REM live at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin

So, the REM-band get to rehearse new material in a grand old Dublin theatre in front of live bodies for a week, and the live bodies get to see the whites of the musicians’ eyes. Fair deal. This listener always preferred to ogle big acts in an environment where you can see the sweat and stubble, the bone machine operating in graphic detail, rather than the bells-and-whistles stadium production. If that means forfeiting the chance to hear ‘Man On The Moon’ for the nth time, so be it. When so many elder statesmen (The Who, Lou Reed, The Stones, Brian Wilson) are working it like presidents in their final term, securing their legacy through revisiting classic albums or undertaking career summation tours before they get put out to pasture, it’s good to see a band like REM shrug off the bootleg-on-the-internet collateral damage factor and present a whole ream of work in progress.
This was the third night of the band’s residency, Tuesday, and advance reports telegraphed almost a dozen new tunes plus a handful of nuggets dating all the way back to the Chronic Town EP. The pre-gig back projection proclaimed THIS IS NOT A SHOW, a point reinforced via megaphone by Mike Mills as Michael Stipe ambled on in black jeans and blue shirt, plonked his laptop on an upturned flightcase and grasped the mic-stand like some IT desk-monkey who’d blundered into an elaborate and possibly unhinged team-building karaoke bash. Throughout the night the singer wrestled with minor technical gremlins and peered at the lyrics on the screen in a way that seemed to perversely ramp up the intensity of his vocal performance. Stripped of showmanship tricks, this was a band concentrating hard, overseen by Joe O’Herlihy on the desk. That said, Peter Buck – a man who, one suspects, has Have Rickenbacker Will Travel stamped on his passport – appeared as unfazed as ever, undoubtedly inured to small scale Irish gigs by dint of his extracurricular stints as Robyn Hitchcock’s sidekick.
The new material seems to be pitched somewhere between Document’s agit-prop assault and Monster’s sleazy swagger, notwithstanding a couple of classic REM waltzes and moody tone poems such as ‘Houston’, ‘Until The Day Is Done’ (with Richard Thompson-esque folk arpeggios from Buck) and ‘On The Fly’. This was as informal as you like, Stipe revelling in the incongruity, going so far as to admit that one new song got booted off the setlist on account of its chorus being subconsciously plagiarised from the Friends theme. Dubbing the set “an experiment in terror and music”, he confessed to being scared witless before attempting to straddle unbroken new mounts, or revisiting rarely aired tunes like the 22-year old ‘Kahoutek’.
For whatever reason, tonight’s back catalogue trawl favoured the band’s secret Appalachian artefact Fables Of The Reconstruction (‘Auctioneer’, ‘Driver 8’, the sparkling harmonics and low-slung skies of ‘Feeling Gravity’s Pull’) and the college rock rush of Reckoning (‘Second Guessing’, ‘Little America’, a lovely ‘Southern Central Rain’ distinguished by Stipe’s inchoate coyote howl over the coda).
The boldest of the new songs included ‘Mr Richard’ ('scuse my stabs at the titles, I passed on the t-shirt with the set-list on the back) and ‘I’m Gonna DJ (At The End Of The World)’. Saved for the final encore, the latter is a vaguely Pistols-y strut that, in its echoing of ‘It’s The End Of the World As We Know It…’ gives the nod to the history-repeating Republican supremacy that first spurred the band into explicit political commentary circa 1987. It’s early days yet, but if REM and producer Garret Lee apply the same print-and-be-damned attitude to the recording of these songs as they did to their live unveiling, they might produce their most vibrant record in years.