“There’s no seatbelt. No safety. You may not be making it home,” laughs Bruce Mitchell, picking me up from Manchester train station in a two-seater Austin 7 that was built in 1932.
My legs are squashed against my chest, Mitchell’s hand brushes my thigh with every gear change and a gentle breeze flaps the laminated windows. The 83-year-old is driving me to meet the enigmatic figure behind the Durutti Column, Vini Reilly. As well as playing the drums for him since 1981, Mitchell is also his manager.
It’s been a decade since Reilly last gave an interview, and even before then they were sparse. Seventy next month, he lives a hermit-like existence, rarely leaving the house. In 2010, he had the first of three strokes. His reduced mobility had an effect on his ability to play and perform. He went bankrupt and lost his flat. There have also been periods of severe mental illness. “I was absolutely crackers,” he later tells me. “I probably still am.”
Driving down Palatine Road, once home to the offices of the groundbreaking indie label Factory Records, Mitchell tells me that “Vin’s always been teetering on the edge. But what an astonishing musical talent. I’ve never known anything like it.” And it’s not just his friends and associates. Red Hot Chili Peppers’ John Frusciante called Reilly “the best guitarist in the world”, while Brian Eno once named the Durutti Column album LC his favourite ever record.
The Durutti Column were put together by Factory boss Tony Wilson in 1978, rising from the ashes of of a punk band called Fast Breeder. Reilly, who had previously been the guitarist in another band, Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds, joined up, and the band contributed two tracks to A Factory Sample, a double 7-inch package that also featured Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire, and which became the first ever release from the label.
From 1980’s debut album The Return of the Durutti Column (released in a sandpaper sleeve designed to scratch any LPs that were placed on either side of it), Reilly would release 20 studio albums as the Durutti Column over the next three decades, with Mitchell and bass and keyboard player Keir Stewart as the band’s nucleus. Eschewing the punk thrash or angular post-punk twang favoured by many players of that era, Reilly favoured a more subtle, tender, emotive and expressive style of playing – he never used a plectrum because he deemed the sound too harsh – blending jazz, classical and flamenco. His sound was sparse yet intricate, technically pristine, and as fiery and fluid as lava oozing down a mountainside.
We arrive at Reilly’s home down a cul-de-sac. He greets us at the door with a soft smile and a gentle handshake, a half lit rollup clasped between darkly nicotine-stained fingers. His big head of hair is still there, albeit flatter and greyer now, sitting on top of his agonisingly thin frame – a lifelong illness linked to post-traumatic stress disorder has meant he has struggled to eat very much.
We sit in the garden, with Reilly on the ground in the somewhat overgrown grass. We’re here to talk about Time Was Gigantic ... When We Were Kids, the 1998 Durutti Column album that has just been reissued, but Reilly is on his current favourite subject: microplastics in the ecosystem and the climate crisis. “We’re doomed,” he murmurs.
Reilly is incredibly softly spoken. Despite my efforts to catch every word, sometimes the gentle gusts of wind whisk them away. At times he speaks so quietly, it’s as if he has swallowed his words before he can let them out. The twittering birds are louder than our conversation but it creates a moment of blissful synchronicity, recalling one of Reilly’s most beloved, enduring and songbird-puctuated pieces of music: Sketch for Summer.
Time Was Gigantic … was the last album Factory Records ever released, meaning that Reilly bookended the label’s illustrious history, one that included New Order, Joy Division, Happy Mondays and more. Wilson, who was Reilly’s manager as well as his label boss, didn’t like the record and discouraged Reilly’s decision to sing on much of it. “I thought: who is he to tell me that?,” says Reilly. “Fuck that. If I have something to say and I want to sing, I’ll do it and stand by it.” Mitchell offers an analogy: “It was like having somebody leaning over the back of Van Gogh and saying: ‘That’s the wrong yellow.’”
Peace was later made. “Tony was a wonderful guy and I loved him; I still do,” says Reilly. It was Wilson, along with Factory Records’ co-founder Alan Erasmus, who convinced Reilly he needed to continue making music after the original full-band incarnation of the Durutti Column collapsed (other members would later go on to play in Simply Red). “It was amazing of them to stick with me,” Reilly says. “I was very depressed and not functioning. Tony was very paternalistic because I was always looking for a father figure.”
