page_title: Without Mercy (album)
section_title: Release
hierarchical_section_title: Without Mercy (album) / Release
caption_attribution_description: English: Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, London
context_page_description: Without Mercy is the fourth studio album by English band The Durutti Column, released in October 1984 on Factory Records. After the band and label boss Tony Wilson were unanimous in their dislike of Another Setting, Wilson pushed the band towards progressing to a new, classical-inspired sound. The band went on to record Short Stories for Pauline, which went unreleased when Wilson refused to release it, though one track, "Little Mercy", kept Wilson's attention. He asked the band to use it as the foundation for a different album, ultimately becoming Without Mercy.
  With a dramatically extended line-up, featuring classical musicians such as cello player Caroline Lavelle and Tuxedomoon violinist Blaine L. Reininger, Without Mercy was recorded in Strawberry Studios. It was partly an attempt by Wilson to push Durutti Column band leader Vini Reilly into spending more than three days recording an album, although the album was recorded in only five days. The album is an album-length, two-part modern classical piece, also titled "Without Mercy", using the narrative of John Keats' poem "La Belle Dame sans Merci", which also gives the album its name.
context_section_description: Without Mercy was released in the United Kingdom by Factory Records in October 1984 with the catalog number FACT 84, and was also concurrently released in Spain and Italy. It was only the third Factory album to be officially advertised in the music press, via a New Brutalist-styled half-page advert in the NME reading "Durutti Column Piss on The Art of Noise." The album had already been premiered live in August 1984 at London's Riverside Studios with the nine-piece "orchestra," followed by further performances at Wilson's Manchester nightclub The Hacienda on 12 December and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London shortly after. The band's drummer Bruce Mitchell later contended that "Without Mercy demonstrated Tony's flair for marketing and PR. It definitely changed perceptions of Vini as a composing musician, so it was an accurate reading of the media. But Vini had to be forced to do it."
  The album sleeve, described by Nice as a "genuinely classic sleeve," was the first project completed by typographically-led design studio 8vo, a collaboration between Mark Holt and Simon Johnston that had been approached after Factory's in-house designer Peter Saville "made little progress on his first Durutti sleeve," and the success of the Without Mercy sleeve meant that 8vo became Durutti's sleeve designers of choice thereafter. It features Henri Matisse's scenic painting Trivaux Pond (1916–17) glued onto recycled pulp board, alongside letterpress-printed type "reminiscent of the flowing poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire," with both the flow and the font on the sleeve chosen to reflect the post-impressionist period of Matisse's painting. With the painting being physically glued onto the sleeve, it was cited as an innovative sleeve by Prendergast.
caption: The album was premiered at Hammersmith's Riverside Studios (pictured in 2008).
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