REM – ROYAL ALBERT HALL, LONDON
SUNDAY TIMES - MARCH 2008

On the basis of their album launch show at The Royal Albert Hall, it would be hard to explain to a teenager why R.E.M. were once so important. But today, everything from Emo to Alternative Country sounds as it does because of the Athens, Georgia band’s 80’s records, and when Radiohead and Coldplay graduated from cult status to stadiums they used REM’s once unimaginable career path for reference. A quarter century ago, an R.E.M. show was an unprecedented experiment in then forbidden musical fusion, as the synaptic psychedelic cascades of The Byrds tumbled over the jerky post-punk rhythms of The Gang Of Four.

Tonight though, we see men who have long ceased to discover anything new seek to replicate those distant moments of inspiration in a choreographed facsimile of the artistic process. Though arguably constrained by the fact that the show was being broadcast simultaneously by BBC Radio 2, R.E.M might as well have been miming to backing tracks, so precise and lacking in playfulness was their performance, and their new album, Accelerate, revisits their straightforward late ‘80s sound, rather the opaque mystery of their 1983 debut Murmur and its immediate successors, or the more varied musical palette of their ‘90s releases

Of the new songs, the opening rush of Living Well Is The Best Revenge was undeniably attention grabbing, and Horse To Water showed that Peter Buck still knows how to drive home an all-conquering guitar riff. But only 2003’s Final Straw, originally recorded in a swift response to Bush’s declaration of war, sounded genuinely impassioned, as Buck’s sturdy acoustic mined folk memories of purposeful protest music. And the 1991 hit Losing My Religion was a highlight, not simply because of its adoption as a universally applicable anthem by a generation of indistinctly disatisfied baby boomers, but because Buck’s mandolin at last offered some tonal variety.

The group’s singer Michael Stipe has now abandoned his late 90’s voodoo pierrot persona, but his shaven head, stylish suit, and considered manner made it seem as if R.E.M. were now being fronted by the director of The National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner. And indeed, R.E.M.’s current crossplatforming, in the shape of a film and photography tie-in with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, is exactly the kind of brand awareness raising move high profile arts institutions like R.E.M. and the N.T. both need to survive in today’s cut-throat world.

Nonetheless, some of the gauche gestures Stipe adopted in the late ‘80s as the group’s following swelled to fill stadiums remain, and when he impersonates the hands of a clock during the ‘tick tock’ refrain of Drive, it’s more Pan’s People than Lindsay Kemp. At one point, Stiped tossed away a sheaf of song lyrics, requiring him to ask scuffling fans to share sheets with their neighbours. It’s a telling moment that reveals the gap between R.E.M.’s noble hopes of taking the idealism of the American post-punk community into the mainstream, and the invasive realities of mass adulation .

The 21st century R.E.M. package is like BBC2’s motoring show Top Gear. You don’t have to like it to admire its crowd-pleasing professionalism. And it is fronted by a trio of middle-aged men who ought to know better. But how is it possible for R.E.M. to develop, or recapture the spark they once had, when they are obliged to work in the heavy harness of stardom? Sonic Youth found a way to take Geffen Records’ money and still matter, and the superstar actor Brad Pitt was rumoured to have participated in a fiddle festival in the Appalacian Mountains last year, learning at the feet of the masters, masked by a false beard. Perhaps Michael Stipe could borrow his disguise