I wore the clothes you wanted

Finishing up my trip across the output of Athens' finest...

This final (I promise) post covers the live albums

R.E.M. Live (2007)

This is their first live album?  TWENTY SEVEN years after they formed?!?  Well, that's what Wikipedia tells me and who am I to argue?  It's a not a bad album - highlights for me are "Bad Day", "Orange Crush", "The I Love", "Walk Unafraid" and "What's The Frequency, Kenneth?".  It does, however, suffer from the album they were promoting at the time because there are six tracks from Around The Sun but only four from the first seven albums, with nothing from either Murmur or Out Of Time - all of which is just wrong.   It does, however, have a very cool album cover - Michael was on stage in South Africa and it was over fifty degrees, so he was hot, hot, hot!

Live At The Olympia (2009)

This is much more like it, although it suffers from a similar problem to the previous one because it has NINE tracks from Accelerate, but there's a good reason for that because they played five nights at The Olympia to try and iron the songs out for that album (although there is an argument they didn't need to include them all on the album).  But I think that it's definitely a better album, it works well live and we're still left with thirty tracks from elsewhere in their career and there are some interestingly quirky selections in there.  Including, surprisingly, two tracks we've not heard anywhere before - "Staring Down The Barrel Of The Middle Distance" which is a great title for a perfectly acceptable track and "On The Fly" which I didn't mind at all.  The highlights for me are "New Test Leper", "So. Central Rain", "Driver 8", "These Days", "1,000,000", "Harborcoat" and "Pretty Persuasion" - I've picked a lot of earlier tracks there, but the album gives a good retrospective of their work and I bet they were just great gigs - I'm jealous of those that were there.

R.E.M At The BBC (2018)

I have heard some of this and I enjoyed it - the reason I've only listened to some of it is that it's an eight disc boxset, which pushes even my levels of fanboyness beyond their limits.  Interestingly, it includes a recording of one of their '95 concerts at Milton Keynes and I was at the other one, which was unfortunately a profoundly disappointing experience - they just weren't on it that day.  Fortunately, it also includes their '99 Glastonbury appearance which is a far better show and well worth checking out if you need some R.E.M., but better watched with the accompanying video.  I liked bits of this, but I don't feel I can really recommend it as an album - it's just a randomly collated selection of points in time, some of which are worth more of your time than others.

Bingo Hand Job : Live At The Borderline (1991)

And we finally end at one of the more mysterious entries on several fronts.  In 1991, the band and various friends (Billy Bragg, Robyn Hitchcock and Peter Holsapple) played a couple of "secret" shows at the 200 capacity Borderline club in London under the pseudonym Bingo Hand Job - funnily enough, it was kinda tricky to get tickets for!  It was a very bootlegged event and there are various videos on YouTube that suggest the whole evening was pretty chaotic with terrible sound quality.  However, apparently a decent-ish quality version made by one of the sound engineers turned up and so they decided to make a limited edition vinyl release for Record Store Day in 2019 - so I was looking forward to listening to it.

But when they say "limited edition vinyl release" they really meant that - it doesn't appear to be online anywhere, with the nearest being this official-ish looking video but the sound quality isn't great on it.  However, brief research on the album as to how tricky/expensive it would be to track down a copy suggests the sound quality isn't great on the album either - but I guess I'll never know and it's nice to end on a bit of mystery.

And after eighteen months spent visiting fifteen studio albums, five compilation albums and four live albums, that really is the end to quite the enjoyable journey.  I loved revisiting the earlier albums in full - I'd listened to quite a few of the tracks across the years, but had lost the art of listening to their albums as albums.  I also enjoyed finally visiting Accelerate and Collapse Into Now after Around The Sun had scared me off their later output.  

At this point I generally like listing my favourites but things don't really work that way for me with R.E.M. because things vary - I just find myself in the mood for some albums more than other at times without really knowing why.  So my final thought has to be directed at Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe (always listed in alphabetical order) - heartfelt thanks for all the music over the years.

Various - The best-ofs the best-ofs from the best-of
Life's A Riot With Spy Vs Spy - where it all began (Billy Bragg)