FAC-2 The Durutti Column by Phil Cleaver

[Beside]

The Durutti Column
by Phil Cleaver

One of the characteristics of Factory Records, which make it unique – even today – is the large part design and art had in many aspects. The art and design not only involved the music, but also applied to anything connected to the label and it's (lack of) agenda which was way beyond just record sleeves, label events, and what most people term 'promotional goods'. This is in some ways ironic, as the label did not seek to promote for a long period of time subsequently drawing much interest and attention.

So... the first vinyl release FAC-2 – A Factory Sample forged these principles. It was not about just releasing material by four bands. In fact, the inclusion of for example John Dowie, was perhaps just as purposeful in making it as much about 'art' as it was music.

It is difficult to be objective about how the label viewed this release back in 1978, what they thought it would achieve, producing their first vinyl release, the then complexity of the unique sleeve, what future relationship they would have with these acts and where they would go from here.

I was fortunate enough to speak to Vini Reilly of The Durutti Column about this release, including the other acts on it and his own opinions of it almost thirty years on.

Phil "Kooky" Cleaver: Factory and John Dowie - who chose whom?

Vini Reilly: Factory chose John Dowie. He was not quite at the same level as John Cooper Clarke in establishing himself in Manchester but I think that Tony wanted to put some kind of poet on there but I think rather than choose the obvious choice which would've been John Cooper Clarke, Tony being Tony chose John Dowie who really no-one knew and most people had never heard of him. However, the fact was that he was very very brilliant with words and his poetry was very different, made Factory choose him. I did meet John Dowie about six months ago at a gig that I was doing and I think he also knew Bruce Mitchell quite well for a long time before I knew Bruce. He's a really great bloke and a very clever bloke.

PKC: So why did Factory choose someone like John Dowie who wasn't doing a band thing. Why did Factory want him on A Factory Sample, the first release?

VR: Because Tony saw that first release in the same way that he saw Factory as a whole. He didn't see Factory as a record company. At all. He didn't ever see it as a record company. He saw it very much as an artefact and as such, everything about it had to be original, and y'know, slightly unusual and unexpected. So you wouldn't expect the first release of an independent label just trying to set itself up to go for that kind of bizarre sleeve which is quite obscure.

It makes quite obscure references to Situationism and so on and all the rest of it. So I think the real thing that made him able to do that was the fact that we had Joy Division because Joy Division were a proper band, a serious serious band. Had they carried on, had we not lost Ian, they could've been a U2. They were fabulous. So we had that strength of content in Joy Division really, which enabled him to then go "Right, what can we put on here that is so off the wall that no-one would even think about releasing it. And at that point, Durutti Column were quite bizarre.

Y'know it was just one big fight on my part, trying to get my music played by these musicians who were much more concerned about being cool and hip and part of a new record label. So I was struggling. It was a verystrange recording for Durutti Column and of Durutti Column. And then to have a poet on there... what was the other band, I can't even remember?"

PKC: Cabaret Voltaire

VR: Oh yeah! It was slightly electro, whatever, pop, whatever the hell that was.

PKC: Coming out of that same Sheffield music scene as the early Human League I suppose.

VR: Yeah, but with a kinda weird contorted element to it. But yeah, it wasn't a case of let's make "a record" for a start. It was "let's create an artefact", so it's not just a record. So it would be something people would keep hold of, which has been the case. I know people who have got them want to keep hold of them.

PKC: So, going on to that, obviously Martin Hannett was very heavily involved in that. Would you say that Martin was as otherworldly as people assume nowadays?

VR: He was very otherwordly. He saw the world, he had this kinda "overview" of things that comes from having very detailed knowledge of physics and science, chemistry and all the rest of those kinds of things. So he could look at stuff that was going on and actually understand how it was working. Martin understood those things very clearly. It was also his approach to his sound and therefore his approach to producing a band. It was about the sounds and how you create sounds and what it is about the sound that is going to be musical or not musical or whatever.

He was fascinated by textures of sound, the colour of sound, much more so than creating a very exciting live performance of a band. It wasn't about that. It was about experimenting and just playing with sound. That's the thing, we were all really playing. We were completely indulging ourselves. I was, and I still do. And Tony was until he died. He didn't do things to make money or to be successful, or for publicity or for attention. He did things because he was just having fun, experimenting and seeing where it led. And I think that was the attitude he brought to FAC-2.

PKC: Moving on to Joy Division... Did you hang out with them? Did you spend much time with them as bands do in a city or a town where a type of music or a scene or something new is coming out, which obviously it was at that time.

