For Vini: The Music / The Durutti Column at Albert Hall

Nobody plays guitar like Vini Reilly, which is a bit of a problem when you’re putting on a night of his music without him. Best not to try and perfectly emulate his sound, but to create something new with it. That’s what two of his longest-serving bandmates and a circle of close collaborators have done in this chamber-style show, which sold out two nights in London this summer. It comes home to Manchester this autumn.

“I wanted to create something that wasn’t a recognisable form,” Reilly said recently. Across almost five decades as The Durutti Column, he managed it. Having unlearned the punk style that defined his brief stint in Manchester’s Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds, he rebuilt his playing from jazz, classical, blues and flamenco, and opted for a clean, glassy sound while his post-punk peers and Factory labelmates reached for distortion. The rest was in his fingers: quicksilver phrases that wander about the fretboard like someone talking to themselves.

“What planet is that from?” was Keir Stewart’s reaction as a teenager growing up in Whalley Range, hearing them on the radio – before joining the band as producer and multi-instrumentalist. Over some 40 albums, the particular planet kept changing, from the spectral minimalism of the early Factory albums to orchestral textures and the vocal loops that anticipated Moby’s Play by a decade. But sadly, from 2010, a series of strokes left Reilly unable to play as he once did, and things went quiet for a very long time.

Then a hell of a surprise this July: Renascent, the first Durutti Column album in 16 years, pieced together with Stewart and long-serving drummer Bruce Mitchell. Reilly’s guitar runs through it, spiralling into flamenco trills on ‘Your Shadow at Morning’ and scraping against Stewart’s soft synths on ‘Liars’ and ‘Scammer’, on which he also sings (in spite of Tony Wilson once declaring that fans of Reilly’s voice were ‘off their heads’). Collaboration is key, and there are fantastic contributions from Caoilfhionn Rose, whose breathy wails and torch balladry haunt ‘Agonistes’ and ‘Sargasso Sea’ respectively.

Improbably or inevitably, it’s here that Harry Styles makes a cameo in the story that leads us to Albert Hall. Well before the surprise album, the band’s music had been having a resurgence. Blood Orange sampled ‘Sing to Me’, and everyone from John Frusciante to Caroline Polachek counted themselves among fans. Adding his name to that list: Mr Watermelon Sugar himself. Curating Meltdown in June, Styles really wanted Reilly on the bill, but with live performances still being out of reach for the guitarist, the people closest to the music set out to find another way.

Stewart, a member of the band for some 30 years, took on the guitar, but rather than chase Reilly’s sound note for note, the ensemble spread it out across violin (Liz Rossi), French horn (Sam Morris), and piano and voice (the aforementioned Rose). The result is adored tunes like ‘Otis’ and ‘Sing To Me’ bathed in new chamber textures, including glockenspiel and pedal timpani. People flew in from as far as Buenos Aires to catch it in London, with one reviewer calling the experience “transcendent”.

And so what began as a stand-in for Reilly has become something special in its own right. Catch it, for one night only, in the city where the band formed nearly 50 years ago.