VINI REILLY
The Durutti Column’s reclusive guitar genius on Tony Wilson, Morrissey and kickabouts with Pat Nevin
PROPPED up against a wall of his living room in Didsbury, where most people would have a yucca plant or a prized ornament, Vini Reilly has a Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster in birdseye maple, bought for him at some point in the 1980s by Tony Wilson. “Guitars are kind of like sculptures to me,” he says, poignantly. “I don’t try to play it any more because it just does my head in.”
Reilly has recovered most of his coordination since suffering a series of strokes in 2010, a fact he demonstrates by giving
Uncut an impromptu performance on his cuatro, a four-string guitar made by a luthier in Lewes. “But the biggest problem is that there are no tunes happening in my head. There’s nothing of substance coming through. What used to happen is I’d just start playing without really thinking about it. It’s like you become very suggestible – there’s no cerebral activity going on, you’re just feeling. I never knew what key it would be in or how long it would last, it just… occurred. And now it doesn’t.”
But if that sounds sad, he is quick to put things in perspective. “I had very serious memory damage, which was the biggest cause of what became a mental illness. I was delusional, and then I became hallucinatory and they had to section me. It was pretty horrible, but I’m very stable now.”
Reilly looks frail but still cool, in hiking trainers with the laces undone, brightly coloured plaid shirt and that familiar mop of hair. He says knowing that people still care about his music, to the point where they’ve submitted questions for this feature, is a source of great comfort and pride. “I owe it to them, definitely, so thank you. It’s great, it’s magic.”
Your playing has been described as gossamer-like, dreamy, ethereal and kaleidoscopic. How did growing up in Manchester influence your sound?
Josh M Slifkin, Pittsburgh, USA Well I think everything influences you, if you’re a musician. But for a start, you don’t call yourself a musician – that’s for other people to decide, because art only exists when someone else is looking at or listening to it. It’s a two-way process. So Josh, by his listening, he can define it and call it music; I can’t. But you can be influenced by a mood. You can be influenced by someone you’ve just had a row with. Everything is an input.
Where did your love of classical music come from?
Chris Thompson, Carlisle
I had years of classical piano training with a professional musician from the Royal Northern College Of Music, she got me through all the grades. But I got kicked off my O-level music class because an idiot teacher gave me a very low mark for a piece of four-part harmony. I asked why and he said, “Consecutive fourths and fifths, Reilly!” So I went to Manchester Central Library with a book of manuscript paper and I copied five or six examples of composers using consecutive fourths and fifths: Berlioz, Tchaikovsky even. He was really angry and kicked me out. Apparently I was a disturbing influence on the class, which was hilarious.
Did it irritate you that, while the first LP [with the sandpaper sleeve] was a brilliant piece of disruptive situationist intervention, it made listening to it a physical problem?
Marc Beattie, via email
No, I thought it was absolutely great! I love anarchy – as opposed to oligarchy, or monarchy, hierarchy, whatever.
What is your abiding memory of Tony Wilson?
Martha Pugh, Canterbury
He had a genius of recognising when to let someone do their thing. We became very good mates – I used to babysit and change his son’s nappy! He had a well-devised smokescreen where he’d breeze through everything, but he was actually very sensitive. He was juggling so many plates as well as holding down his day job, and the pressure on him was incredible. We would wind each other up and it could get very niggly, to the point where people in the office became very uneasy – which was funny, because neither of us would harm a fly. It would erupt into this real shouting match. At one point, Tony had this very expensive chair, which he kicked over. But he was getting rid of
the stress, and so was I. Every time, we’d end up laughing our heads off. He was like my older brother.
Where did you get the inspiration for “Sketch For Summer?”
Steve Mackenzie, via email
I had a depressive illness, which I’m still medicated for. It made me do the most stupid things because it was impossible to deal with. You don’t feel anything, it’s like you’re not even alive or something. My girlfriend had to physically get me out of bed, even though I knew I was [meant to be] in the studio. I got into Martin [Hannett]’s car and he drove me to the studio in Rochdale. He started unpacking all these boxes of amazing equipment while I was getting more and more introverted, just messing around on my guitar. Then at one point, Martin turned his head and said, “Play that again, Vini.” He had a little click-track thing going, so I played to that, just off the cuff. Then at some point I had a massive row with Martin and stormed out, because that’s what I was like. But what Martin had done [with the music] was incredible. “Sketch For Summer” I’d say is attributable to Martin, because I’d never heard a guitar sound like that.
