1. Radio Free Europe
2. Pilgrimage
3. Laughing
4. Talk About the Passion
5. Moral Kiosk
6. Perfect Circle
7. Catapult
8. Sitting Still
9. 9-9
10. Shaking Through
11. We Walk
12. West of the Fields
I am Eddie Argos, I am the singer in a band called Art Brut and a few other bands, I’m a lo-fi punk rock motherfucker and I also write and paint a bit.
Just like everybody else says, this changes on an almost hourly basis. At 22:59 p.m. on Tuesday 3 May 2016 it is:
Shiney on the Inside – David Devant and His Spirit Wife
Sexy World – The Yummy Fur
The Kids Are All Square – Thee Headcoats
Here, without any ado at all, is the story of R.E.M.
The young Peter Buck was the sort of fella who listened to so much music that, had we existed at the time, he would have thought that even Ruth and Martin’s Album Club couldn’t find a blind spot.
‘I’ve heard everything,’ he’d say. ‘I got heavily, and I mean heavily, into Exile on Main Street by The Rolling Stones when I was fifteen. After that I bought as many albums as I could. At last count, I had 25,000.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ I’d reply, ‘but I always find something.’
Back in 1979, Peter Buck does the two most obvious things that all fellas like him end up doing – he learns how to play guitar and gets a job in a record shop so he can listen to even more music.
One of the regular customers catches his eye – another teenager who was always surrounded by beautiful girls and buying exactly the same records as him. They get talking and discover they both bought Horses by Patti Smith on the day it came out.
For this reason, as much as any other, Peter Buck and Michael Stipe decide to form a band and move into a disused church in Athens, Georgia.
Bill Berry was a juvenile delinquent and a bully.
Mike Mills was a smart bespectacled kid who all the grown-ups liked. He looked a bit like Richie Cunningham in Happy Days.
‘We hated each other,’ Berry would later say. ‘He was the class nerd, straight As, and I was just getting into drugs and stuff.’
All right Bill, calm down mate.
‘He was everything I despised: great student, got along with teachers, didn’t smoke cigarettes or smoke pot.’
All right Bill, you’ve made your point.
During tenth grade, one of Bill Berry’s mates asks if he would like to play drums on a boogie-woogie jamming session. Berry agrees and drives across town to the house where the rehearsal is due to take place. Once he arrives, he carries his kit down a load of stairs to the basement.
Shortly after, the bass player arrives – Mike Mills.
Berry has since said that if he was playing any other instrument, i.e. something more portable, he’d have stormed off there and then. However, because he can’t be bothered to move his drums again, he decides to stay put and make peace with his nemesis.
‘This is ridiculous,’ Berry said to Mills.
‘Yeah,’ Mills replied.
With that, they shook hands.
The mad part of this story isn’t that they’ve been best friends ever since, or even that they became the rhythm section in one of the biggest bands in the world.
No, the mad part is that anyone other than Jools Holland would agree to take part in a boogie-woogie jamming session.
At the start of 1980, the two halves of R.E.M. were still unknown to each other – Peter Buck and Michael Stipe were trying to get something going in a disused church, whereas Bill Berry and Mike Mills were in a series of bands that went nowhere.
A mutual friend was needed and she came in the shape of Kathleen O’Brien. Kathleen lived in the church, and also had a huge crush on Bill Berry. So, knowing that her two church-mates needed a rhythm section, she brought everyone together.
This is it.
It’s the pivotal moment in alternative American music and Bill Berry sums up the meeting perfectly with the only thing he can remember about it:
‘It was cold out and we were all wearing coats.’
Thanks Bill.
Stipe, on the other hand, remembers meeting a really drunk Mike Mills who could barely stand up.
‘No way! NO WAY!’ said Stipe, ‘I’m not going to be in a band with this guy, there’s no way on earth!’
Berry eventually talked him round and the four of them set a date to rehearse at the church. When the day arrived, though, somebody didn’t turn up so they decided to knock the whole thing on the head.
