How their latest album Renascent finds the band looking forward, not back
By Cristin Proctor Rooney
By the time The Durutti Column released their debut album in 1980, Manchester post-punk had already begun to establish its own sonic vocabulary, yet Vini Reilly seemed uninterested in speaking it.
The group emerged from the same late-seventies milieu that produced Joy Division, Buzzcocks, and the wider Factory Records constellation, yet their music resisted easy placement from the beginning. Where many contemporaries pursued abrasion, Reilly seemed drawn toward air, silence, and light. Across nearly five decades and over twenty-eight albums, The Durutti Column have built a musical language entirely their own: delicate guitar suspended over ambient textures, ghostly samples, minimalist rhythm, and melodies that arrive as though you’ve been granted brief access to someone else’s memory. Their influence has only grown with time. John Frusciante once called Reilly “the best guitarist in the world.” Brian Eno named the band’s 1981 album LC his favourite record of all time. Their music has drifted into the cultural bloodstream, appearing everywhere from Jerry Maguire and The Bear to Grand Theft Auto, while artists as varied as Frank Ocean, Blood Orange, and Harry Styles have cited the band as a touchstone.
For many listeners, the route into The Durutti Column often begins with the mythology. By 1979, Reilly was struggling so severely with depression that he had largely stopped leaving the house. Concerned that his friend was “going to die,” his manager, Tony Wilson, bought him a new guitar and encouraged him into the studio under the pretense of experimentation. Unbeknownst to Reilly, a producer recorded the sessions. The resulting material became The Return of the Durutti Column, a debut album Reilly had never consciously set out to make. When he was eventually handed the finished record, he hated it and hoped nobody would ever hear it.
Instead, the album was greeted with widespread acclaim. One critic described Reilly’s guitar playing as resembling “frost on a window pane,” a phrase that remains one of the most accurate descriptions of his sound. Drawing equally from jazz, classical music, flamenco, and post-punk minimalism, the record felt detached from any prevailing trend. It existed almost outside time. That quality, more than forty years later, explains its endurance.
The peculiar circumstances of its creation also seem to have established a blueprint for everything that followed. The Durutti Column’s finest work often feels less like a performance than a private act of discovery accidentally overheard by the listener. That sensibility runs throughout Renascent, the group’s first new album in sixteen years. The circumstances surrounding its creation mirror, in unexpected ways, those of the debut. Reilly, now in his seventies, has survived three strokes and endured years of health complications. Sessions were delayed by the pandemic and frequently adapted around his recovery. Much of the album was ultimately recorded informally in Reilly’s kitchen, with producer and multi-instrumentalist Keir Stewart – who has worked alongside Reilly and drummer Bruce Mitchell since 1998’s Time Was Gigantic… When We Were Kids – constructing tracks piece by piece.
Speaking at a recent Rough Trade East event celebrating the album’s release, Stewart recalled sprinting through rain and mud in Reilly’s garden, running cables from the kitchen to his car outside, where he captured the sound on a laptop. The story of the album’s creation feels oddly appropriate to the sound – The Durutti Column have always made music that sounds rescued from the elements. With adaptation, after all, central to the band’s story. The band’s percussionist Bruce Mitchell also recalls the whispered vocals on the debut album, revealing they were partly the result of Reilly recording beneath his bed so as not to wake his father.
The latest edition to their catalogue, Renascent carries the unmistakable fingerprints of The Durutti Column with luminous guitar lines, vast negative spaces, and a sense of delicate melancholy, yet it never settles into nostalgia. If anything, the record possesses the curiosity of a younger band discovering itself. One could easily imagine it as the work of a newly formed band from Goldsmiths rather than a group of musicians in their seventies recording from a kitchen in Manchester. “Liars” is among the album’s stand-out tracks, layering refracted guitar and sighing keyboards over haunting percussion while Reilly’s voice drifts just beyond reach, floating further away disappearing into the song’s atmosphere. “Time Present and Time Past” feels perhaps closest to the band’s familiar vocabulary, a lesson in striking a delicate harmony between melancholy and beauty that has long defined The Durutti Column. “For Friends Everywhere” serves as a companion piece to the beloved 1981 composition “For Belgian Friends,” connecting different eras of the band’s catalogue. “Sargasso Sea,” features Manchester musician Caoilfhionn Rose, who recently performed with the band at their Southbank appearance as part of the line-up curated by Harry Styles for his Meltdown Festival.