How important was teaming up with Bruce Mitchell, both for The Durutti Column and for you personally?
AJ, via email
Bruce always just got it. The first rehearsal we had – the first time we played together – was at a gig. We did stuff I hadn’t played before, and he certainly hadn’t heard. But people liked it, and I think the next day we were in Finland at a massive festival. But that’s what Bruce is like, he’s amazing. The reissues, I don’t do any of that stuff, Bruce does it. He’s magic.
Your guitar-playing on the live version of John Cooper Clarke’s “Beasley Street” works perfectly. Might you have done more together?
Kate Furnish, Worcester
We almost did. He drafted me in to do an album with Martin [Hannett]. I think Pete Shelley arrived at one point. He was lovely, Pete Shelley – we used to go and have these special little cakes at this patisserie in Manchester. It was an interesting group of people, apart from the drummer Karl Burns, who I disliked intensely because he was crude. John was in a very fragile state because he was trying to get off heroin. So that kind of got in the way, and we never finished it. But we were always close. I love the guy, he never changes.
In your collaboration with Morrissey for Viva Hate, which song do you feel was your strongest contribution?
Andrea Peviani, Lodi, Italy
I like “Late Night, Maudlin Street”. Morrissey constructed the songs based on some basic chord patterns laid down by Steve Street, which meant there was loads of room for me to put stuff in. Morrissey had done a guide vocal with these lyrics that had a very sad atmosphere, so I came up with this riff that just worked. Then Morrissey would come in and rephrase his lyrics, and put the chorus where the verse was. He was incredibly original. Sometimes these things would come out of nowhere and they’d be perfect, it was such a buzz. We had a fantastic time [making that album], we were laughing all the time. Morrissey’s an incredibly funny, brilliant bloke. He’s very misunderstood by lots of people. One day he pulled up at my house with a little 1960s saloon car full of eco-friendly cleaning products. He took me for a drive – he was a terrible driver, worse than me – and when he spotted a pony on its own in a field, he had to get out of the car and call it over to pet it. But that’s what he was like, so oversensitive in a way, but just lovely.
Can you tell us about the time you and Pat Nevin were invited to Morrissey’s house, circa 1988, where Morrissey produced a grand piano which he had bought for you to play?
Killian Laher, via email [Laughs] He didn’t buy it for me! It was a full-sized grand, which was mad as he never played it – he just liked the fact that he had a piano. Another room was a very state-of-the-art gymnasium for one person, but Morrissey denied that he worked out, which Pat thought was hilarious, because you could see his body [on the records]. Pat always had this little ball of compacted straw in the boot of his car, and a couple of times we had a kickabout in Fog Lane Park. He told me I could have been a footballer because I had the skills, I was nimble like him.
“My Country”, the closing track on the Vini Reilly album, is a song about poverty, discrimination and an absent state. Thirty-five years on, do you consider that England has changed at all?
Emi Herrera, via email
It’s got a lot worse – far, far worse. Do songs like that have the power to change things? I think if people can connect with a sentiment or agree with what I was… I won’t use the word singing because I couldn’t sing! But [if they can connect with] those words, then that’s nice, because I think I was right. Although we also need opposing opinions. You need to hear ideas that are different to yours, otherwise how can you form your own opinion?
If there is one other singer you’d like to work with, who would you pick?
Matthieu Clervoy, via email
It would be a woman who’s no longer with us, a singer called Reshma from a small village in India. I bought loads of her stuff on cassette from a shop on the curry mile in Rusholme, which used to sell Bollywood soundtracks. She sings ghazals and her voice is like nothing else I’ve ever heard. Her music’s addictive, transcendental, so affecting and so powerful. I can’t live without it.
The Durutti Column’s Vini Reilly will be reissued as a five-disc box set by London Records on April 19
“Morrissey’s an incredibly funny, brilliant bloke. He’s very misunderstood by lots of people”