VR: No. It was funny, in fact none of the bands did that. Y'know it was like A Certain Ratio when they came along, I did know Donald (Johnson) the drummer from ACR but for years and years he was the great great black musicians. I was into black music in a big way and still am. So I knew Donald from the black music scene emanating from Wythenshawe and Moss Side for years, the early seventies. I used to jam with Donald but apart from him I didn't know the others and I didn't even get to know them.

So, I didn't socialise with A Certain Ratio, and A Certain Ratio didn't socialise with Joy Division, and I didn't socialise with Joy Division. Our paths didn't cross except at gigs and you were so busy and involved doing your own gigging, especially if there was more than one band, you know yourself what mayhem that is, so it was never really that we were all one big gang.

Everyone was supportive of each other but we didn't need to meet up and have drinks together to prove that. I think that the thing that we had in common was that none of us were that bothered about being famous and we didn't have any illusions about making loads of money. A Certain Ratio were just doing what they did in the studio in a flat in Hulme. They did things like put microphones outside the flat window in Hulme and then put those microphones through space echos and echo machines and then take acid. So all the sounds of people outside would be going through a tape machine, delays, effects and stuff and you'd be tripping away to it.

PKC: On the Factory Sample there was John Dowie, who you said you'd kind of met, Cabaret Voltaire I guess you didn't know really.

VR: No, I didn't know them at all. In fact I've still never had a conversation with any of them, not a single Cabaret Voltaire member.

PKC: So it was really just Joy Division that you knew. You knew Ian fairly well didn't you? How did you meet him?

VR: I met Ian in the basement of a music shop which was the best music shop at the time. It was called Reno's and was on Oxford Road. It's still a music shop now but it's no longer Reno's. It was the best place to get band equipment and the basement was where the good stuff was I suppose. A mutual friend of ours, Eugene, worked with Ian for a while when they were both civil servants. Eugene and I worked together for a while when we were both serving petrol. So Ian and I had this mutual friend and Eugene would speak to Ian of me and to me of Ian. So I kind of knew about him but we accidentally bumped into each other in the basement of this music shop, as I said. I was very struck by how ordinary the clothes were that Ian was wearing, which made him very distinctive because it had become the norm to wear outrageous clothes at that point.

And so it was actually more outrageous and more interesting that Ian would wear very ordinary plain trousers and very ordinary "straight" clothes. And that was just because that was what he felt comfortable in.

So that was what my first impressions were. But he was obviously a musician. As soon as you spoke to him and by his bearing and posture you could tell that he was very hip. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew exactly what was going on and what the scene was and all the rest of it. He was very cool but he chose to dress in this way that was straight, which was really effective.

PKC: So there was a sort of contradiction with him which is really what, I suppose, when you watch the films and things that there's almost like this guy that's very grounded, very normal, that has this kind of almost a battle or contradiction would you say in his life?

VR: Yeah, totally. I think that in his own personal thoughts were so intense. My theory at the time, and I still believe this is thathewasabitshyanda bit embarrassed about being seen as pretentious but was pretty deep. For him it was enough that he was doing it. He didn't need to talk about it and disseminate it, to elaborate and explain, he just sang about those things.

Of course, most people can't just hear a vocalist or look at the way a vocalist performs and that's it. There a very few lyrics from songs that are worth hearing anyway, if you think about it. Most of them are not that important, it's just a vocal line that adds the melody and maybe some human emotions are there.

But with Ian it was different. There was a very dark side to his thinking and I think that he had depression, which, speaking to people who were important to Ian, I've heard it said that he may well have been diagnosed as being bipolar. I reckon that he probably was. I don't think many people realised just how deeply that run. And how deeply he felt it.

The only clue you had, really, was when you saw them perform and then you realised that he really was on the edge. When he performed it was as if he was liberated on that stage to really express how he really felt inside with this dark side coming out. It was very gripping. It really held your attention and you were completely held by it. Absolutely riveted to the spot by this person who was just incredibly intense. It was an amazing atmosphere that was created when Joy Division performed. The music was very sympathetic towards Ian. If you listen to a song and the way the music rises or falls in the light of things, then you understand why it worked so well because Barney as guitarist and Hooky on bass and Steve the drummer were in empathy.

Y'know he would work himself up into a frenzy and they would follow that, they had got used to playing together as a band so much that it was second nature for them to do that. It was part of what made them such a great band. But, in answer to the question, I didn't hang out with Joy Division. Really none of us hung out with each other at all.

PKC: Was that part of rivalry do you think, in the way that some bands have or was it just they everyone wanted to get on with their own thing?

