CityLife

The Durutti Column

Vini Reilly engrossed in his chords

EVEN in a musical work to mark his passing, we may have expected the late Tony Wilson to get the first and last word.

 And so, even before Vini Reilly commenced his elegant guitar-picking, we heard Wilson’s voice, an extract from an interview with producer Martin Hannett, asking: “Is this an art form, or are you just a technician?”

The first part of the question was then looped into nagging repetition. Seventy minutes later, and after nine distinct movements of largely wordless hymns to his memory, Wilson’s voice piped up again, expounding on theories of socialism.

Emotional night

As his son Oliver said in introducing this Manchester International Festival premiere of the Durutti Column’s A Paean To Wilson, this was “quite an emotional night”.

 Those emotions came wreathed in the distinctive style of Reilly, drummer Bruce Mitchell, and fellow Columnists Keir Stewart on keyboards, John Metcalfe on viola, Poppy Morgan on electric piano and Tim Kellet on trumpet.

That meant subtle electronic rhythms, often like somnolent echoes of joyous Afro-Cuban beats, gilded with Mitchell’s drums, framing fragile themes from Reilly’s guitar and wafting electronica.

With Reilly’s tendency towards Spanish themes and the addition of Kellett’s dreamy trumpet, it often resembled chill-out mariachi music.

Easter Island statue

For music so contemplative, it was a bizarre choice to stage this in the Pavilion Theatre, the audience forced to stand in a sweltering tent rather than appreciate every nuance from the cooler vantage point of a seat in, say, the Bridgewater Hall.

Reilly makes the strangest of guitar heroes, sitting and plucking away at his Stratocaster like a classical guitarist, his face as grey and blankly impassive as an Easter Island statue.

He does not work in macho riffs but in a gentle collage of rhythm and harmony, every phrase drenched in electronic echo, as if heard from the back of the world’s largest cathedral.

 At times it was difficult to discern the exact moods this music was exploring, but when Reilly summoned Hendrix-like feedback from a furiously overdriven guitar, then used the whammy bar to make it keen and moan, there was no mistaking it: this was pure anger for the loss of a friend.

Bolshier signings

 It was with The Durutti Column that Wilson’s  passion for the music industry began.

They were first to be signed to Factory Records, and Tony was still enthusing about the first demos of this latest work even as he lay in hospital at the end of his life.

He never lost faith despite other, bolshier signings dwarfing Reilly’s sales.

You have to hope that a recorded version of this Paean somehow becomes publicly available.

At 70 minutes of experimental music, it would, one suspects, be almost impossible to market to an audience beyond the few hundred disciples packing into a sweaty tent over three nights in Albert Square. Heroically uncommercial, Tony would have loved it!