50 Days of R.E.M. # 1 Losing My Religion

'Oh Life...'

Perhaps a predictable but probably inevitable end to this particular journey. I'd say their most important song. Possibly the one that made them the biggest band in the world for a while. Smells Like Teen Spirit did a similar thing for Nirvana. It sometimes only takes one.

First time I ever heard Losing My Religion. It was at quite an important moment in my life. I'd just graduated, didn't really know what I wanted to do but knew i didn't want to work in an office. I decided I'd like to be in Prague because the Velvet and less Velvet Revolutions had just taken place in Eastern Europe. I decided I'd quite like to be there writing poetry and playing chess with Americans.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get a teaching job there, only in a small town on the Danube called Komarno on the border between Czechoslovakia and Hungary. My brother and sister and law drove me down there. Slovakia was just awful at that point in time. Really Stalinist. Flat and quite featureless. When we arrived in Komarno my brother asked me whether I wanted to just drive back home.

But I stayed. It was a very interesting year. I won't bore you with the details, as this is supposed to be about R.E.M. but Komarno was a proper shithole then. Looks very nice now. There was almost nowhere to go as almost all the bars were gypsy bars and no-one would go to the gypsy bars. I was just about the first person from Western Europe a lot of the people had met. I tell you it was so dull someone sprayed my name on a wall somewhere in town. True that.

Anyway to R.E.M. The people there were all very nice and hospitable but thank goodness for my sanity, there were two young American girls, round about the same age as me working at the other colleges in town.They were great. We'd meet up occasionally and discuss our experiences and support each other through the weirdness of it all. . One afternoon we were sitting in one of the few bars in town and Losing My Religion came on on MTV. They both liked the band.

It was just such a memorable moment. That video is so weird and out there, still not entirely sure what I think about it. As for the song. You couldn't make out any discernible tune or chorus, (it doesn't have one does it?), or get a handle on it at all. It was quite uncanny. Now everybody knows it back to front a lot of people are probably utterly sick of it but it sounded phenomenally brave the first time I heard it. I'm not entirely sure how a case to say it was a sell out could be constructed really.