SIMPLY RED: Greatest Hits

 

(#557: 19 October 1996, 2 weeks)

Track listing: Holding Back The Years/Money's Too Tight (To Mention)/The Right Thing/It's Only Love/A New Flame/You've Got It/If You Don't Know Me By Now/Stars/Something Got Me Started/Thrill Me/Your Mirror/For Your Babies/So Beautiful/Angel/Fairground

"You'll never see me walking down a guilty middle-class street/I'm frequently appalled by them pretending to be poor men." Those aren't the thoughts of Morrissey, but of a fellow audience member at that Free Trade Hall Sex Pistols gig. I wonder if Mick Hucknall has frequently pondered the paradox that guilty middle-class streets house the vast majority of people who have liked and bought his music for getting on forty years now.

That couplet comes from his song "I Won't Feel Bad," which appears on the second Simply Red album, 1987's Men And Women. It is a fiercely and admirably unapologetic lyric which challenges his critics to sneer at his imminent wealth and associated power; look, quit picking on me, look at the gangsters who are really raking in the money, away from all of us.

It is a pity that Men And Women is only represented on this end-of-imperial-phase best-of by its one big hit, the satyric and equally unapologetic "The Right Thing," since it contains some of Hucknall's most intriguing songs and performances - "Infidelity," which does Costello's "The Only Flame In Town" better and in which Hucknall refuses to be sorry for sleeping around, the inscrutable "Lady Godiva's Room" (originally a single B-side, then incorporated into deluxe editions of the album) and a rather moving "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" which seems to owe its poignancy to the inadvertent memory of the great ghost that haunted British New Pop of the eighties, Ian Curtis.

Still, Hucknall has been haunted by the need to get his messages into those places which might otherwise sneer at and reject them, all the time doubtless worrying about whether his audience has ever "got it." The blue-eyed Soul, Passion and Honesty smokescreen conceals the likelihood that the nearest equivalent to his voice is, of all reluctant Englishmen, Leo Sayer; "Holding Back The Years" best demonstrates the two singers' identical just-accidentally-sat-on-a-cockatoo yarragh.

At the time Simply Red's Greatest Hits appeared like a blockbuster newly gone missing, although the compilation very quietly went on to go six times platinum. Its cover is unassuming, Hucknall's mind clearly elsewhere. The collection gives the public what it wanted; most of the "recognisable" hits, one or two curveballs - "So Beautiful" if anything sounds more convincing in this setting - and a token new recording, a somewhat perfunctory take on Aretha's "Angel."

The album confirms the story of a thoroughly sincere fellow who unequivocally means what he sings, whether it's about politics or sex or anything else. Picture Book worked - to a point - because Hucknall was only on the way to becoming famous and determined not to exhibit pre-emptive arrogance. He does the Valentine Brothers' masterpiece - a song which didn't get a proper British release precisely when it was needed - and uses it to escort Face/NME hipsterdom into the uncomprehending faces of the wider public, which is something a lot of New Pop artists didn't really achieve.

On Men And Women, Hucknall let all of his other tendencies - particularly the post-Tom Jones lurve man persona (in an unfortunate coincidence, not long before Jones himself essayed a full-scale comeback) - run freely, but where did that leave him save in a cul-de-sac? A New Flame buried its nuggets of angry wisdom beneath pastel shades of apologetic blandness. On Stars, he got the balance absolutely correct; he learned to slow down, reflect and, to a degree ("Thrill Me") zip up. With Life, however, Hucknall found himself back at the same paradoxical roundabout.

This is a very nice record of songs, if niceness is all you want and/or need. It may well be that Hucknall is singing and playing to...the suspicious people, the reasonably well-off types who don't view themselves as a central cause of society's problems, who do not consider themselves to be "fighting" or on a "mission" because, by escaping from the horror of the world so eagerly, they think themselves their own heroes, in control of their own historical fantasy. They see their passions and misdemeanours as part of a drama, view themselves as participants in an epic poem. Their lives exist as channels for light entertainment. They do not possess the capacity or imagination to consider just how passively receptive and actively complacent they might really be.

