Sketch for Summer
The Durutti Column at the Meltdown Festival, June 17, 2026
One night last week I was eating a slice of pizza outside the Southbank Centre near Waterloo Bridge and I saw an elderly man walk by wearing a vintage Flying Nun t-shirt and I immediately knew that we were both on our way to the same place. T shirts with your favorite band on them are bad enough, but shirts advertising a particular record label are a thousand times nerdier. Nowadays anyone can record and release their own music, and I no longer keep track of who is on what label, but back in the day that kind of knowledge was less esoteric.
When I first graduated from college, I worked as a volunteer at a college radio station called KFJC. Wednesday nights were station meeting night, and it was the main social event of my week. We would gather in the station’s meeting room and the GM would tell us important announcements and then he and the music director would put a huge pile of the week’s new record releases -- in that era, record companies released 24,000 LP titles a year, and always on Tuesdays -- on the table, slit open the packaging, put them one by one on a turntable, and proceed to tell us what to think.
No, I am just kidding, they didn’t intentionally do that, but I am sure that their words were an influence on how I approached my thoughts about each act. Would I have appreciated a band like the Birthday Party, or Husker Du, without being first told how to listen to them? Probably not. Like most of the volunteers, I came to the station believing I was a hugely discerning music fan because I loved Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello and the Cure, and within a months of joining up I could not only tell you the entire history of the Soft Boys, who they were influenced by, and why it was a crime they were so underrated, but also what label they were on and what label they should be on, and if I didn’t know, I could have guessed.
Twin/Tone, SST, Homestead, 4 AD, you name it. They all had a sound that was individual to their acts, a taste that was made by the person at their helm, and all of it was a far, far cry from the Petty/Springsteen/Elvis triangle. Anyway one of the bands I loved at the time was the Durutti Column, the second release from Factory Records in Manchester, best known for releasing better known acts like Joy Division, New Order, and Happy Mondays and Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark. Their music sounded like no other music I had heard on the radio: it was instrumental, atmospheric, nuanced, delicate, passionate, and utterly compelling. It wasn’t dance music, or punk music, or popular music. It just sort of was. You fell into it, or you didn’t.
Being young, and in California, I really wasn’t tuned into that scene at the time. I think I thought the band didn’t really exist; that it was more of a recording project. If they toured or played out at all at the time, I sure didn’t know about it, so you can imagine my excitement when I saw that they - or a version of “they” - were performing at the Meltdown Festival at whilst I was in the UK. The Meltdown Festival happens in Purcell Hall at the Southbank Centre - a room that holds about 250 - and this year it was curated by Harry Styles, who claims the Durutti Column as a big influence. (So do Frank Ocean and Yung Lean, and I would have laughed at the latter idea if it wasn’t for his amazing song for Gener8ion called Storm that just came out: if you haven’t seen that, please click here.) For Meltdown, Harry himself played the Purcell Room (in addition to 12 nights at Wembley Stadium), just the night before this gig. You can only imagine the difficulty of getting into that, but the Durutti Column wasn’t that easy either. I logged in every morning for two weeks and one day a single return ticket appeared and i snapped it up. It cost 27 quid.
The Durutti Column was always a bit of a solo project for one Vini Reilly, who had a stroke a decade ago and thus can’t perform, so this was really a performance by other former members of the band and some newer ones and it was transcendent. I am not a huge expert on the Durutti Column’s music, so forgive my lack of song titles, but the first few numbers were instrumentals and they were hushed and rapt and sonically fulfilling: one critic years ago, called the band a work of “radical non-provocation,” and described Reilly’s guitar playing as being like ‘tracing ice castles on a frosty window pane,” and I can’t possibly do better than that. As for seeing it performed live, if you’ve ever done a sound bath at yoga, you might know the sensation: sometimes a sound can be so resonant that it’s like the soundwaves are breaking apart the plaque in your brain, allowing more space between your thoughts, between your heartbeats, between your relationship to the world. The latter part of the set was made up of songs from a new album “Renascent,” including “Liars,” the first release, and it had vocals, and it was also very beautiful. The show lasted exactly 75 minutes.
I’m not joking when I say I find this kind of music spiritual, but other words will fail to describe it. Ambient, sensual, filigree...a whole thesaurus of such adjectives wouldn’t quite hit it on the head and you’d either like it, or you wouldn’t, so there is no point in going on about it. It was a lovely special event though, the whole reason one travels here, and listening to it made me understand why peasants went to mass. That night England beat Croatia in the first world cup match, and as I walked home from the tube, it felt as if my eustachian tubes had been somehow subtly altered by the evening’s event, so that now every soundwave had a deeper meaning. At that moment, as all of London shouted in unison, it was as if all the good cheer and happiness that the world has on offer was bursting out of the pubs and into the London night, and to me, post-Durutti Column, it sounded exactly like prayers.
This is not what I thought this essay would be. But it’s better and now I’m going to revisit DC which was not at all my thing back in the day.
Damn, Gina, this riff is on a level of its own, top tier, and that link to Gener8ion had me trembling.