A couple of weeks later Peter Buck bumped into Berry, purely by chance, and said, ‘Let’s give it one more try.’
Having brought the band together, Kathleen decided that their first gig should be at her birthday party, held in the church.
I have to say that I’m a big fan of this Kathleen. I think she’s the first person I’ve come across that has formed a band and then made them play their first gig in her honour.
I mean she’s pushy, but I like her.
Exactly 125 people were invited to the party but something like 600 turned up – ready to witness the first performance of a band that, at this stage, were called The Twisted Kites.
Despite the fact that they were playing a gig in their own house they were, in Bill Berry’s words, ‘scared shitless’. They proceeded to get drunk and staggered through as many covers as they could remember – including ‘God Save the Queen’ by The Sex Pistols and a fifteen-minute version of ‘Roadrunner’ by Jonathan Richman.
However, towards the end of the gig, members of the audience had to take over on vocals as Michael Stipe had badly burned himself with a cigarette.
And that was supposed to be that. A one-off gig for a friend’s birthday.
An unexpected downside of the debut gig was that the brilliant Kathleen was now in debt – largely because everyone had drunk a load of booze that she only paid a $200 deposit for. In order to help her out, the band decided to put on a fundraising gig at the 11:11 Koffee Club.
‘I really didn’t want to play there,’ says Bill, ‘but we had to get some money for Kathleen.’
This story really would be awful without Kathleen, you know.
The band also decided they didn’t want to be called Twisted Kites anymore so they held a meeting at the church where everyone got drunk and wrote a load of names on the wall.
They awoke the next morning and whittled it down to the following choices:
Negro Eyes
Slut Bank
Cans of Piss
R.E.M.
I know, they picked the worst one.
To make matters worse, the gig at the Koffee Club was a disaster. The police were called and shut it down after a couple of songs because the club didn’t have a licence for alcohol. Everyone had their names taken and the establishment was subsequently closed for good.
It’s probably worth a quick recap of where we are.
A woman called Kathleen has formed a band made up of two kids that met in a record store and another two kids who used to hate each other. During their first gig the singer nearly set fire to himself, and their second gig resulted in a local venue going out of business.
What a great start.
In 1983, R.E.M. started work on their first EP – Chronic Town.
Michael Stipe was so nervous about his voice that it was mixed as low as possible. Then, just to make sure, he sang all five songs with a rubbish bin on his head. You could barely hear him, and you had no idea what he was singing. Still, the EP was so good that when a record label called I.R.S. heard it they offered them a deal.
‘But our singer sings with a rubbish bin on his head.’
‘Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.’
They start the sessions by putting two dinosaur mascots on the speakers for good luck.
Despite these, Stipe is still so nervous that he records his vocals lying down in the dark on top of a staircase outside the main studio. Bill Berry has to play alongside a click-track in order to keep in time, and Peter Buck plays an acoustic guitar for the first time in his life.
When they record ‘Talk about the Passion’ it’s the first time they’ve ever played it the whole way through – it was supposed to be a rehearsal take. It’s brilliant though and the producer tells them they needn’t bother playing it again.
That’s the final version you hear on the album.
It’s not only one of the best debuts ever, it’s one of the best albums ever. For all the jokes, the haphazard approach, they come out of the blocks as the most assured band in America.
They keep the dinosaurs and bring them along for all future albums.
In 1983, R.E.M. appear on Letterman and perform ‘Radio Free Europe’.
While the rest of the band throw themselves at the occasion in the spirit of a dream come true, Stipe looks absolutely terrified. He spends the whole performance motionless, hiding behind his long hair and clinging to the microphone for dear life.
After the performance, Letterman walks over and Stipe exits the stage so he can watch the host interview the rest of the band. Stipe then comes back on and sings ‘So. Central Rain’ – again nervously attached to the microphone the whole time.