Yet these are the people for whom (they believe) Hucknall is speaking, and by some odd combination of chance and dogged perseverance his music is able to reach out to them. It's perhaps not his fault if their reception is faulty. In that sense, his nearest American equivalent is not Michael Bolton, but Garth Brooks. I said something above about "the suspicious people," suspicious because, much as the hardcore country addicts who resist any attempts at crossover being imposed because they are defensive of the music's perceived "commonness," the guilty middle-class streets are filled with Jerry Leadbetter types who really only want to crash out on their expensive sofa with a glass of wine and an Engelbert Humperdinck record but will rise up to the ramparts in order to defend what they view as an assault on the culture they like, again because it is thought common and lowbrow - "it" in this case being middle-of-the-road (a.k.a. centrist) pop (easy listening, if you must). The people, if you insist, with the real cash. I am not sure Mick Hucknall would disagree with that theory, if only because he reaches that audience with relative (musical, but not necessarily lyrical - nobody listens to the words in pop, not really) clarity and directness. And, like Brooks, he is proud and confident enough not even to consider changing his spots midstream.

The downside to that access is that only the surface of Simply Red's music prevails, and nothing genuinely changes. Thirty years ago, in the course of my day job, I befriended one of the clinic nurses - or, more properly, she befriended me. We began talking about music and ended up compiling C90 mixtapes for each other. Don't get the wrong idea - we were both spoken for and it was purely friends-only. One tape I made for her included a mix of then-contemporary music and things which were older but still reasonably hip. Side two, track two, was "Sweet Surrender," one of many priapic epics on Tim Buckley's Greetings From L.A. She commented to me that, although she really, really liked the tape, she couldn't understand why I'd put Simply Red near the beginning of side two.

I was quite tickled by her confusion. I had already heard the singer's Buckley aspirations towards the end of "Holding Back The Years" but really she was right; emotionally there was little substantive difference between the two voices and what their owners did with them. And it may be that it is the emotionalism which never vacates Hucknall's singing is what counts with his band's music and accounts for his immense popularity. At this (1996) point I was also busy picking up CD reissues of classic dub on Hucknall's Blood And Fire imprint. He did, and presumably still does, nothing but good. Not long thereafter my nursing colleague left for another job elsewhere and I never saw or heard from her again. That's the way life goes. I hope hers - if she's still out there - has gone and is going well.

Peter ANDRE: Natural

 

(#556: 12 October 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Flava (ft Cee)/Natural (C&J Street Mix)/Mysterious Girl (ft Bubbler Ranx)/I Feel You/You Are (Part Two)/All I Ever Wanted/Show U Somethin’/To The Top/Tell Me When/Only One/Message To My Girl/Turn It Up (ft Ollie J)/Get Down On It (ft Past To Present)

 

I wonder whether this album could more aptly be called Younger. Most of it sounds as though it might have emerged from 1989 with its Old Jack Swing moves and post-Michael Jackson balladeering – and New Jack Swing at least six years past its sell-by date sounds to some inexplicable extent more dated than Kula Shaker’s 1969 or Jamiroquai’s 1973 tributes – but the likes of “Flava” and “Turn It Up” chunder along like fresher paradigms for “Fastlove,” before things got “spoiled.”

 

And maybe that’s being kind to Peter Andre’s music. Not Andre the man himself, who tends to come across in the media as something of an amiable dork but who I think is cannily self-aware of this underlying dorkness and uses it to his advantage, but his music. He became famous on the Australian version of the talent show New Faces by basically doing Bobby Brown – hopefully not in the manner of his rather unfortunate video for “Get Down On It,” which is present on my cassette edition of Natural (10p from downstairs at Notting Hill Music and Video Exchange) but absent from the Spotify edition.

 

While Andre’s early Australian hits such as “Funky Junky” are not tunes I am exactly rushing to hear, his beach bum hunkdom, muscles rippling like a fence of the purest corrugated iron and his physical resemblance to as near a white Michael Jackson as anyone could get (with the possible exception of Michael Jackson) eventually exported their way back to Britain. Beyond the fact that he gets guest rapper Cee to comment “I wanna rock with you just like Bobby Brown” – so at least he’s honest about it, albeit at one remove – “Flava” is essentially fluffily white swingbeat with its baby-faced cod-Babyface beats, its central keyboard riff borrowed from Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It,” its nod to Mark Morrison (“The mac’s back”) and Andre’s own pale vocal which appears to have been varispeeded to sound even weedier.

