nixsight

… After standing up in the midst of thousands of strangers for five hours. But that’s okay, because we were watching live music. I’ve no idea what the capacity of the Rosebowl is, but it’s a pretty big cricket-ground venue, and by the time the band played it was packed. The weather kept threatening to turn on us, from dull and overcast to positively nasty, with odd flashes of sun that only really promised that rain, if it came, would be heavy and in a storm.

Girl One kept saying that the weather would hold. She is a terrible optimist when it comes to things like this.

[Spoiler: She was right.]

First support were The Guillemots. We’d never heard them before, so didn’t really know what to expect. Having since heard their recorded stuff, I have to say we would have been shocked regardless – their album sounds almost sterile compared to the organic live performance they gave us.

This was probably aided by the fact that their set was plagued by technical difficulties, resulting in some very odd sounds coming out of their equipment. However this seemed to suit their song structure, and the way that they work together, allowing a bit more fluidity and spontaneity than one would normally expect from a band at such a big venue, and the overall effect was quite refreshing and entertaining.

Frontman Fyfe Dangerfield was an engaging and self-deprecating presence, and handled the apparent cock-ups with charm and humour, although the weight of the opportunity to play before REM must have been huge. Some of their songs – though I’m afraid I don’t remember which, not being that familiar with their music – are impressively epic, too – an enlivening mix of movie-soundtrack drama and left-field pop that puts hooks in you.

I can’t say the same for The Editors, who played second support, to be honest, although throughout their set I found myself a little isolated by how unimpressive I found them. The audience seemed to lap them up, singing along to many songs as if they spoke to the heart of each of them, and I wondered for a second if this would be what it would feel like if some ungodly horror found me stuck in the middle of a Coldplay concert.

Because although there was nothing actually offensive about the band, and although they had a much more solid and professional command of their material than The Guillemots, I had the twin impressions that a) I had very much heard it all before, and not been all that engaged first time around, and b) They were swapping out skilled gesturing for actual sincerity.

Midway through the first song, I remembered what Rol had said in his much better review of the earlier REM show, about the band. I don’t know if I would as quickly have made the connection between The Editors and U2′s eighties era guitar sound, but it got under my skin pretty quickly once I heard the similarity, and not in a good way. I didn’t mind U2 in the early nineties, but prior to that they always felt already outdated – I preferred listening to electric guitar warbling from the seventies, I guess. Worse, I think, was the way that the lead’s mannered vocals reflected the really overworked mid-to-mainstream goth bands of the same era – I kept half expecting “Temple Of Love” to kick in.

Also, once you see the James Dreyfuss thing, you can’t un-see it. Thanks, Rol.

The other problem, I suppose, was lack of variation in their set. Every song played out like a show-ender, with the same build to crescendo, which gave me the peculiar feeling that their set was just solid wall of blah, and also that it actually ended two or three songs before it ended. By that point, of course, I’d already wished them over.

The vague disquiet I felt at not getting something that everyone else was clearly into overwhelmed any impression the band left on me. Which tells you something right there.

[Another spoiler: Eventually, their set did end.]

Now, Girl One bought the tickets to this event. I always liked REM in the early nineties, but I have to admit to falling for them in that very short period when their MTV star went nova, circa “Losing My Religion”, and my curiousity about them extended backwards into their career a little way, so that by the time “Automatic For The People” came out, I was already primed for them to fade.

It’s possible that the amount of play some of the “Out Of Time” tracks got at the time helped me come to this conclusion – It’s interesting, but when “Automatic…” came out, I remember finding some of the songs a little emotionally flat compared to prior outings. Interesting, I suppose, because some of my favourites now are from that album.

But anyway, this is a long way of saying I haven’t really given REM any serious attention since “Automatic…”, and none of the studio songs I’ve heard since then had made me think I was in the wrong.

Girl One was very excited, though, and I actively love enough of their earlier songs that I guessed I’d have fun, even if it was going to feel like a trip down memory lane.

I was utterly blown away by the show we actually got. The band started out with an awesome rendition of “Bad Day”, a song that on record sounds to me like an only slightly adjusted version of “End Of The World As We Know It”, which I much prefer. Live, it’s impossible not to be swept along by the emotion and tempo of Stipe’s delivery of this song. As a show opener, it’s incredible, compressing everything good about REM into one vital package – great songwriting, with lyrics that evoke feeling without the clarity that might exclude some from relating to them; superb structure and music that’s punchy and rich at the same time; and the Stipe vocal, that is both full of defiant energy and vulnerable simultaneously, so that you both relate to the singer in a way that lifts you up, but you also want to give him a cuddle and a hot cup of tea and tell him that everything is going to be alright, too

There’s a contradiction in seeing them live, too. It doesn’t make sense that they deliver vocals and a sound that is note-perfect to what you hear on their studio albums, but that they are also full of the pure energy and enthusiasm of the band’s live performance. I’ve seen utterly professional and consistent bands before, and you often gain very little from seeing them live. But with Stipe and co. it isn’t just the stage show that makes the songs resonate, and it isn’t just the ecstatic audience – I think it’s that there’s something about these songs that really only starts to make sense live.

Maybe that’s why REM fit with MTV so early on in their career – as well as being a band that knows how to incorporate images into their work, Stipe’s physicality and personality is something that is so tightly linked with the lyrics that you don’t get the full sense of the songs until you see him performing them. His vocal is too eccentric to get a grip on without seeing him.

Man, I’m tired. Listen, what I’m trying to say is, the set started with a song that I hadn’t thought a lot of before, and now love – and that’s indicative of the whole show.

Visually, the stage design and lighting work, as well as the video work that was integrated seamlessly into the lightshow, made each song feel like it’s own little stage-show, and pulled the whole thing together. Which is just as well, because to a short guy like me, nearly the whole thing looked a lot like this:

I seem to recall that back when I really liked REM the first time – and yes, you can take that as a sign that the concert resulted in me loving them again now, because I am that fucking fickle – Michael Stipe had a reputation as being quite restrained, outside of singing the songs. That he flinched from the attention, and felt that the songs should speak for themselves.

I don’t know if this is a false memory I’ve picked up from somewhere, but the Stipe we saw last night was a commanding presence, despite being self-deprecating and jovial – and he really seemed to enjoy himself. Which in turn made us all enjoy himself, too.

As Rol has already mentioned, the set-list was a heady mix of old and new tracks – which meant that I knew some songs that Girl One didn’t, and there were plenty of all new ones that neither of us had heard yet at all – but it all worked together. None of the classics feel outdated or safe in the band’s hands, and the new stuff doesn’t sound like a desperate attempt to sound current, or push out another album so that they can shift a few more units. Playing live, REM are a band at the top of their game, and the music sounds like it’s made by a band who are kick-ass and creatively alive right now, not one that has been perfecting their act for 20-something years and is getting by on past energy.

“Everybody Hurts” was absent, but we barely noticed. In fact, the only real omission that got to me a little was my favourite, “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”. I always forget how much that song means to me, to the extent that I didn’t even realise I was thinking hard about it until right at the end of “And I Feel Fine“, a story I wrote for Elephant Words last year.

[Final Spoiler: It was one of many awesome songs that they left for the encore. I rocked out!]

Oh, yeah, leaving the Rosebowl was reminiscent of those scenes in “28 Weeks Later”, where the huddled hundreds of aching, worn-down people are hustled slow and shambling through the dark. Only without the violent ultra-death, thankfully. And then we had Chinese food.