The Durutti Column
The Return of the Durutti Column
Manchester, UK: Factory Records, 1980
12” vinyl LP
Edition of 2000
Public Image Ltd’s John Lydon hoped to packaged the band’s second LP in a sandpaper sleeve, but had to settle for a metal film canister (see below). Factory Records wished to issue their second LP in a metal film canister but had to settle for sandpaper, after PIL beat them the punch six months prior.1
Despite the album title - The Return of the Durutti Column - the LP was the debut recording for the project, which was basically a collaboration between guitarist Vini Reilly and in-house producer Martin Hannett. Early versions featured nothing more than FACT 14 stencilled on the cover, but the album was only Factory Record’s second full length release, following Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures from the year before. The other numbers were used to identify promotional posters, seven inch singles, even the label’s stationery.
Factory Records impresario Tony Wilson named the band2, and the album, and also co-designed the cover, a rare instance of Peter Saville’s brilliant design work not adorning a Factory product.
Wilson acquired four-thousand sheets of 12-inch square sandpaper and offered members of the two other bands signed to the label - Joy Division and A Certain Ratio - £15 each to wallpaper paste them onto blank sleeves. Reportedly, Ian Curtis, with a wife and child to support, did the bulk of the work while his bandmates watched pornography in the other room.3
The idea behind the cover was that the sandpaper would gradually damage the disks on either side of it in one's record collection (something Warhol’s cover for The Stones’ Sticky Fingers was already doing, inadvertently). It also ended up damaging the record enclosed.
Obsessed with the Situationists4, Wilson had borrowed the idea from the 1959 Guy Debord book Mémoires (see earlier post here).
Peter Saville appreciated the iconoclastic gesture, but was apprehensive about the final design. “To me, it looked like a DIY thing that was, really, the antithesis of what I was trying to do. It looked a bit homemade,” he said. "My premise, with Factory, was that we would be independent, but we would do things better than the big manufacturers. I wanted to place culture or art in the possession of – I don’t want to call them ordinary people, but people not privileged to own art. I thought, why can’t pop things be smarter, more cultured, better?”5
Designer Jamie Reid6, who reportedly introduced Wilson to Mémoires and “proofed" The Return of the Durutti Column, recalls that Wilson paid him for his work with a half-dozen copies of the disk, all of which fell apart.
Vini Reilly was not consulted on the sleeve design, and didn’t even realize the recordings were intended for release:
"I didn't even know it was going to be an album. It was just the case of jumping at the chance of being in the studio. I actually didn't get up in time, Martin had to physically get me out of bed to get me to the studio – that's how little I believed it would happen. I was still doing late night petrol station shifts. I was even more amazed when Tony presented me with a white label. I was completely baffled. 'What, this is really going to be an album? You must be insane! No-one's going to buy this!' And then Tony got the idea from the Situationists about the sandpaper book, and decided to do some with a sandpaper sleeve. It was Joy Division that stuck the sandpaper onto the card. I was mortified."
Last week a copy of the record sold for £1,400 at auction (above, bottom). Admittedly it was a provenance copy, having once belonged to influential DJ John Peel. Peel had played six of the ten tracks from the record on BBC Radio 1 in 1980: Sketch For Summer, Requiem For A Father, Katherine, Conduct, Sketch For Winter and In “D".
A 2025 reissue of the record, complete with sandpaper cover, was announced a month ago today and was made available for pre-order. It has already sold out. The CD reissue (below, bottom) remains available.
1. The first time Lydon appeared on television was on Tony Wilson’s Granada TV show So it Goes, which aired footage of a Sex Pistols concert.
2. "Buenaventura Durutti was a cool dude. A Spanish anarchist who led a team in the civil war against Franco, called the Durutti Column. But that isn't where the name came from. Keep up, keep up. In 1966, a bunch of proto student revolutionaries, fired with the cult brand of anarchist theory that goes by the name situationism, took over the student's union at Strasbourg University, just by turning up for the
elections. They spent their entire annual funding on creating a massive comic strip which they then flyposted overnight in their city. The Strasbourg morning rush hour was brought to a halt by a city-sized
comic strip. One of the panels featured two cowboys talking about reification. This panel was called The Return of the Durutti Column’.” Tony Wilson. 24 Hour Party People: What the Sleeve Notes Never Tell You, 2002.
3. "Joy Division did about five hundred of them," recalled Wilson, "because Ian needed money more than the rest of them. The other three watched porn movies while Ian did all the slapping and pasting. The strange thing about wallpaper paste is that it looks rather like semen. Coming back to the flat at midnight, finding the other three staring at the porn video, and Ian slapping this semen everywhere, is one of those great memories.” Tony Wilson, quoted in Shadowplayers by James Nice.
4. Wilson’s Manchester nightclub and music venue The Hacienda was named after a Situationist slogan: "The Hacienda Must Be Built", from Formulary for a New Urbanism by Ivan Chtcheglov.
5. Saville expressed his reservations to Wilson, "But Tony said, I’ve already bought the sandpaper. So I became arm’s length at that point. I didn’t engage with any of the issues around making that sleeve.”
6. Reid, who died in 2023, was best known for his graphic design for the Sex Pistols, including the band logo, debut LP and the cover for the single "God Save the Queen", which was been called "the single most iconic image of the punk era."