 

Nevertheless, Natural eventually yielded no fewer than three number one singles. The second of those, “I Feel You” – nothing whatsoever to do with Depeche Mode – is actually, and slightly surprisingly, not the worst of chart-toppers. The continued 65 rpm varispeeding of Andre’s voice works better in this context than it did when he tried to be Mr Brown; on “I Feel You” he is clearly going for the Michael Jackson ballad market and it isn’t a shameful effort.

 

The singer is alone at home, pacing the floors, wondering where she’s gone, knowing deep down that she’s not coming back (“oh I wonder if you’re coming home tonight”), tearing himself apart over what he might or might not have done, aching for her presence (“’Cos it’s cold when we’re apart”). He doesn’t achieve catharsis but it’s a perfectly decent Britsoul song, skilfully handled and delicately produced (with a nice puff-of-smoke vanish of an ending); had it been performed by Loose Ends it might have been hailed as a classic, but if anything Andre's varispeed voice is tweaked up a little too enthusiastically, his “well well well”s do not threaten Terry Callier, his attempts at male assertion (“I’m thinking about the things that I want to do to you/Soon as you get home!”) are unbecoming and unconvincing, and overall the performance is scarcely in the same universe as Vandross’ “The Other Side Of The World” or O’Neal’s “If You Were Here Tonight” or Gaye’s “Just To Keep You Satisfied” – but it’s hardly a disgrace either.

 

The album possesses other moments. “Show U Somethin’” – oh yeah, Pete, what might that be exactly; your Etch-A-Sketch Gold? – would work better as Middle-Aged Jack Swing if the rhythm track did not sound as though it were provided by a freshly-emptied box of staples. “To The Top” would be routine were it not for producers Ashley Cadell and Mark Forrester’s slightly distended background, akin to The Magic Roundabout theme’s barrel organ having taken the wrong pills by mistake.

 

Andre’s forte does indeed appear to be The Ballad. Two of those on Natural were composed by him alone. “Tell Me When” is modestly engaging but “You Are (Part Two)” is something more than that. “Part One” was the same song performed as acapella doo-wop (and is present on the original Australian edition of Natural, which was heavily reordered and rejigged for international ears) but “Part Two” finds Andre’s voice alone with only a piano to accompany him and is a very brief but quite strikingly magnificent piece of work.

 

And, possibly to everybody’s surprise, Andre brings Natural towards its climax – behave at the back - by covering a song composed by…Neil Finn. “Message To My Girl,” from the penultimate album by Split Enz, 1983’s Conflicting Emotions; a song which Finn subsequently dedicated to his wife Sharon on stage in 2006 (clearly an Antipodean salute). Suddenly, everything blooms into colour, and finding a song that is genuinely charged-up, both harmonically and emotionally, is a discovery which audibly pleases Andre, who gives a fine interpretation.

 

Ah yes, you say, but what about the man’s most famous song?

 

Well, times got rather tough for Mr Andre after his first - and most at the time thought only - wave of success; I'm not saying that he was reduced to sweating in a Hofmeister Bear costume and forced to wander around Kettering town centre scattering leaflets on a wet Friday (it was Leominster) but when you're appearing on nineties revival bills and it's still 1998 you know there's something amiss.

 

So I daresay that 2004’s invitation to the I’m A Celebrity… jungle was more than welcome, since by accepting it he met Katie Price, to their mutual benefit - when you have to hack your way through Australian bushes and eat crocodile testicles to get your career back I'd say it was a pretty serious endeavour - and on this renewed wave of goodwill, blended with politely aghast nineties nostalgia, "Mysterious Girl" got its third chance, largely due to the pound sterling efforts of then-top Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles, another in the long line of music broadcasters anxious to prove that as long as you have broadcasting skills, a love of or interest in music comes a distant second, if it comes anywhere at all.

