Mills insists REM had no time for retrospection at that point, and were focused on the “present or the near future, all the time”. In today’s marketing-driven world, the choice of tracks seems unusual. It becomes a great performance by a band starting to embrace their history and their enormity. So you’ve got that factor and the fact that its being recorded for posterity so you don’t want to mess that part of it up either."Īfter Radio Song, three songs in, Stipe reassures himself – “Not bad” – and you can almost hear the nerves evaporating. Mills remembers the fact that there was a small audience – some friends but mostly fans, after the band had to “work with” MTV to ensure it wasn’t made up of industry people – in the room as being “as daunting as anything, because of the immediacy. You really have to get yourself up for that.” So to sit there and expose yourself, warts and all, was very daunting. “The last time we’d really played before that was the 89 tour, which was full on, big PAs, big amplifiers, and also MTV was really big at that point. “I think we were all nervous,” Mills says. At the beginning of the show at least – Stipe (who was just becoming a superstar and perhaps realising that life would never be quite the same again) sounds unusually nervous. Listened to now, it’s an extraordinary recording. The MTV appearance was a way of reaching millions without hitting the road and found the band in one way at the peak of their powers, but strangely vulnerable. Reading on a mobile? Click here to watch the video for Radio Free Europe. As well as having to coax Warners into releasing Losing My Religion as a single, going against the record company's wishes in refusing to tour Out of Time (because they needed to recharge after gruelling years spent on the road) also suggests a certain unease with the new, far more commercial world they were now in. Although Mills has sympathy for those who regard the shift in record companies marking two distinct phases of the group, he insists not much had changed apart from the fact that he finally owned a house and felt secure in his career. You do what you do whether there’s 10 people or a million people.”Īfter years on independent label IRS, 1989’s Green marked the first of many records for Warner Brothers. There’s no point analysing it, what you’re doing is organic and it comes from a place in the heart rather than thought. You’d never think how many people were listening to a song like Losing …. We were able to go to all sorts of places and do this thing we really loved. “It’s kinda satisfying, to know that your music resonates in such a way that that many people like it and it gives you the chance to do what you love for a lot more people. With Losing My Religion, the band had realised that they were able to write songs that could connect universally, which Mills says felt empowering. Then you go home and your friends know you and tell you what a dumbass you are. When you’re on tour or in the big city, people know you and want to talk to you. Staying in Athens helped us keep our feet on the ground. That was one of the reasons we never moved to New York City. “You want to be grateful and graceful about your success, and at the same time not let it go to your heads. Was that how it felt? “Yes, it’s a balancing act, for sure,” Mills says. Stipe once described the 1991 rollercoaster as a process of trying to “preserve your sanity and enable yourself to do it for a while and not suck or sell out”. The 1991 appearance was recorded just as Losing My Religion had exploded the 2001 performance finds the band, by this point minus Berry, reinventing themselves all over again. We’re talking about this now because Losing My Religion is the only song that appears twice on Unplugged 1991/2001, The Complete Sessions, a newly released acoustic live album featuring two long-unheard performances recorded at MTV’s New York studios, which capture the band at two pivotal moments in their career. So it felt very natural and organic, rather than this big avalanche of notoriety.” We were really lucky in that every record up to Automatic For The People and maybe Monster, sold more than the one before it. Largely on the back of that song, 1991’s Out of Time shattered expectations of two or so million sales to sell more than 18m copies, kickstarting the group’s 1990s ascension to the status of one of the biggest bands in the world.“It marked the transition from pretty big to really big,” Mills remembers. Reading on a mobile? Click here to watch the video for Losing My Religion.
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