The Sandpaper Cover of The Return of the Durutti Column | Red Bull Music Academy Daily

You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience.

In January 1980, Factory Records released The Return of the Durutti Column, the debut album by The Durutti Column. A group assembled by Factory directors Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus, come 1980 The Durutti Column was just one man: a guitarist named Vini Reilly.

Reilly had played in Manchester punk group Ed Banger And The Nosebleeds, but the music on The Return of the Durutti Column owed nothing to that genre, save perhaps a desire to non-conformity. Nine tracks of mercurial, jazzy solo guitar, augmented at the post-production stage by modular synthesizer played by Factory’s in-house producer Martin Hannett, it was remarkable music. But every bit as remarkable was its packaging: sleeve pasted with two slabs of heavy-duty sandpaper, and – on some copies, at least – spray-painted with the catalogue number, FACT 14.

The Return of the Durutti Column could be seen as an explicit declaration that Factory Records had some lofty intellectual ideas. Both title and sleeve made direct reference to the work of the Situationist International, a mid-20th century group bent on disrupting “the spectacle” – their term for a manifestation of advanced Capitalism, an accumulation of pseudo-images that invented false desires and stifled authentic, lived experience. Little in Reilly’s sparkling guitar miniatures spoke of revolutionary intent. But his beautiful, blank music offered a canvas for Factory – specifically, label co-founder Tony Wilson – to circulate ideas that had served as inspiration for the imprint from its beginning.

When Tony [Wilson] mentioned to me a book with a sandpaper cover that violently damaged your other books, I thought, “Yes, that’s a powerful, iconoclastic gesture.”

Factory released four editions of the sandpaper-bound Return, totalling 3,600 copies, and in June 1980 the album was reissued in a more conventional sleeve, featuring a painting by Fauvist artist Raoul Dufy. For the first time in 30 years, then, 2014 sees FACT 14 back in sandpaper. In December 2013, Factory Benelux, the label now curated by James Nice of LTM Recordings, announced a new limited edition of Return. Nice has conceived an updated design setting an 11-inch square of sandpaper beneath a die-cut based on the 1978 Factory bar graph logo conceived by Peter Saville, with a hard vinyl 7-inch of additional tracks replacing the original “test card” flexidisc. The whole package is housed in a protective polythene wallet. (Some of the revolutionary intent is diffused, but at least your vinyl collection won’t bear the brunt.)

Nice, taking advice from Saville and Durutti Column drummer/manager Bruce Mitchell, has been working on this new edition since 2010. For him, the revival of such lost artefacts is a sort of public duty. “It seems to me that the sandpaper Return… is second only to Metal Box in terms of radical post-punk packaging,” he says. “FACT 14 is an ugly/beautiful object, and the abrasive outer cover stands in pleasing opposition to the music contained on the record inside. Plus several memorable soundbite stories are attached to it – that it destroys all the other records around it, or that Joy Division put them together for tuppence ha’penny. That it’s Situationist, whatever that means.”

Talking about it today, though, it’s clear Saville still has a complex relationship with FACT 14. “When Tony mentioned to me the Dadaist proposition of a book with a sandpaper cover that violently damaged your other books, I thought, ‘Yes, that’s a powerful, iconoclastic gesture.’ And I also saw how it could be transposed or transported to the format of a record cover. But I did feel, even just instinctively, that there were some aspects of it that were incompatible with itself.” He laughs. “Sandpaper and vinyl records… it’s not the most comfortable partnership.”

INSPIRATION

The sleeve of FACT 14 has a direct inspiration: the 1959 book Mémoires, a collaboration between Guy Debord – the French intellectual and de facto leader of the Situationist International – and Danish artist Asger Jorn. The inside of Mémoires is striking, a collage of cut-up texts, maps, cartoons and newsprint, splattered with coloured ink. It was the sandpaper jacket of Mémoires, though, that would resonate: designed to damage or destroy the books around it, the surface it was placed on, even the reader.

A page from Mémoires<br>In 1959, the Situationist International were but two years old, just a handful of thinkers drifting the bars and cafes of Paris’ Left Bank. Their ideas, though, would soon attain startling potency. The Situationists were starry-eyed utopians, ruthless critics and prolific creators. Their films, books and philosophical pamphlets re-smelted shards of earlier 19th and 20th Century artistic and political movements – Surrealism, Marxism, Lettrism, Dada – into calls for...