VR: We were just so preoccupied with doing our own thing. And the whole attitude of Factory was not to be snobby or exclusive in any way. We were interested in what the critics said. We were just having fun. Expressing things that maybe other people weren't expressing. That's how I felt at the time and I felt very comfortable in that environment.

PKC: Just going back to the Joy Division thing... do you think that that kind of captivating, gripping thing was just for the stage and that off stage they were just like normal guys. Ian had his wife, a family, he lives in a normal town, in a normal house. He was a very grounded sort of person. I mean do you think that it really was just the stage and that outside of that they were just four normal people?

VR: I don't think so, because those lyrics and Ian's use of language to express and to capture a real atmosphere of something, it kind of evoked very dark things that we all have in us I suppose. But I think that that came from his love of literature. I know the author he really loved was T.S. Eliot.

He really was into language and poetry very clearly. I think that that was what he was really about. At the same time he was into David Bowie and glam rock at one point. So it's a real mix of things. But that obsession almost with language, with atmosphere and creating some kind of tension, I think that that was there all the time anyway.

It was just that on the stage you can do it better. When there's an audience there it draws more out from you. Even I feel, in my small way, when I play the guitar in my home I'm probably playing technically far far better than when I'm on stage because it's so much easier to do at home.

You can get the sound exactly right and you're not competing with instruments, blah blah blah. But as soon as you're in front of a crowd of people, who want to listen to what you're doing, you tend to find yourself reaching out further and further to find something else inside yourself to say musically. And the stage is the only place that you can do that. There's nowhere else that will do that.

PKC: I understand what you mean about home. You're not knew Alan Erasmus from way back in the Wythenshawe days. A lot of my friends in those days were from Wythenshawe or Moss Side and most of them were black, because I happened to be into black music.

Alan introduced Tony to me. Tony came round to see me, never having heard me play. Alan brought Tony round three times before I finally agreed to take part and put a band together with other musicians. I insisted that I would have control and all kinds of ridiculous things, which was just silly.

But Tony was really patient. When I originally spoke to him about it and when I got to know him more, he used to say you can tell whether somebody had something just by the way they stood up in a room, or by the way they were. Normal ordinary things. You could just tell. And I think that's probably true for somebody with Tony's perception. It was incredible. I think that was absolutely right.

So he asked me to be the start point of this band which was a five-piece Durutti Column band. I threatened to walk out unless he sacked the singer we had at the time because he was so bloody awful. So challenging yourself. Playing live you play other people and from when you've got the stage, people want to be entertained. You've got this canvas I suppose and a thousand people all standing there watching you and you wanna do something that grips. Can you remember Tony Wilson approaching you to do the Factory Sample?

VR: First of all he approached me because I off there we would've had no singer and studio booked. So Tony found an actor who was dreadful, this fucking awful actor with his dreadful pretentious and portentous lyrics which bore no resemblance to anything I felt or wanted to say. So he didn't last very long either. But then I left the band. I gave Tony a letter and the band a letter, saying I'd left. After that first Factory Sample I was so disappointed with how flat and ordinary the music was and I was trying to write music that was interesting. But the bass player put punctuation marks so you knew exactly what was going to happen next musically. It became predictable and too obvious.

It was complete and total rubbish and not me, more importantly. I don't mind stuff being rubbish and all my albums are rubbish but at least they're my rubbish. And that's what's important to me. But that wasn't even me. So I left, very disillusioned, only to have Tony and Alan keep coming round to see me saying "you are The Durutti Column", which I thought was incredibly loyal of them. So that was quite amazing.

PKC: Do you think it would be possible to get a label to something like A Factory Sample again? I know that Factory Too tried doing it with just four bands but do you think it was just the right thing at that moment?

VR: I think that there was some very lucky and quite incredible coincidences. One of which was that on the one hand you had probably the most adventurous and intelligent record company (in the sense that it was a record company!).

It thought outside the box completely. It was not about competing with other record companies in the business of music. It wasn't about the music business or success or critical acclaim or any of that stuff. It was people that were very bright and mostly Tony.

Tony was the direction. He focused us all in a certain way. His vision was far far beyond the music scene which is actually very shallow as everyone knows, and never more so than now. But it was even shallow back then. You had thousands of imitation punk bands or whatever the hell they were doing. It was just nonsense. So I think we all wanted to do something that was real. Whether it was commercially successful or not was irrelevant. It had to be real.

So you had Factory and at the same time you had Joy Division. Joy Division were, and still are, forever. They were so ahead of their time. And Ian was such an immense, incredible talent.