(Track from album, “The Return Of The Durutti Column”)
This song is something of an anomaly in my collection.
For starters it’s an instrumental, and with exception of very few tracks, where I like the rest of the band’s material so much, that I don’t delete the song for completion, instrumentals are a big no. Too boring. Hoe can you possibly listen to a song for 3 minutes that has no words? It’s also by The Durutti Column, whose catalogue is plagued by bland nothingness, background music, the stuff you hear in a lift; it’s just unbearable.
So, it’s strange really, these two factors being as they are, that this is such an important track for me.
I first heard about the album this is from, “The Return Of The Duritti Column”, ironically titled since it’s their debut outing, in a book cataloguing the sleeve designs of Factory Records, from 1978 to it’s demise in the early 1990s. The sleeve caught my attention immediately, designed from sandpaper with the intent of destroying every other record placed next to it, the design played homage to the Situationist International, a revolutionary political and artistic movement. As well as having a kind of political message, it was also deemed to be the perfect comment on Punk aggression and agitation, paradoxical when compared to the music on the enclosed disc.
The romanticism continues, with Reilly asking the members of Joy Division to make the sleeves for the initial run by hand, leaving Ian Curtis to stick together sheets of sandpaper, whilst the rest of the band watched a porn film. Good old 70’s Manchester.
The track itself, as mentioned, is very un-punk, but at the same time, retains those typical factory new wave aspects.
The opening synthesised noise of tweeting birds is almost serene, sounding perfect in a kind of classical composition type way, and very real. The real beauty of this track however, is the one-man guitar wonder wizard that is Vini Reilly, playing an amazing concerto of electric guitar that almost feels out of place on a record with purposefully and physically destructive artwork.
The plucking patterns are so intricate, so easy to feel lost in… and achieved alongside challenging chord progression, this track shines as the strongest in The Durutti Column’s catalogue, even alongside the champion effort made by Reilly in 1989 with “Vini Reilly”, 18 tracks composed in a mere 20 days in the aftermath of the infamous recording sessions for Morrissey’s debut, “Viva Hate”.
It’s just very good. Beautiful and flowing, and very accomplished. I really liked the sense of not being able to determine whether or not there was a separate bassist or whether Reilly was just as god like as Dylan or Hendrix. There’s a real sense of masterful musicianship here, and though this shows on the band’s later work, there’s nothing that comes even close to sounding this exciting and strange…
★★★★★
Versions of “Sketch For Summer”
Album Version – 3:00