Stipe is so absent from the ‘performance’ that the Musicians’ Union assumes Peter Buck is the band leader and pays him twice as much money as everyone else.
It’s now two years later and R.E.M. appear on The Tube to perform ‘Can’t Get There From Here’ from Fables of the Reconstruction.
The band are still as energetic as before, they look virtually identical, but Stipe is a changed man. He’s dyed his hair with mustard, he’s found his feet, and proceeds to show us his moves.
For the next three minutes and twenty-nine seconds he doesn’t touch the microphone once.
To this day, it’s my favourite TV performance from any band ever.
Stipe would go on to become one of the great frontmen. By 1989 he was topless on Top of the Pops and singing ‘Orange Crush’ through a loudspeaker.
Peter Buck started out as the weakest musician in R.E.M. – a guitar band where the guitarist wasn’t that good – but he got much better. He also got so drunk on a plane once that he tried to insert a CD into the drinks trolley because he thought it was a CD player. What a great bloke.
Mike Mills sang the best backing vocals of all time on ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)’ and is the member of R.E.M. I’d most trust to look after a cat.
Bill Berry was so good, so important to the band, that they were never quite the same when he left in 1996. He also wrote ‘Perfect Circle’, which may be the best song ever written by a drummer.
Being a fan in the eighties was the nearest thing I’ve ever had to being a member of a secret society. It warranted its own handshake – a sign that you could give to others that you were also into this band with unintelligible lyrics that once lived in a church in the Deep South.
And it never wore off. Even when the lyrics made sense and the mystique had faded, they were always capable of being brilliant.
Put simply, the ten albums from Murmur to New Adventures in Hi-Fi are probably the best run of ten albums that anyone has ever produced.
Kathleen should be really proud.
It’s not just Murmur, I haven’t listened to any R.E.M. albums. I mean what’s the point? I’ve heard enough R.E.M. songs on the radio to know what R.E.M. sound like. They warrant about as much investigating of their back catalogue as Coldplay do.
I suppose the problem is that Murmur came out when I was three years old. By the time I was old enough to start getting excited about music, R.E.M. were already defined by their MASSIVE HITS.
I know what I like about music. I like it to be experimental, to be about empowerment or reinvention, to contain heart-on-the-sleeve sincerity. I like songs to be about something and to have a bit of personality. I can only really get passionate about bands that do interesting things or have some kind of punk or independent outsider spirit to them. R.E.M. as defined by their MASSIVE HITS contain none of these qualities.
Perhaps if R.E.M. had been less ubiquitous in my formative years I would have had an inclination to go back and find out more about them.
But they were everywhere.
My least favourite song by R.E.M. is ‘Everybody Hurts’. I find that song to be an annoying litany of patronising greeting card-style platitudes, cynically designed to sell mawkish sentimentality to anguished angsty teens and middle-aged people who should definitely know better. I hate it. The first time I heard it I knew I never wanted to hear it again. It is a completely empty song devoid of any actual real feeling. It is the song equivalent of someone not really listening, but just nodding along and making sympathetic noises to you as you tell them your problems. It is an insincere bastard of a song.
Despite the fact I have actively avoided ‘Everybody Hurts’, I could definitely sing – well maybe not sing but certainly speak – all of it to you right now, just from the sheer number of times I’ve had to endure it by being close to a radio I’ve not been in charge of. The very fact I have a least favourite song by a band I have no real interest in shows you just how inescapable R.E.M. are.
I suppose the short answer to why I have never heard Murmur before is that R.E.M. get played a sufficient amount everywhere I go without my permission, so I’ve never really felt the need to play them at home.
I just want to say, before I begin, that even though I have just ranted about R.E.M., I really was genuinely excited to give this album a try. I’m a big fan of The Replacements and when I’m sneaking around on the internet reading about The Replacements on forums and Facebook groups and whatnot, I see a lot of their fans also like early R.E.M. This has always made me feel that perhaps I’m missing out on something, that maybe R.E.M. were amazing in their early days, before their massive career-defining hits, and I just arrived too late to the party. Being asked to listen to Murmur seemed like a great opportunity to find out.
