I've voted Durutti Column but I'm very conflicted.
I grew up liking rave music, Durutti Column are nice and blissful, but chatting to some older bloke from Manchester who was at the Hacienda told me it all went to pot around the late 80s. I forget the year he gave but it might even have been 86 if not 88. I suppose it will be a question of taste, but it leaves me very conflicted.
I agree with the older bloke, that's because this scene at its best was about creating pop music in the ashes of punk, whether you call it "new wave" or "post-punk" or "synth-pop" or whatever. This was fertile ground for a while but lost steam in the mid-80s, when dance music became the form where new vital energy and promise was cropping up, already evidenced by New Order's imitative tailing of New York club music with "Blue Monday." Groups listed here such as Stone Roses and Happy Mondays (outside of Manchester, Primal Scream and, a later example, Saint Etienne, notwithstanding more "experimental" groups like Psychic TV and Cabaret Voltaire, also come to mind) represented an advancement of this tendency in pop to associate one's work with the burgeoning club and rave culture, integrating dance music sensibility into their own production or leasing out remixes to those more embedded in the scene, a grab at vanguardist credibility that would continue with similar subsequent acts into the 90s. In the more straightforward case of 808 State and its very fleeting relevance, Gerald truly (and rather singularly) represents a passing of the torch, or, if you like, the escape from the Haçienda cul-de-sac into the world of modern dance music proper, with its attendant shift to London.
All that being said, I think Durutti Column/Vini held onto his own integrity and was smart not to get swept up in aping trends that were ultimately beyond his abilities, as so many other acts around him did. I was listening to a few of his 90s albums for the first time recently, and while perhaps not indicating the wealth of progression found in contemporaneous developments, he did move with the times gracefully and remained relatively original in his approach to doing so.
