Lotta Continua: The Struggle Continues
I ask you to pretend with me for a moment that the Durutti Column is not the crappiest band you've ever heard.
"Well, it is crappy," insists Vini Reilly.
"I have no idea why anybody would buy or listen to a Durutti Column album. I have no idea when I'm doing a concert or a gig why anybody is standing there listening to it. I don't know what they're hearing or what they like about it. I'm just very glad that even though it is a very small amount of people that they like something.
"Whatever I was feeling and hearing when those pieces of music came into my head, the vinyl or CD hasn't captured the essence of what that was. None of them did. Every piece of music is a response to an emotional stimuli, whether it's a girlfriend, or a love, or a death -- something will have made this happen, and I don't even pretend to understand how. But when the piece of music arrives and I have the feelings that are to do with that piece of music, it is quite overwhelming sometimes, and when I'm actually recording it, and I feel that passion and that strength of emotion, but when I listen back to it, even like an hour later, I can no longer hear any passion or any emotion. It just sounds empty and useless to me.
"The thing is I don't know what Durutti Column music sounds like. I don't know if you play an instrument yourself. If you're creating your own stuff, after you've done it, you can't hear it anymore. You certainly can't hear it in the way that someone who hasn't created it hears it. Once I've been through that process of transferring it from my brain to a record, and there's some distance between myself and the recording process, I can't hear what it is anymore.
"Fats Waller or the Boogie Woogie people -- they would have to do 50 performances of the song in order to make enough acetates to get the performance out. You can only get so many acetates from one performance. So you've got all these different performances, and you can pick out favorites. You can listen to a Boogie Woogie thing by Albert Amend and Pete Johnson for example, and the thing they did that was most famous was called something like "Boogie Woogie Jump," and there's seventeen versions of that available right now, and I can tell you which is the version I like. They're doing the same things, the same patterns, the same playing with rhythm, the same melody, and the same exchange of ideas. They can do it very precisely, yet I can tell which one is the one for me, which is THE version. I can tell which version has captured the real passion and fire of the thing.
"There's just some connection. Something that's transmitted to you, that you pick up. And it is unconscious. You either feel it or you don't, and if you feel it, you know it. And it is spiritual, it's magic, it is indefinable, whatever, mystical, whatever word you want to use. And if the piece of music hasn't got that element to it, then it hasn't got anything. It's pure technique.
"You can feel when you're doing a concert for example, that all the people in the room are feeling an identical feeling, even though at a Durutti Column gig there is no archetype person. There seems to be a huge range of people of different ages, different classes, but I can see, I can tell, I can feel that they're feeling exactly the same feeling as each other. And that's weird. I don't put out any ideas to pretend to understand what or why or how that is, but it's definitely there or else I wouldn't bother getting on a stage.
"Passion can be infectious and inspiration can be infectious. But it is a very difficult thing to generate artificially. I find it is either there with no work involved or thought put into it. It is not a cerebral thing. It's either there or it's not. It was there with Bruce for example. From the very first time, I ever physically played a guitar to his drums, we don't rehearse. I've never in my whole life - well, since I was 12 years old -- practiced the guitar. I still don't. The only rule I have about the guitar is never play it, unless you really, really want to play it. It's kind of incidental that I find myself playing it quite often. It could be a year since we did a gig, but we still don't rehearse. The rehearsal is the soundcheck. Very often at a gig, I'll start to play a song which he's never heard before in his life, and I know he'll be right there. And I know it's going to be absolutely, perfectly correct, and musically it's going to be simpatico. It's just this chemistry thing. It works or it doesn't, and it's not cerebral or contrived, and it works with Bruce.
"The greatest Flamenco singer was in my opinion a guy called El Cameron, and he's now dead, but he was very critical of his accompanists. If his accompanist wasn't in tune with the same thing he was feeling, he just wouldn't work. He'd just stop singing in the middle of a concert and walk off. For him, it was pointless. A singer does need something pushing them.
"All I was trying to do, and what I'm trying to do, is just make music that is true. Like I remember seeing a great Orson Welles interview, where he describes Jimmy Cagney. One of these things he says about him is that if you watch a Jimmy Cagney film, nobody behaves in real life the way Jimmy Cagney behaves. It's a complete caricature, but there isn't one moment on the screen where Jimmy Cagney isn't a true portrayal of a character. You absolutely believe in that character. And that's all I'm trying to do, just to make something that is true to what I'm hearing in my head, whether it's beautiful, good, bad, indifferent, whether people like it -- it's irrelevant. I'm just trying to do something that is true. If I can just do one album in the course of my life that is true, then I'll die a happy man. I've not done it yet."
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Older articles can be found in The Archives
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