 

The resuscitation of “Mysterious Girl” in 2004 symbolised the third coming of a decent enough but fundamentally average pop-reggae tune – the song struggled to #53 on its initial 1995 release, and then a year later peaked in second place, behind the Fugees' "Killing Me Softly" - which lopes along reasonably agreeably despite appalling lyrics ("No doubt I'm the only man who can love you like I can") though dips rather flatulently when Bubbler Ranx isn't involved. Nonetheless, it did the trick – and along with the enhanced rebirth of phenomena like “Amarillo” and “Let’s Get Ready To Rhumble,” might indicate a profound rejection of then-contemporary pop (see entry #744 for further thoughts on this matter) - and the man has subsequently survived and to a small extent has even continued to thrive. I once found myself in a lift with both Andre and Price at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital one Wednesday lunchtime and they seemed like perfectly fine, down-to-earth people, happily chatting with nurses and giving autographs to kids. Let’s leave the picture that way.

KULA SHAKER: K

 

(#555: 28 September 1996, 2 weeks)

 

Track listing: Hey Dude/Night On The Town/Temple Of Everlasting Light/Govinda/Smart Dogs/Magic Theatre/Into The Deep/Sleeping Jiva/Tattva/Grateful When You’re Dead-Jerry Was There/303/Start All Over/Hollow Man (Parts 1 & 2)

 

There to fill a gap in the market rather than create a new one, Kula Shaker were briefly in public favour in the mid-nineties. They evolved from a psych-Mod revival band called The Kays and frontman Crispian Mills was (is) the son of Hayley and the grandson of Sir John. They became popular with boys who don’t care to think too much and K – as Alan Bennett has noted, “the angriest of letters” – probably would have gone nowhere near number one, let alone spend a fortnight there, at any other moment.

 

K is mostly an enterprising but finally dull affair. On the back of a few catchy singles we find not very much, other than standard, gruel-heavy rock workouts which could have come from a below-par Charlatans album. Nor are the singles themselves, generally, of much merit. “Hey Dude” – incredibly, a number two hit – sounds like the boyfriends of The Last Dinner Party having a go at being Black Grape, though ends with the decidedly non-Ryderian protest that “But you treat me like a woman when I feel like a man!” Mills is neither Joe Elliott nor Shania Twain.

 

Similarly, the devotional mock-ragas of “Govinda” and “Tattva,” however heartfelt their content, plod unexcitingly with none of the natural fizz of Cornershop’s "6am Jullandar Shere" (from an album entitled, pointedly, Woman’s Gotta Have It). Alonza Bevan is, it has to be said, an excellent bass player, and there are times when the band do show a modest degree of adventure – the abandoned television theme instrumental “Magic Theatre,” and the later moments of “Into The Deep” where the band do make something of an effort – not nearly enough of an effort, but at least it’s something - to escape their Stone Roses backdrop. The way Mills just about manages to get through the line “Think I'll grow myself a big ol' hairy moustache” without corpsing in “303” demonstrates an admirable and humorous sense of self-awareness. On the other hand, the portentously-titled “Hollow Man (Parts 1 & 2)” constitutes tedious sub-Pink Floyd noodling; if they were thinking of recapturing the uncanny magic of Gilmour’s three-part “The Narrow Way” from Ummagumma, then they were some considerable distance away from doing so.

 

Where Kula Shaker unexpectedly thrive is when they drop the spiritual pretensions and bullet-point philosophy and simply concentrate on being a rock band. The problem for me, and for those of you expecting a full-on demolition of this band and record, is that “Grateful When You’re Dead” is beyond question a fantastic and dynamic pop single which would have worked at any time between 1966 and 2006. It does its business in about two minutes fifty and even its album segue into yet more tiresome ambient bollocks cannot mar its undeniable power. On it, Mills sounds as though he’s been suddenly snapped awake.

 

Perhaps the band’s best moment, which got grudgingly added to later editions of the album, was their 1997 number two smash hit single reading of “Hush,” the old Joe South/Deep Purple warhorse and a performance which to my ears is far more reminiscent of The Prisoners than The Charlatans; it strips out all the extraneous luggage (no solos), Mills assaults the song with genuine zest and, again, it takes just two minutes and 58 seconds to make its point. They treat the song as colourful Archies bubblegum, something Tommy James and the Shondells could have done (and there is nothing on K to approach “Crystal Blue Persuasion”).

