Just recently, and quietly, R.E.M. passed the tenth anniversary of their last live performance. And I miss them. I miss knowing what they were doing now, where they were going creatively, and how they would address these totally balls-out-to-batshit-crazy times. R.E.M., as was, even though they no longer exist, still exist as a business that quietly maintains an ordered history. Every twenty fifth or so birthday, each of their studio albums gets a deluxe reissue, with a live show of the period, or a clutch of demo recordings and unreleased songs, or both. Frustratingly, each of them seems to come in a slightly different sized package (a 5” clamshell box, a DVD sized book-pack, a 12” photobook with CD’s inside). Standing outside of these, and separate, the “R.E.M. At The BBC” set captures across 8 CD’s and a DVD, 11 complete live shows spanning 20 years of the bands life.

In short we get :
CD1 : in studio radio sessions from 1991 to 2008
CD2 : John Peel Session from 1998
CD3 : an hour from Nottingham in 1984
CD4-5: the full live show from Milton Keynes in 1995
CD6-7 : the full live show from Glastonbury 1999
CD8 : St John’s Church Radio Session 2004
DVD : Jools Holland 1998 and a bucketload of TV shows

There’s no sign of the Royal Albert Hall show from 2008 I went to, or the 2003 Glastonbury performance, but I think that’s more than enough there isn’t there? Every period of the bands life, from the 1980’s Jangle Years, to the 1990’s Stadium Gloom and 2000’s Awkward Mature Band stage are all represented. Some of the recordings aren’t perhaps as well mixed as you might hope, being live on-the-fly broadcasts with synthesisers a little loud, the occasional muffled vocal, or guitars overdriven occasionally, but they all reflect R.E.M. is their element : live, breathing, there in front of you. Normally playing “Losing My Religion”, which appears eight times on this compilation.

The radio sessions captured on disc 1 are a mixture of acoustic glory (including an appearance for the rarely heard, and utterly beautiful “Fretless”, and a previously unreleased cover of Editors “Munich”, which justifies the purchase price of the whole dang set) and full band appearances. The second disc is an intimate Gig-but-not-a-gig Peel Session in front of an audience from 1998. In fact the awkward “Up” period gets four outings here with this Peel Session, Later with Jools Holland 1998 on the DVD, a BBC Session from 1998 and the 1999 Glastonbury headline show. To call this set “1984-2008” is a little unfair as one show is from 1984, and then nothing until 1991 apart from occasional TV appearances as extras on the DVD, and there only two songs after 2004.

Milton Keynes 1995 rounds out two discs, being a complete headline show from the “Monster” tour, which was R.E.M.’s most interesting period. It shows the band taking a left turn from the acoustic based period of the “Out of Time”/”Automatic” era to something fluider, snarlier, and weirder ; as if the band that toured in 1989 stayed the same, but got bored of the Rickenbacker, and bought a whole bunch of lo-fi fuzz pedals and got weird. It was also the first time that Michael Stipe outed his character based role play and narrative lyricism, playing at being a ‘rock star’ gone slightly wrong rather than a sincere narrator. It’s an assured two hour stretch of R.E.M. at their apex, and covers both most of “Monster”, and some of the then-unreleased “New Adventures In Hi-Fi”.

The next set comes from the post-Bill-Berry “Up Tour” of 1999, and covers their first Glastonbury headline set. The set is both confident and hesitant, with a wide range of songs, a new drummer, an expanded lineup, and a bizarre transition as they learned how to become a band again, and mostly succeeded.

The final CD sees a live-in-a-church session, with final drummer Bill Rieflin, and in support of the lacklustre “Around The Sun.” The show suffers by virtue of being heavy on a large number of midpaced, lifeless, and uninspired material : surprisingly these songs fare better on stage in front of an audience than the finalised studio record. But it’s still not great, and fails to entice. The DVD covers “Accelerating Backwards” which is a set of TV appearances from 1984 to 2004, and the nearly full hour long “Later Live With Jools Holland” show from 1998 which is a fluid and curious snapshot of the band as they learn to be themselves again. (Many of the songs from this were selected to be live B-sides, and a weird cover of Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” briefly appears as well).

In summary this Box Set is an affordable and comprehensive slice of R.E.M. as a live act, showing how they were often better on stage than on record, and a healthy compendium of the bands live history in one place. A fine way to remember them.