I never normally listen to music in the shower, but because I was excited about hearing Murmur for the first time, and because I didn’t have a lot of time, I made an exception. I brought my iPad into the bathroom, turned the water on and put the album on as loud as I could – so it was possible to hear it over the top of the running water.
Murmur begins with some strange noises and in the shower it sounded a lot like somebody hitting the underneath of a car with a spanner. That was unexpected, I thought, and quite exciting. Fuck! I think I might actually really enjoy this record.
Then ‘Radio Free Europe’ began and it sounded a lot like ‘Roadrunner’ by Jonathan Richman. I believe that ‘Roadrunner’ by Jonathan Richman is mankind’s greatest achievement, and always have a lot of time for any song that bears even a passing resemblance to it. My curiosity was piqued. I turned the shower off, sat in the bath and started to give Murmur my full attention.
I could hear the R.E.M. that I know in ‘Radio Free Europe’ for sure, but to my ears, on this first listen, it was a more provocative R.E.M. than the one I know from their HITS. R.E.M. songs often have very similar choruses, and this one definitely followed the same format, but on this occasion it caught me completely off guard. I loved it. It sounded like it had been flown in from a different song, and flawlessly fitted on to this ‘Roadrunner’ pastiche. In a good way. All of a sudden the song was new and vibrant and exciting; it made me think of how exhilarating it must have been for R.E.M. to record this, the first song on their debut album. They weren’t fully moulded yet, not really, they were still playing with style and form and I imagined how they might have even surprised themselves with how great ‘Radio Free Europe’ had come out. I thought of all the amazing potential this debut album must have coursing through it, to have made everybody listen to it at the time, helping R.E.M. become one of the biggest bands of all time. This album was a big deal, it is a lot of people I respect’s favourite album. All my cynicism went, I even had goosebumps thinking of the treat that lay in store for me.
Then with a feeling of dread I suddenly realised:
‘Oh shit, I’m totally going to massively enjoy this album and have to write that I had an epiphany about how amazing R.E.M. are while I was sitting in an empty bath. I’ve become the sort of person I despise.’
Then ‘Pilgrimage’ began. It used the same ‘weird noises before the song starts’ trick as ‘Radio Free Europe’ but then the most amazing bass guitar part came in, and again I thought:
‘FUCK! I really am going to have to write about having some kind of transformative experience with R.E.M. while lying naked in an empty bath.’ (Sorry for putting that image in your head.)
Thankfully though, once the singing started the song turned out to be totally shit, an unbelievably boring dirge. I waited for the next song, just in case this is the exception, but it turned out to be the rule. The next song is called ‘Laughing’ and again, despite a promising intro, it turned into what sounds like a discarded Tom Petty demo.
I stand up and turn the water back on. While I’m thankful I don’t have to write about having an epiphany in an empty bathtub, I am still hopeful that something will grab my attention and make me sit down and turn off the water again, totally enthralled. Nothing does.
The second time I listen to the album is later the same day. I’m not in such a rush this time and so give it my full attention. I lie down on my bed with my headphones on and promise to myself that I will give it a fair trial.
There is no water running this time, so I hear that what I thought was a spanner hitting the bottom of a car at the beginning of ‘Radio Free Europe’ is actually just some kind of synthesiser noise, or a sound the studio made and they just decided to leave it on the recording. Not as interesting as I thought. I don’t enjoy ‘Radio Free Europe’ this time as much as I did in the shower, mainly because now I know it’s not the beginning of an exciting odyssey into a band I’d been denying myself, but just an OK song at the beginning of quite a slog of an album. I brace myself for what is to come.