The record also highlights the often-underappreciated contributions of those around Reilly. Stewart’s production brings clarity and warmth to the album while preserving the space and delicacy that have always defined The Durutti Column’s music. Much of the album’s framework was created by Stewart, who built the underlying structures and arrangements, acting as a canvas for which Reilly could later come and add paint. Mitchell’s role is equally essential. While conversations about The Durutti Column can inevitably return to Reilly, Mitchell has spent more than three decades as drummer, collaborator, confidant, and de facto guardian of the band’s legacy. His contribution extends far beyond the music: he has navigated the challenges of working alongside an artist famously resistant to compromise, and remained steadfast through the worsening health issues of recent years.At the Rough Trade event, Factory Records historian James Nice turned to Mitchell and remarked, “Bruce, you are one of the most incredible people I have ever met.” Mitchell later reassured the audience that Reilly was in good spirits, although his rebellious streak remained intact: he had recently fired all of his at-home carers and nearly thrown his dinner over a Guardian reporter. Even in his absence, Reilly’s spirit was unmistakably present.
Listening to Mitchell and Stewart recount stories at the Rough Trade Q&A, it becomes clear that The Durutti Column’s history is inseparable from the strange and often improbable web of Manchester culture that surrounded them. Stewart lived around the corner from Morrissey, who Reilly would later play guitar for on Vauxhall and I. Reilly also played football for Manchester City’s junior teams alongside Johnny Marr, later collaborated with musicians across genres, and counted Pat Nevin among the band’s admirers – a fact Mitchell greeted by observing that Nevin was “very small for a footballer.”There were stories of touring with Peter Hook of Joy Division, and of tales from on the road. It is the kind of history that makes you want to sit down with the band over a pint for the stories that never made it into the archives.
The mythology surrounding Reilly also remains irresistible. He has spoken openly about a chaotic youth that included homelessness, gang violence, and multiple suicide attempts. Recovery arrived gradually, aided in part, he has said, by the joy of spending time with a friend’s young daughter. Yet what makes Reilly so compelling is not suffering but survival. Even now, he remains deeply suspicious of his own reputation. Asked about his celebrated guitar playing, he once dismissed the praise by suggesting that any musician in a Córdoba bar could make him “look stupid.” Mitchell recounted that it was common for Reilly to appear on radio programmes only to spend the interview explaining why listeners should not buy the band’s latest album and instead wait for the next one. Yet, the band informs the audience that for once, Reilly appears to be both pleased and satisfied with this finished work. Perhaps that humility (and stubbornness) is part of the reason The Durutti Column have endured. By refusing to conform to genres, trends, or commercial expectations, they have enjoyed the rare privilege to make music entirely on their own terms, to do, as they put it, “whatever the fuck they want.” In doing so, they have achieved something many artists spend their careers pursuing: they became in the purest sense, an artist’s artist. They are admired by their peers, cherished by critics, and largely untouched by the demands and pageantry that accompany celebrity.
Renascent becomes the first new Factory Records catalogue number issued since the death of Tony Wilson nearly two decades ago. Yet the album is not an exercise in nostalgia, but an act of looking forward. Its title means rebirth, renewal, or rising again and proves apt. There is also a sense of symmetry and of a full-circle moment given the band’s debut was titled The Return of the Durutti Column; this latest release marks a return in the most literal sense, a re-emergence after sixteen years away and a testament to the persistence required to keep creating, adapting, and enduring. Nearly half a century after their formation, The Durutti Column have returned not to revisit their legacy, but to extend it. Like the finest work in their catalogue, Renascent feels untethered to any particular moment. Perhaps that has been the secret of their longevity: The Durutti Column have always existed slightly outside time, and that is precisely what has made them timeless.
