The Return of the Durutti Column
The Return of the Durutti Column
2017–2018
20 photographs
Project supported by Cnap (support for contemporary documentary photography, 2017)
“We’re not at all afraid of ruins. We who ploughed the meadows and built the cities can build again, but better next time. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts”.
Buenaventura Durruti Dumange
“I
realized that I was playing with popular culture and that it was fun. And because I'm from Manchester, I can do it a lot better than those stupid Londoners”.
Tony Wilson (in James Nice, Shadowplayers. The Rise and Fall of Factory Records)
The reference to this situationist-inspired comic strip denotes Factory co-founder Tony Wilson’s great interest in the Situationist International (SI), which had already been a major source of inspiration for the media strategy of Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren two years earlier. When, in early 1978, following McLaren’s example, Tony Wilson and intermittent actor Alan Erasmus decided to create and manage a band from scratch—the founding act of the future label that would soon lead to the formation of the Durutti Column—punk in its original form had long since faded away. Once the time for the raw expression of revolt had passed, the compositions of the continuators of the short-lived movement gradually took a more distanced turn, and their music took more varied paths. That followed by Vini Reilly, totally against the grain, is undoubtedly one of the most unexpected. In his own words: “In [1978], when punk was definitely dead and the music industry was creating hundreds of ‘punk’ bands because it sensed a potential money-making opportunity, I was putting a band together, and we thought it would be very anarchistic to reclaim the punk ideal and present quiet, personal, nice guitar pieces...”. A position in line with the Factory’s “pragmatic” philosophy, in that it provides a concrete answer to the question of how to live one’s life given that “there is no future in England’s dreaming”, as Johnny Rotten once sang. How to lead one’s life, but also, more specifically, in what form and under what conditions, in times of crisis, and once illusions have been shattered, to make art—in this case “pop” music. Tony Wilson makes it clear: “For me, Factory is an artistic experiment. It has to do with art theory”. [...]
In addition to a strange and persistent attachment to the city itself, it was Vini Reilly’s artistic and intellectual singularity that led me to return to the Manchester landscape in search of signs likely to evoke this musician. Guided by biographical data, the idea was to explore the neighbourhoods associated with different periods of his life. Heaton Park, in the north of the city, his birthplace; Withington and Fog Lane Park, to the south, the area where he grew up and the park where, as a child and teenager, he played soccer; Chorlton-cum-Hardy, home to the sound engineer of his early albums, producer Martin Hannett; the Northern Quarter, one of his favourite districts, with its record shops and bars; Oxford Road, or the area around Manchester Metropolitan University and the Royal Northern College of Music; on the city’s southeastern outskirts, Stockport, where the band’s first album was mixed; etc.
Benoît Grimbert. Full text to be published in Les Carnets du Bal