In March 2007, R.E.M. have been inducted into the Rock And Roll Corridor Of Fame at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Lodge. The ceremony provided Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills the chance to reunite with Invoice Berry and – only for the one evening – R.E.M.’s authentic iteration carried out suitably charged variations of “Gardening At Night,” “Man On The Moon” and “Begin The Begin,” together with a canopy of The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
A joyous, if barely emotional, event, the occasion reaffirmed R.E.M.’s place at rock’n’roll’s prime desk – a territory they’d occupied since their seventh full-length studio album, 1991’s Out Of Time went on to promote over 18 million copies worldwide. Nonetheless, at the same time as their Corridor Of Fame triumph acknowledged the Athens, Georgia, outfit’s outstanding canon of music, the band have been starting to query their continued relevance.
R.E.M.’s most up-to-date studio album, Round The Solar, was trailed by an impressive hit single, “Leaving New York,” however total Buck, Mills, and Stipe have been sad with the report’s contents. Buck later informed the Atlanta Journal-Structure that the album “just wasn’t really listenable” and revealed to the UK’s Q journal, “Even Michael [Stipe] was going, ‘Y’know, if we make another bad record, it’s over.”
Over the winter of 2006, the band went again to the drafting board, with Buck and Mills joined by touring alumni Scott McCaughey and Invoice Rieflin whereas they labored up a wealth of recent songs. Laborious, quick and purposeful, the fabric they re-emerged with was, in impact, essentially the most visceral rock’n’roll music R.E.M. had put their stamp on since 1996’s New Adventures In Hello-Fi.
As many of the new songs have been begging to be carried out reside, the band determined to revert to their authentic default working follow, whereby they might vigorously work up their freshly composed tunes onstage earlier than recording them within the studio. Opting to decamp to Europe for this in depth road-testing train, R.E.M. duly booked a five-night stand at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre, lasting from June 30 to July 5, 2007, with advance billing referring to the exhibits as “public rehearsals.”
An apt option to host what hindsight would recall as certainly one of rock’n’roll’s legendary residencies, the venue R.E.M. left their mark on throughout this run of exhibits was already steeped in historical past. Having been inaugurated as Dan Lowrey’s Music Corridor in 1881, the theatre was later rebranded because the Olympia in 1923, happening to current drama, opera, ballet, pantomime, and extra. It even later survived a probably catastrophic incident throughout a 1974 efficiency of West Facet Story, throughout which when the proscenium arch throughout the width of the stage collapsed and the roof actually fell in.
One in all Dublin’s most prestigious rock venues in newer many years, the Olympia has since performed host to a few of rock’s greatest names, with David Bowie, Adele, Kings Of Leon, Radiohead, Morrissey, Blur and plenty of extra treading the boards because the 80s.
Anticipation for R.E.M.’s stint within the Irish capital was excessive and the band opted to convey a younger movie director, Paris-born Vincent Moon, on board to seize a visible report of those self-styled work-in-progress exhibits. The prime mover behind the Blogotheque’s Take Away exhibits, a web-based challenge recording field-work music movies of rising alt-rock musicians and extra mainstream acts equivalent to Arcade Hearth, Moon had not too long ago come to Michael Stipe’s consideration.
“I’d been making films with a lot of unknown bands, but I’d done some work with Arcade Fire, so perhaps my name had got around,” Moon not too long ago revealed in our unique interview. “My first contact with them was actually an SMS saying Michael Stipe desires to name me within the subsequent hour! Are you able to think about?
“It was hard to believe that a band of such status would be so open and kind,” he continues. “Michael’s attitude was pretty much ‘just do what you want,’ and R.E.M. gave me a lot of scope and were very gracious. When they asked me to film the shows in Dublin, I took my friend and film editor, Jeremiah, with me and the whole band were just so sweet and accommodating.”
Moon’s edited highlights of R.E.M.’s five-night stand turned the documentary This Is Not A Present, which appeared as each a standalone launch and as a bonus DVD with the 2-CD set Stay At The Olympia. Nonetheless, whereas the first goal of the Dublin residency was to fine-tune the songs which might later grace Speed up, R.E.M. dug the relative intimacy of the Olympia a lot, additionally they took the chance to carry out materials from their critically acclaimed early IRS albums.
