I discovered REM in 1988 or so, with the release of 'Green' (what a bloody album, practically every song a classic piece of REM, and ushering in a new era of acoustic beauty on 'You are the everything' which they would later mine to extremes) and buying around the same time the catch-up compilation of old stuff called 'Eponymous'. I rapidly bought up most of their own catalogue (on cassette!) and, in June 1989, was delighted to get the chance to see them live in Dublin on the Green world tour. This was a fantastic concert (the Go-Betweens supported just to up the wonderfulness quotient to quite extreme and frankly dangerous levels for me), and a film of the tour was released on video (and later DVD) as 'Tourfilm', seen below:
The Dublin concert didn't have the video backdrops, but the basic principle was pretty close, and it remains probably the one of the best gigs I have ever been to. I still recall them coming out and launching fairly heavily into 'Finest worksong', and feeling briefly disappointed, just for a flash, that this was going to be a loud distant impersonal performance, but this gradually evaporated as the concert became more and more intimate (even in the warehouse-like surroundings of Dublin's RDS), until Michael Stipe stood before a chair, stripped to the waist, and started hitting it with a stick for the start of 'World leader pretend', still probably one of my favourite REM songs ever (I love the descending drums and the bit towards the end where the drums start and the singing and piano rise to the fore in a beautiful oasis of calm, much longer and better on album that live), and captured below after a pretty hard-hitting (but wonderful) version of 'Turn you inside out' (dedicated to the Exxon corporation!); 'World leader pretend' starts around the 4:45 mark.
One of my other favourite REM songs (in fact, possibly at the top of the list) is 'Fall on me', and the 'Tourfilm' version is below:
- The day after the gig, I met Mike Mills on the street in Dublin, while proudly wearing my new 'Green world tour' t-shirt (me, not him) and with my ticket stub in my pocket, but was having a row with my girlfried of the time and failed, to my eternal regret, to ask him to sign either (I do, however, have a Go-betweens t-shirt signed by both Grant McLennan and Robert Forster);
- The day I bought the DVD, by then a postgraduate student, I took the day off and watched the film around 5 times in a row;
- 'I believe' REM were never quite the same again, and were at their peak during this tour. Certainly, a concert 5 years or so later during the 'Monster' tour in Slane (a large Irish outdoor venue) was immensely disappointing, and I think they never quite recovered from the twin losses of Michael Stipe's hair and Bill Berry (with the notable exception of the staggering 'Leaving new york');
- The best other REM live artefact I have come across is a very old bootleg cassette of them playing live in McCabe’s Guitar Shop in the mid-1980s with a bunch of guests, most notably Natalie Marchant, then of 10,000 Maniacs, with whom Michael did a wonderfully funny duet of ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ and the Velvet Underground’s ‘Sunday morning’ (it should be noted that they were each singing one of these songs, at the same time), blending into a child’s counting song. The cassette has long since given up the ghost, but I am sure there must be an electronic version available somewhere, and some day I will find it. While I hunted for it on Youtube recently, I did find the following gems, firstly with Michael, Natalie and Peter Gabriel doing the latter's 'Red rain' together, and secondly with Billy Bragg standing in for Peter in a version of John Prine's 'Hello in there' which I will finish up with:
As a final final thought, I remember a line from an interview with Stipe around the late 1980s in which he was asked if he and Natalie were the Kylie (Minogue) and Jason (Donovan) of intelligent adult rock, to which he replied 'who the fuck are Kylie and Jason?'.
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