Reilly’s father died when he was 16, and amid deteriorating family relations he ended up living on the streets, where he got involved in a world of violence and gangs. In one gunfight, a friend was shot and died in his lap. Tired of his desperate life, Reilly says he deliberately antagonised some Moss Side gangsters in the hope they would kill him. Instead, he got a warning shot by the side of his head, which temporarily deafened him. “I didn’t know I was depressed, as I hadn’t been diagnosed then,” he says today.
Meeting Mitchell was a turning point. “When I met Bruce I was about to kill myself,” he says. “It was the third time I’d tried it.” He says that a faulty trigger on his gun was all that stopped him. “Bruce took me into his home. My depression dissipated because of a very precious little girl [Mitchell’s young daughter]. Suddenly, you’re focusing on her and not going inwards into your own brain. That kept me going. It literally saved my life. I dismantled my gun and threw it in the Mersey.” Reilly doesn’t wish to dwell on this anguished period. “All that stuff is in the past,” he says. “I’ve been through 13 psychiatrists to oversee my recovery from mental illness. So that’s enough of that.”
As a child Reilly had a natural ear for the piano, playing his dad’s keyboard around the house, but his head was turned by the guitar and he became an obsessive player, isolating himself in his bedroom to play endlessly. While peers may have been mimicking guitar heroes from the rock and glam years, a teenage Reilly was magnetised by the sounds of Los Indios Tabajaras, a guitar duo of brothers from Brazil, whose guitar playing Reilly believed to be most poignant he had ever heard.
Following Wilson’s patronage, it was clear to all who witnessed him that Reilly was a genuine guitar great. When Morrissey went solo, he recruited Reilly to play on his 1988 debut Viva Hate, filling the gap left by another master, Johnny Marr. But Reilly dismisses the idea of being a virtuoso. “Go to any bar in Córdoba in Spain and those guys playing there will make me look stupid,” he says. “They’ll never make any albums and no one’s ever heard them but they’re the players, they really are.”
Reilly is dismissive about his own music. “When I listen back to it, it’s boring,” he says. “It’s done. I’ve already expressed everything I needed to when I was playing it.” I tell him that a colleague told me they wanted the 1989 track Otis playing at their funeral. “Give him my apologies,” he laughs, before downplaying the beauty of the track, in which sparkling guitar swirls around dreamy vocal samples from Tracy Chapman and Otis Redding. “It was just messing about.”
Nonetheless, his music continues to resonate today. You’ll hear the Durutti Column in acclaimed TV shows such as Master of None or the second series of The Bear, and he has been streamed tens of millions of times on Spotify. “He’s not interested,” Mitchell tells me later in the pub. “I’ll show him on a laptop, but he’s not fired up – he’s sort of detached.”
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.”
There is YouTube footage from 2020 of Reilly playing in his living room and it’s not the work of a three-time stroke victim you may expect. But it’s still not good enough for Reilly. “I carried on and on after my strokes and I got to a level, but it’s not even close [to where I was],” he says. “I really can’t play guitar. It looks ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous. I’ve got a good excuse to stop now because I’ve got arthritis all down here,” he says, pointing to his hand, while staring down at his long, hardened nails that are shaped into uniformly pristine spear tips for plucking.
Has he made peace with the idea of detaching himself permanently from an instrument that has been a lifelong extension of himself? “Yeah,” he says, breezily. “I’m 71 next year. I began playing when I was 11 – that’s 60 years. That’s long enough. I’m lucky I’ve made it this far and I’ve had an amazing life.”
As Reilly prepares to hang up an instrument that he truly made his own – although Mitchell says he’s still recording from time to time – there does appear to be a faint glimmer of recognition for the beauty he has created. “It expressed something to me,” he says, referring to a rare moment of listening to old Durutti Column tunes recently. “It was quite emotional. There was a sadness to it but not an unpleasant sadness. It was lovely, actually. That’s the first time I’ve ever thought: well, you did something.”
Time Was Gigantic ... When We Were Kids is on London Records.
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