 

But it didn’t last. Mills made some hazily naïve comments about reclaiming the swastika from the Nazis and returning the symbol to its Hindu origins – the term “swastika” in Sanskrit means “conductive to wellbeing” and first appeared in print in Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, serving as explanation of a grammatical point – and was summarily pilloried and rendered unmutual. It then transpired that Mills’ previous-but-one band, Objects Of Desire, deployed the slogan “England will rise again” – which might have worked on a European Cup level in 1996 but not at all in 1993 – and also performed at a Wembley conference of conspiracy theorists entitled “Global Deception”; one of the chief speakers at the latter, William Cooper – the term “illuminati” tells you all that you need to know about him (except that he was shot dead in a gun battle with the Arizona police in November 2001) – is thanked in the credits of K.

 

Kula Shaker did not really recover from any of this. The controversy – which Mills later publicly decried – torpedoed the prospects for their then-imminent second album, Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts, and the band split in September 1999. They reformed in 2004 and have subsequently continued to perform and record; this year’s Natural Magick album even restored them to the top thirty. But their moment was perhaps always fated to be brief.

R.E.M.: New Adventures In Hi-Fi

 

(#554: 21 September 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing: How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us/The Wake-Up Bomb/New Test Leper/Undertow/E-Bow The Letter/Leave/Departure/Bittersweet Me/Be Mine/Binky The Doormat/Zither/So Fast, So Numb/Low Desert/Electrolite

 

If Monster represented the beginning of a new journey for R.E.M., then New Adventures In Hi-Fi marks that journey’s consolidation, with improvements. The album’s songs (along with others which didn’t make the final cut) were written and recorded while the band were on the road touring Monster, mostly at live soundchecks around the United States – Charleston, Boston, Auburn Hills, Memphis, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Orlando and at home in Atlanta – with four other songs recorded in a rather lo-fi local studio (Bad Animals in Seattle).

 

Inevitably, much of New Adventures concerns travel and movement – such song titles as “Leave,” “Departure” and “Low Desert” adequately tell the story in themselves – but the record (or records; on one format it came as a double LP) also documents in particular the increasing frustration of Michael Stipe at the world and people around him, and maybe even with himself (“Bittersweet Me”). Certainly Stipe has rarely been more punchily direct as a lyricist than he is on New Adventures, as witness the smiling melancholia of “How The West Was Won…” or the snarl at the sponsored superficiality of chat shows (“New Test Leper”).

 

Equally, the band are now far more at home with the rock direction signalled by Monster; songs such as “Undertow” and “Binky The Doormat” convey much more musical power and confidence, and the steady build-up of “Be Mine” from fuzzy folk meditation to something approaching An Anthem is handled in an absolutely masterly fashion, as heralded by Bill Berry’s drums, which awaken at 3:50 and escort the song into a wholly larger, but completely logical, arena.

 

It is perhaps a miracle that Berry was on the record at all; he had collapsed on stage in Lausanne, Switzerland, with a ruptured brain aneurysm in March 1995, and although he recovered sufficiently to rejoin the band and help them complete New Adventures, things were, for him, decidedly not the same. So it is rather poignant that the record is introduced by his drums alone, laying out the ground for the echoey piano and dub-like disorientation of “How The West Was Won…”; some commentators at the time referred to a trip hop influence, but the song actually sounds like one of those secretions of cloistered dread one might encounter on later albums by the Clash (“Shepherds Delight,” “Death Is A Star”).

 

On “How The West Was Won…” Stipe muses about the induced dream of the unending frontier, and how it finally came to not very much at all – his quaking “ah”s at the end of each “and where it got us” may represent either lamentation or irony. “I point my nose to the Northern Star/And watch the decline from a hazy distance” he observes, as well as offering characteristic Stipeisms which don’t really make sense yet fit the song’s central emotion exactly (“I cross it, bless it, alkaline,” which corresponds precisely with Mike Mills’ distended, Robert Wyatt-doing-Cecil Taylor-at-16 rpm piano solo).

 

The song lulls the unwary listener into imagining an album of reasonably quiet contemplations. How delightfully shocking, then, to be shaken awake by Stipe’s chuckling, in-our-faces “I LOOK GOOD IN A GLASS PACK!” “The Wake-Up Bomb” is sleazy glam-rock which proves quite forcibly that Suede still had a bit of a way to go, and also efficaciously self-aware glam-rock which subsists on the knowledge that this imposed fable of music’s past could act as a metaphor for the neutron bomb, leaving structures intact but wiping out actual people.

