This is a massive self-indulgence. Even for me. But blogs often are, aren't they? This particular blog is, quite unashamedly. Over the last three weeks I've been listening through to the recording career of R.E.M. album by album, day by day, from their glorious beginning in 1983 to their ignoble end in 2011. In fact, I tell a lie, I stopped listening a few days from the end as I could face the inarguable decline the band's records took following the departure of drummer Bill Berry. I didn't have the stomach for it.
I've been doing this on Temporary Fandoms, a wonderful listening group for music enthusiasts / obsessives which I've alluded to on here before. There are over 800 of us in all, though only a hard core of 50 or 60 comment regularly on what we're all listening to. The R.E.M. immersion has been the most memorable and emotional one I've personally experienced since I joined the site a few months back.
The reason for this? My abidong love for that band. This stems essentially from the years between 1983 and 1986 when I moved from 18 to 21 and they put out their first four albums which put them, once and forever on the map.
I was quite obsessed with them during this period. In love you might as well say. I've never felt that way about a band before or since, and I never will again. It was a first love musically and like all first loves one you never shake off entirely. Why would you want to?
I stuck with them until Bill left, following the release on New Adventures in Hi-Fi but have continued to play those first albums ever since. I adore plenty of other stuff, of course. This blog is testimony to that. But something about listening to them gives me a primal tug that I don't quite experience elsewhere. I'm not saying that they're the best albums ever made by any means. Of course they're not. They just do, and will continue to do something to me that other records don't.
So here comes the self-indulgence. Far from putting me off listening to the band for a while as you'd expect the immersion of the last three weeks has encouraged me to start a new series / countdown in their honour here. My fifty favourite R.E.M songs from 50 to Number 1.I imagine the suspense is killing you.
The order of course is fairly arbitrary. I'm not saying one song is better than another. Just that it means more to me. Maybe tomorrow a differnt song will come to mean more. But I'm quite uncritical of everything I'll post here. And plenty of other favourites won't even make this list.
So we'll start with Pretty Persuasion from 1984's Reckoning. Classic Byrds chime. Classic Punk rush. Classic incomprehensible early lyric. They performed it on the BBC TV show The Old Grey Whistle Test at the beginning of their UK tour in support of Reckoning. .I've included both that moment and the recorded version here.I saw them at the London Lyceum with my sister during that run of gigs.
P.S. The photo with this post is a picture of me at 19. I'm third from the left. With three of the best friends I'll ever have though I'm not in touch with any of them anymore. The picture was taken In Lugano, Switzerland. The guy to my left, Holger, passed on a few years later in the saddest of circumstances. The girls are Franziska from Germany and Jytte from Denmark, (probably my first real love, though I never told her. I suspect she knew). It's one of the most important photographs of my lifetime, capturing a moment of great happiness for me. I probably had R.E.M. spinning in my head at the time.
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