The song REM refused to play live
The spring evening air is crisp. An eerie fog has shrouded Athens, Georgia, and Michael Stipe can barely think of anything more poetically fitting. Alongside his buddies Bill Berry, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills, the band REM are about to take to the stage for the very first time, ensuring April 1980 is a month to remember. The setting: an abandoned church. The occasion: a friend’s birthday party.
There can scarcely be a better introduction to the group. The juxtaposition of a creaking edifice of abandoned spiritualism and the upbeat enthusiasm of friends coming together to enjoy some sweet pop music is a snapshot that typifies the indie heroes in some peculiar way. From this first show until the very end in 2011, their sound was lavished with a rare mix of haunted, faraway mystique and nostalgia and much more immediate rapture, fun, and friendliness.
The song that they dreamed of replicating during their tenure was ‘Moon River’, which perhaps serves to explain their strange ways even further. “Even as a little boy, it made me kind of want to cry or be by myself for a while,” Stipe told Creem. “I think it’s a really special kind of song that can do that.” However, not many rock ‘n’ roll bands consisting of a few firm friends crave to conjure something of that mystic ilk.
But REM paired those two poles perfectly on tracks like ‘The One I Love’, ‘Losing My Religion‘ and ‘Man on the Moon’, which, incidentally, stand as the three songs that they have played live the most. The same, however, can not be said of ‘Shiny Happy People’, perhaps a great pop song in a polished and catchy way, but not one that embodies the great wistful poignancy of the group, reflected by the fact that they’ve only ever played it live once.
Why REM left ‘Shiny Happy People’ out of their setlists
Considering that they’ve played ‘The One I Love’ a reported 534 times and lesser-known efforts like ‘Stumble’ 18 times, the near complete absence of ‘Shiny Happy People’, one of their biggest hits, is somewhat of a curio. After all, they were confident enough to release it as a single from their seventh studio album, Out of Time. It also featured one of their heroes, Kate Pierson of the B-52’s. And it became their only hit to break the top ten in the US and the UK, scoring sixth place in the latter.
But none of these factors have ever stopped it from being a big regret that the band are positively revulsed by. It’s simply not them, and they can’t abide by that. The song was borne from a Chinese propaganda poster, proving that it still had the band’s societal sagacity contained somewhere in its welter, but Stipe and his bandmates figured that they let it down somewhere along the line.
Its borderline poppy nature is just a little “embarrassing” to Buck, but they’re also well aware that it was never really going to be an anthem that sat proudly in their setlist from the get-go, as Stipe told Mojo, “We wrote it because we were challenging ourselves. I grew up a child of the ’60s listening to The Monkees and the Archies and The Banana Splits. The guys threw me the stupidest song that sounded so buoyant and weird and I was like, ok, I accept the challenge. So it was bubblegum music made for kids. Don’t hate it. But I don’t want to sing it.”
That last point is the pertinent one. On record, it showed a different side to the band, a lighter and lesser moody offering that Buck admitted “sounded really, really good”. But it was never going to sit alongside ‘Nightswimming‘ and conjure the sentiment of a birthday party in a creaking church that was always the basis of their live lore whether playing a small show in Athens or under the spotlight at Glastonbury.