 

“The Wake-Up Bomb” is just one of the best pastiches of glam-rock, and specifically British glam-rock of the period which was already, in 1996, approaching a quarter of a century ago, that I’ve heard, with its sneeringly loving references to 1973, Queen, T Rex moves and even the New Seekers (“I had to teach the world to sing by the age of twenty-one”), not to mention Stipe’s unexpected echoes of the vocal idiosyncrasies of Steve Harley (“Carry my dead bored, ‘been there, done that’ any-THIIIIIING”). By song’s climax he has had more than enough, now referring to “you lunch meat, pond scum” and magnifying his Harleyisms (the repeated coda of “Yeah, I'd rather be anywhere doing any-THIIIIIING!!!!”). The punctum element here is unquestionably Bill Berry’s tambourine from verse two onward.

 

“New Test Leper” (I think it’s meant to be shorthand for the New Testament) is more recognisably in the regular R.E.M. line of approach – though note Mills’ very free-ranging bass-playing throughout, and also Peter Buck’s Robin Guthrie-esque fuzz lead in the choruses, while Stipe ponders on how raw a deal Jesus would have had on daytime talk shows, culminating in an Elephant Man reference (“I am not an animal”) – those who do not fit into a securely monetised paradigm of international currency-reliant humanity (“all organised and blank”) are pitifully and often painfully excised from it. “Undertow” is rock dynamism which makes nineties U2, let alone Monster, seem relatively jejeune; the important element here is Mike Mills, whose voice immediately responds to Stipe’s pained “I’m drowning me!” as if to save him.

 

“E-Bow The Letter” was the audience-testing lead single from the album – much as “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?,” “Drive” and, arguably, “Losing My Religion” had been on its receding predecessors – but undaunted British record buyers placed it at number four in their singles chart, making it statistically the band’s biggest hit single up to that point. Its surface of jokey, semi-rapped reminiscences conceals a canyon of mourning – it is said that the song’s lyrics derived from a letter Stipe wrote to River Phoenix, hence the song itself can reasonably be viewed as an elegy, as underlined by the hovering background ghost of Patti Smith, alternately reassuring (“I’ll take you over there”) and menacing (“I’ll take you over”). The song incorporates some of Stipe’s saddest and most resigned words (“Will you live to eighty-three? Will you ever welcome me?,” “My loss, and here we go again”). But the two voices intermingle at the song’s modest climax, and Smith finally guides the wretched soul away from Hell (“There, there…There, baby”).

 

“Leave” is for me the album’s highlight. It begins with a sourly beautiful passage for orchestra, resolving, as it must, in a Picardy third, as though indicating that this represents the “old” R.E.M. Indeed the band made a recording of the whole song in this style, but in the album’s emotional context the passage signifies a goodbye to…something.

 

Headphone listeners should especially be warned; there follows a rude awakening. A siren starts blaring and refuses to relent – who let the Bomb Squad into the studio (Answers: nobody, because the song was recorded at a soundcheck at the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta, while the siren effect was provided by Scott McCaughey relentlessly moving the octave switch of his Arp Odyssey up and down)? “Leave” is one of R.E.M.’s most raging rock grinds, at the very least on a par with “Turn You Inside Out” from Green. It does not let up as Stipe allows his frustration to foment and explode. This wall of pressurises sound persists for over seven-and-a-quarter minutes, including a priceless moment when the song appears to end, but oh no, the siren starts up again. And if the repeated chants of “leave it all behind” don’t spell it out to you – the band have clocked and listened to…Ride! Flipping heck.

 

“Departure” is jocular but powerful travelogue rock, a bit like Stereolab remixing “Get Off Of My Cloud,” Stipe’s rapid-fire observations countered by undulating rhythmic traction (think particularly of Mills’ fuzz bass and Farfisa organ). “Bittersweet Me” does its best to resemble old-school R.E.M., but Stipe’s anger cannot quite be contained as securely as before; if anything, he ventures into John Lydon vocalese at many points in the song (“How easy you think of all of this as bittersweet me!”). Yet the song also includes some of his severest and most poetic jibes – the younger Morrissey would have been proud to pen “Oh, my peer, your veneer/Is wearing thin and cracking.”

