The second consecutive Hammersmith Palais gig on this series. It was a great venue, sorely missed by those who remember it from formative nights in the Eighties like me. I travelled home from my university during my first term at university in Autumn '85 to see it and went to the gig with my brother and sister who had been won over during the previous couple of years by my non-stop record player rotation of the band's early albums.
R.E.M., R.E.M. Where to even start with my love in my late teenage years for R.E.M.? It's something I'm not yet completely over, even all these years on down the line. Probably never will be. It's difficult to explain to the uninitiated, who knew the band primarily through Losing My Religion, Everybody Hurts and the like, when in an almost miraculous outcome as the Eighties became the Nineties that they arrived at a place when they were pretty much the biggest band in the world.
But that's not my R.E.M.. My R.E.M. were a much more self-consciously obscure and mysterious concern. One on whose early records the lyrics were virtually indecipherable and the instruments and backing vocals weaved in dense complexity in and out of the mix to create a world that those who were disposed to what they were offering, a love for literature, art and Rock and Roll folklore, melody and enigma, fell for big time. For some people they were the band. I was one of those. My love for R.E.M. between 1983 and 1986 knew no bounds.
For me personally, looking back, it was actually about more than liking the records, the look of the band and what they said in interviews though of course all of these things played their part. It was actually about becoming myself. My adult self. This process only happens once in life and if you're fortunate as I am to be part of a loving, nurturing and supportive family, it's a moment of unique opportunity.
With all of that, you are still only allowed one first love. In life I was fortunate enough to experience two, before and just after this particular evening. One of them, a few months back before this gig during a six month gap year break in Switzerland where I'd met, worked with and fallen for a young Danish girl who I still wonder what became of, all these years later. That was unrealised, though the experience was enough in itself, a quite golden set of memories that are still there for me whenever I choose to take out a photo album in the bottom drawer of my desk and relive them. It's easy to do. Memories are like that. The other was waiting a few months down the line with someone I met then and is another story to be told elsewhere. Needless to say I played her R.E.M. records ceaselessly, much, it should be said, to her irritation.
Never mind that though. This is every bit as much about R.E.M. as it is about me. After all they themselves were embarked on their own precious journey of discovery at this point, three years into a career that had by now seen them find their way onto the front cover of magazines seen them become critics darlings and also make definite commercial inroads that the pack of wonderful American alternative guitar bands they came to prominence with in the early Eighties, were thus far denied.
I'd seen them before, a year back at the London Lyceum and attempted to do so in one of their first ventures to British shores when I'd stood in vain in a queue at The Marquee, off Oxford Street on a gig that turned to be sold out. I pretended for a while to have been there, such is the self-deceiving nature of the teenage self to friends who knew little about the band and certainly weren't captured by the spell that I was personally under. This time though I'd bought three tickets in advance, costing £4.50 each, a remarkable historical detail in itself, reminding us just how far we are now from then.
At the front of the stage after the supports had played and the stage been set up for the headliners were row upon row of clean-cut American college kids, representing the inroads R.E.M. had already made into the heartlands of their own markets. As the band took the stage, in altogether more hobo garb than their compatriots, and the backing tracks heralded the start of Feeling Gravity's Pull the atmosphere changed. Peter Buck played the eerie guitar figure that launches the song, rhythm section Mike Mills and Bill Berry kicked into gear. The crowd surged forward the college kids blanched and retreated to the back of the venue and we were off.
I can remember only fragments of the night. R.E.M. cherry picked from their first three records, they did a clutch of covers. Michael Stipe ad-libbed between songs off the cuff on politics, southern narratives and the absurd. They were playing different sets every night in those days. Writing their own scrift in a way that only a band fully confident in their own abilities can. My brother recalls a moment when Stipe and Buck seemed to fall out visibly over where they were going next.
The band built a thrilling intensity that rolled remorselessly through their set and into two lengthy extemporised encores. They nailed it. It still remains the best gig I've ever seen. Because of where they were. Because of where I was. I've seen so many wonderful bands and artists since but never one where the stars seemed so utterly aligned.
No comments:
Post a Comment