To some degree this blog is coming full circle, even though I'm the only person who might fully realise that. Having started it two and a half years ago, solely intended as an Album Review site with a review of Murmur, it's still here and has become something else. I'm still typing away regardless all this time later.
Anyway, I'm back to R.E.M. which is the place that I started from. I imagine I'll always go back to their early records and they'll always mean pretty much the same to me. They were the way I constructed my identity at that special point in your life where that's what happens to you. I've no way of really explaining that to anyone. In a way, R.E.M are a great choice for a first musical love in that respect as there's so much that's unexplained and inexplicable about their first few records. It's just the story of four young people, who chanced upon a great musical scene and culture, setting forth on a great musical journey together.
I remember going out to buy this record. My younger sister will remember it too, because we walked from our home in Teddington, across the bridge to Kingston on a hot, sunny day to get it. And then back. I'd been listening to their first album quite relentlessly in my room at the top of the house and hearing something quite different every time I heard it. Every single time. R.E.M still felt like my secret to me. There had been precious little notice taken of them in the British media at this point apart from those in the know and I certainly didn't have any friends who were even aware of them. My sister and older brother had been pummeled into some recognition by my repeated playing of their records. But these remarkable first albums will always feel to some degree like my discovery and mine alone and I'm still so proud of myself for chancing upon them.
We bought the album in Kingston, with that still remarkable Howard Finster sleeve and walked home. There's an anecdote between me and my sister of the walk between Kingston Bridge and when we got back that's just between the two of us and I won't bore you with. When we got home and I went upstairs to play the record. I was initially quite confused because it wasn't Murmur. I later found out that it had been deliberately recorded that way. Churned out over a handful of weeks in comparison with the first album which had been deeply thought over, largely at the dictate of guitarist Peter Buck, who liked to work this way and thought about it as the best way of going about making records.
Gradually I came round to it and it worked it's way into me where it's been ever since. I won't go into the details of why I love it so much. It's best listened to and taken in for yourself though I suppose it might never mean as much to you as it does to me. It's about memory, family, friends, experience and dream, like all the best R.E.M. records. About your teenage years, when the love of your family allows you that indulgence. It's about becoming yourself.
It's about sadness too. There are a couple of slower songs Time After Time and Camera where the mood is more meditative and perhaps fans of the band that just expected the formula of the more upbeat songs found wanting. It's not a flawless album by any means. It's quite consciously rushed off before the group heads off. Back on the road. Leaving things behind and going somewhere else.
The story of R.E.M. has been told now. They became the biggest band in the world for a while. Almost inadvertently. As a result of their sheer talent and determination to stick by their guns. They lost a group member and were never quite the same again, though it took them a while to realise that fact.
Still, they had a remarkable energy while their motor was running and it's difficult to describe to people who weren't there first time round how astonishing they were at their peak. They had an understanding of dynamics, melody and energy that bore no apt comparison with anybody before or since them. They were that good. They stood shoulder to shoulder with The Smiths in the early to mid-eighties when so much around them both musically was barren and it would have been a brave man who said which was the better band.
So much memory and dream with R.E.M. That's what they're about. Here's another memory of this record and that band. I took a tape with Murmur on one side and Reckoning on the other with me on my gap year to Switzerland with me for a job in a hotel in Locarno. I met a German guy called Holger there who I gave the tape to and we bonded over their music together and became good friends. He said Murmur was better than Reckoning and perhaps he's right. Murmur is certainly the more crafted album.
Still, thirty years on from that I find it difficult to judge. The band's third album Fables of the Reconstruction was being made and readied to come out as we spoke. I think of Murmur, Reckoning, Fables and Chronic Town, the EP that proceeded them as the best part of R.E.M. Holger is no longer with us. Because he chose not to be. I raise a glass to him.
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