini was doing. Basically I just kept the tape running.'Comotto, Agustín (2022). The Weight of the Stars: The Life of Anarchist Octavio Alberola. AK Press. ISBN 978-1-84935-409-7.

The eight albums recorded for Factory ( The Return of the Durutti Column, LC, Another Setting, Without Mercy, Domo Arigato, The Guitar and Other Machines, Vini Reilly and Obey the Time) were re-released with additional material by Factory Too/London, under the banner Factory Once, between 1996 and 1998. Largely the project of the composer, guitarist, synthesiser programmer and arranger Vini Reilly, The Durutti Column was one of the first acts signed to Tony Wilson’s Factory Records label in 1978.Recorded over a period of a week, their 1980 debut instrumental album The Return of The Durutti Column is probably the best place to start with their music. Antony Beevor in The Spanish Civil War (1982) maintains that Durruti was killed when a companion's machine pistol went off by mistake. He assessed that, at the time, the anarchists lied and claimed he had been hit by an enemy sniper's bullet "for reasons of morale and propaganda".A Situationist group of Strasbourg University students spent their student union's budget on a giant flyposted comic strip in 1966. One of its panels, featuring two cowboys discussing philosophical reification, was called The Return of the Durutti Column[ sic], in reference to Durruti's military unit. This, in turn, influenced Tony Wilson's naming of his English post-punk band, The Durutti Column. [16] In 1998, Durutti Column contributed "It's Your Life Baby" to the AIDS benefit compilation album Onda Sonora: Red Hot + Lisbon produced by the Red Hot Organization.