 

As for “Be Mine,” Stipe manipulates the corniest elements of Valentine’s Day cards and suchlike in an encyclopaedic attempt to explain how strong his love is and what he would do for, and occasionally despite, it; one is never quite convinced that he is not an obsessive rather than a would-be lover or saviour. Yet the song’s architecture builds up beautifully, leaving us with an arm-waving ocean of guitar riffs and chord changes which would not have disgraced prime Oasis. This is tremendous rock music.

 

“Binky The Doormat” is one of the album’s most powerful and ominous rockers. Here Stipe retreats to his semi-abstract globe of imagined imagery, but none of it conceals a profound absence of self-esteem. Binky himself is an antagonist in the nice-try-but-shoddily-realised 1991 black comedy horror drama Shakes The Clown whose self-pity does not obscure the fact that he is a murderer and near-rapist. Stipe confines his concerns to the self-pity, and that is manifestly quite enough. Following the brief instrumental interlude “Zither” – recorded in a dressing room, no less - which sounds like an early draft of “Everybody Hurts,” we return to rock with “So Fast, So Numb,” which revisits the River Phoenix subtext a lot more furiously than “E-Bow The Letter,” even implying that he and Stipe might have been more than just friends (“I’ve been around, I’ve been your lover”) while damning Phoenix’s seemingly self-willed descent (“You love it, you hate it/You want to recreate it”). Meanwhile, the relatively straightahead rock of “Low Desert” finds Stipe terminally exhausted with The Road (“There's a radio tower, it's egging you on/Back to the place where you never belonged/Where the people thrive on their own contempt”).

 

That leaves “Electrolite,” the album’s most obviously “R.E.M.” song – musically it’s like an angular variation on “Nightswimming” (Mike Mills was again responsible for the central piano motif) - and one of the best and most acrid love songs to Los Angeles, and for the matter the twentieth century, that I know. Stipe lived in Santa Monica for two years in the nineties and was inclined to stand on Mulholland Drive – far enough not to smell the city, but close and wide enough to see its audacious ambition. Sometime around June 2006 Stipe wrote an essay about Los Angeles, some of which was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, including the following passage:

 

"And nowhere seemed more perfect than the city that came into its own throughout the 20th century, but always looking forward and driven by ideas of a greater future, at whatever cost.

 

Los Angeles.”

 

Underscoring that cost was, principally, the San Andreas Fault, and “Electrolite” was directly inspired by the Northridge earthquake of 17 January 1994, the worst the city had experienced since 1971, in which Stipe’s Santa Monica home was severely damaged (although technically the eruption was caused by the previously-undetected Pico Thrust Fault).

 

Later in the same essay, Stipe wrote:

 

"I name check three of the great legends of that single industry 'town,' as it likes to refer to itself. In order: James Dean, Steve McQueen, Martin Sheen [as he looks down on Hollywood, although in the song itself the actors are cited in reverse order]. All iconic, all representing different aspects of masculinity—a key feature of 20th century ideology. It is the push me-pull you of a culture drawing on mid-century ideas of society, butt up against and in a great tug-of-war with modernism/rebirth/epiphany/futurism, wiping out all that that came before to be replaced by something 'better,' more civilized, more tolerant, fair, open, and so on ... [see 'reagan,' 'soylent green,' 'bladerunner,' current gubernatorial debates]”

 

The song’s title comes from Stipe’s impression of seeing Los Angeles from the air while flying towards the city; the notion of a starlike phosphorescence. The performance itself is, I would say, resonant, full of signifiers of love, most notably Nathan December's patient guiro, reminding us of how Los Angeles came into being and also of the subtle percussive undertow which enhanced so many of the sunny, optimistic songs materialising on the radio from around the time Stipe was born (and of course I also think of its startling use in the Beach Boys' "Cabinessence").

 

But the song is also, as I intimated above, a song of farewell to the twentieth century, bearing not much in the way of hope for a twenty-first. In “Electrolite” Stipe might be bidding farewell to “the future” or that century’s idea of it; hence “20^th century, go to sleep/Really deep/We won’t blink.” “I’m not scared” Stipe asserts as the song and record end. A slight theatrical pause, and finally: “I’m out of here.” As, for quite a lot of people, were R.E.M. But for them, the journey, though necessarily diverted, was nowhere near completion.