Edition №11
The master tapes of the first Factory records spent years in Tony Wilson’s loft. Oliver Wilson found them when he cleared his father’s things out after he died in 2007: “piles and piles of 8-tracks, tapes, this, that and the other by every Factory Records artist.” He decided they belonged to the artists who made them. The Durutti Column’s reels went into the Museum of Science and Industry’s archive in Castlefield, on the site of the world’s first passenger railway terminus, and in 2009 the producer Keir Stewart drew them out to remaster the band’s first four albums. His account of that job survives in the box set’s liner notes: transfers run at the Royal Northern College of Music on a lovingly maintained Studer, the outputs fed into a new Prism converter. The reels, he wrote, were “like ancient scriptures of the Factory, original and intact.”
Stewart never left the story. In July 2026 the Durutti Column returned with Renascent, their first album since 2010, on Factory Too, the label run with Oliver Wilson. Stewart produced it. The man who carried the tapes out of the loft made the record that brought the band back.
One of the four albums in that 2009 box was The Return of the Durutti Column, the 1980 debut of Vini Reilly’s band, produced by Martin Hannett. The source end of its chain is unusually well kept: a named archive, a named machine, a producer who can tell you which converter he used. The object end is where it gets strange. In July 1980, Factory re-cut one side of the record and kept the original printed artwork, and the printed surfaces have disagreed with the discs inside them ever since. Three modern editions still print a track listing that their vinyl does not play, and one of those is still in print.
So the well-documented tape chain ends at an object that cannot identify itself properly. Catalog number, label copy, and sleeve all read as the record they no longer contain. What settles it is a count you can make in a shop in ten seconds, before you pay, and the rest of this edition is that count, the two pressings that reward it and the one disc that carries the complete album.
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