The Durutti Column - cocktail, 1985

"You also get the ripples and rushes of ‘College’ (‘formerly ‘The Sea Wall’) and ‘Journeys by Vespa’, which are both in line with the gently hair-raising thrills of earlier tracks like ‘Madeleine’ and ‘Danny’, where Reilly’s guitar weaves complex, dazzling textures, the down-tempo, desolate spaces of opener ‘At First Sight’, which does sound a lot like Without Mercy, although not identically so. ‘Destroy, She Said’ is one of a few pieces which ties the album to the year it was made, but like I said, not in a negative way. You know, in that a sitar in a pop song is most likely going to be a mid-1960’s song just because a song is immediately recognisable from a particular era, doesn’t mean it has dated. Anyway, despite all of what I just said, ‘Destroy, She Said’ is not one of my favourite pieces here, erring closer to the jazzier spectrum of Durutti that I’m not so keen on. ‘Model’ (formerly ‘Little Horses of Tarquina’) is a brief and gorgeously spectral guitar solo. ‘Take Some Time Out’ and ‘A Silence’ both have vocals – the former is a lighter than average creation, though Reilly’s singing can’t help but conjure an air of downtrodden misery! The latter is not as good, a bit Durutti-by-numbers. ‘Mirror A’ and ‘Mirror B’ are quite different pieces, ‘A’ being a decent if lightweight, fully electronic piece with vocals by ‘Pauline’, and ‘B’ a piano-led dirge, punctuated by Eric Sleichim’s saxophone, not one of my favourite elements of the Durutti sound circa this time, I have to say. In-between those two pieces we get ‘Cocktail’, which is lighter than ‘Mirror B’ but has the same saxophone problems, and ‘Telephone Call’ which has saxophone too, but used to much better effect. This piece is quite jazzy actually, but the more melancholic, late-night, drowsy side of jazz. It’s good! The album concludes with ‘A Room in Southport‘ (formerly ‘Snowflakes’), a very gentle, shuffling thing of beauty, with some lovely harp playing from Anne Van Den Troost."