That intro to ‘Pilgrimage’ sounds great still, as does the intro to ‘Laughing’ and ‘9-9’, but this now feels like a cruel trick as I know what the songs that follow those intros sound like, and it is a sudden and very steep drop in quality.
On this second listen through Murmur, I can kind of hear in places why some Replacement fans also like early R.E.M. I can definitely hear shades of that life-changing incredible band on songs like ‘Laughing’ and ‘Catapult’. I manage to convince myself I would actually like ‘Catapult’ if Paul Westerberg from The Replacements had been involved in some way, it has a nice tune. Unfortunately, Michael Stipe has none of the wit, charisma, talent, intelligence, passion, humour or presence of that immense front man. In fact, by the time I’ve reached ‘Catapult’ on my second listen through the album, I start to doubt that Michael Stipe exists at all. Perhaps he is also just a strange studio noise ‘accidentally on purpose’ left on the recording.
I persevere. I finish the album. I was ambivalent after the first listen but as I cross the finish line this time I have decided that I hate this record and anybody who likes it. This makes me a little bit sad. I’m definitely the type of man that enjoys having a strong opinion, but I also love having my expectations confounded, and I really was secretly hoping this would happen with Murmur.
To celebrate making it through Murmur without falling asleep I have a chocolate biscuit and start toying with the idea of only pretending to listen to it a third time.
But I am a man of my word, Martin from Ruth and Martin’s Album Club seems like a good guy and I did promise him I’d listen three times, so reluctantly I give Murmur one last seemingly never-ending run around the block.
I hate ‘Radio Free Europe’ now. It is still by quite a large margin my favourite song on the album, but the false promise it gave me on that first listen has made me despise it. I feel conned.
However, by this point it is the only song on the record that can conjure up any emotion from me whatsoever, so I savour the hate I feel for it and prepare myself for the beige blank page that is the rest of the album.
I find it very hard to concentrate. I really don’t understand the point of this record. It is a nothingness. I’ve been listening to it using my girlfriend’s Spotify account. Yvonne has a premium account and I’m beginning to sort of wish she didn’t as some shouty adverts might break up the tedium of Murmur. Anything with a bit of personality would be welcome at this point.
Murmur could easily be radio static. My mind starts to drift, I start to think about my favourite conspiracy theory – that the CIA funded the Abstract Expressionism art movement because they wanted to give prominence to an art form that you can’t put any kind of message or meaning into. I start to think that perhaps the CIA also funded R.E.M.’s rise to prominence, because, just like Abstract Expressionism, it is also impossible to put messages or meaning into R.E.M. songs.
Murmur drifts onwards. I start to think that if I hadn’t had to write down my feelings about it, I might have forgotten it exists at all. Are these three playthroughs really the first time I’ve heard it? Perhaps it is just the first time I’ve managed to recall listening to it. Mediocre music, no personality, weird for weird’s sake, laughable lyrics that are understandably buried deep in the swampy mix; there is nothing here to hold onto and certainly very little to enjoy.
On the upside, like the R.E.M. songs that I know, at least these ones will be gone by the morning.
I look forward to forgetting Murmur again.
No.
I’m really sorry as I know a lot of people love this album, but I give it nothing out of 10. It is not for me.
Remember I told you how much I loved Kathleen?
Well, I wasn’t the only one.
A regular reader called Dani Lawrence was so taken by her story that she made it her mission to find her and sent a series of emails to tourist information in Athens, Georgia. All she had to go on was her name, the fact that she lived there in 1981 and was somehow involved in the formation of R.E.M.
Remarkably, after much effort, she was found in Decatur, Georgia, where Dani sent her an email along the lines of ‘I’m not sure if you know about this but someone has written a piece about R.E.M. but it’s actually all about you!’
Kathleen then contacted me, told me how much she enjoyed the piece, and we’ve been in touch ever since.
It’s a bit like that film You’ve Got Mail, if You’ve Got Mail was a film about two people discussing the early days of R.E.M.