A lot to the delight of long-term followers, R.E.M. delved deep into their catalog, and the ensuing 2CD set culled a beneficiant 39-song choice from these sprawling, career-spanning Olympia units. The tracklist was heavy on materials from the early-to-mid-80s, with the band revisiting all however one lower from their preliminary mini-LP Persistent City, along with performing over half of Reckoning and 5 tunes from 1985’s Fables Of The Reconstruction. The alternatives have been incessantly stunning, with a hefty chunk of the tunes having final featured in R.E.M.’s setlist effectively over a decade earlier.
What Stay At The Olympia made abundantly clear, nonetheless, was that magic nonetheless coursed by means of the veins of those talismanic early songs. “Sitting Still” and “West Of The Fields,” from R.E.M.’s full-length 1983 debut, Murmur, retained their brittle, nervy vitality; Reckoning provided the Byrds-esque splendor of “Pretty Persuasion” and the wonderful, melancholic sweep of “So. Central Rain,” whereas the Man Ray-referencing “Feeling Gravity’s Pull,” from Fables…, had shed none of its authentic shape-shifting attract.
Elsewhere, Stipe and Co. gleefully plundered their wider catalog, performing a minimum of one tune from all their studio albums up to now outdoors of Inexperienced, Out Of Time, and Up. Sounding enviably box-fresh, Lifes Wealthy Pageant and Doc staples “These Days,” “Cuyahoga” and a suitably sturdy “Welcome To The Occupation” mirrored R.E.M.’s burgeoning political and ecological consciousness within the latter half of the 80s, whereas underrated mid-90s albums Monster and New Adventures In Hello-Fi yielded dynamic variations of lesser-vaunted gems, together with “Circus Envy” and the elegant “Electrolite.”
R.E.M. repeatedly pressured that their Olympia dates have been a “public rehearsal”, and far has since been manufactured from the band’s unusually relaxed and playful onstage demeanor throughout their Dublin sojourn. In actual fact, it’s value tuning into Stay At The Olympia merely to savor Michael Stipe’s self-deprecatory between-song banter. This arguably peaks after “Sitting Still” when, in discussing followers’ on-line makes an attempt at deciphering his opaque early lyrics, he reveals, “OK, it says, ‘Stipe himself has no idea what he says’ – thank you search engine!” to rapturous applause and gales of laughter. Looking back, although, it’s apparent that, even when the band’s new songs might have arrived in Dublin in a semi-complete state of being, the nostril-flaring variations of tracks equivalent to “Man-Sized Wreath,” “Horse To Water” and “Living Well Is The Best Revenge” show that they have been all set to face their post-Olympia future with a contemporary sense of goal.
Eager to grab the second, R.E.M. took the recommendation of U2’s The Edge and went on to form what would change into their 14th studio album, Speed up, with producer Jacknife Lee. The band shortly scheduled a trio of three-week recording periods in Eire’s County Westmeath, in Vancouver, Canada, and on residence floor in Athens, Georgia, in a bid to keep up each their focus and the vitality they generated onstage on the Olympia. Commenting on the advantages of adopting this artistic methodology, Stipe later informed US journal Spin, “I work really well under pressure, and the guys know that all too well… so the pace forced me to kind of spit stuff out.”
When Speed up was launched to a raft of constructive evaluations, and debuted at No. 2 on the US Billboard 200 in April 2008, it was obvious that R.E.M. had succeeded of their quest to seize the urgency of their Dublin exhibits in a studio context. Launched 18 months later, on October 27, 2009, Stay At The Olympia later loved its personal season within the solar. Followers unable to attend these already legendary exhibits might luxuriate in a quirkily good setlist akin to an alternate best hits, whereas the media freely doled out four- and five-star evaluations, and British publication Uncut very cogently declared that, on Stay At The Olympia, “the punk-fueled folk-rock group that had ruled the 80s along with U2 magically reappears.”
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