Memories # 1 R.E.M. - Losing My Religion

And for the New Year again, another new series. We'll see how far this one takes me which I imagine will be relatively far. Related to the Nick Cave quote at the top of the page about memory. So, songs that I remember and the memories associated with them. A simple remit. This might involve partial reconstruction of memories I've already documented on here so forgive my self-indulgence (in fact for the whole series, a massive act of self-indulgence altogether).

Starting with this, a song that's been plaguing me for reasons I can't account for over the last fortnight. R.E.M., as anyone who knows me or has read much of this blog are the really important ones. Because they were 'my band'. Because I discovered them pretty much right at the beginning. Because I constructed so much of myself around their first few records throughout the Eighties and into the early Nineties. Because they were mine and in some strange way in my mind they remain mine all these years later. Much the same as any first love does.

1990, when this came out, I was in Komarno, Czechoslovakia, in what was then a rather grim, unprepossessing town on the border with Hungary. It's apparently changed greatly since and I plan to return if I can in the next couple of years. I was there just after the momentous political changes that had taken place there. I worked for eight months or so in the town as an English teacher in a Primary School and the Hungarian Gymnasium.

There are many tales to tell about that time, this one is merely incidental. I remember watching the  video to this song just after it first came out on MTV in a bar with a couple of American teachers called Amy and Corinne who were my only 'Western' company during that strange academic year that I spent in Southern Slovakia. We didn't know what to make of either the song or the video. But R.E.M..knew as they so often did. Perhaps this is the moment that they first really started flirting with pretension but try to tell me honestly that the song's not wonderful in many, many ways. It was just one more remarkable moment in a quite remarkable career. Ignore the knockers. At their best, they were quite sublime.

One of the first groups I taught at the Komarno Gymnasium in Czechoslovakia, (now Slovakia). I still remember the names of almost all the students in this picture almost thirty years on.