Falling in and out of love, music and sex, reviews so wrong you have to make them right, and 25 years of R.E.M.’s sneakily horny Up

When I think about R.E.M.’s Up, their eleventh studio album, I think of my favourite ever small sanctuary. It’s 1998. I’m in my single room in my third year of university, which had everything in it that I needed, so I barely had to escape: a sink and mirror in a little cupboard, an inset wardrobe, three little bookshelves between the sink cupboard and the wardrobe, a desk where I’d write my essays in longhand, and a huge square noticeboard that I covered with postcards (New Order, Joy Division, Bauhaus) and letters from friends in rainbows of inks. 

It also had a single bed against the wall that faced the street with a little light above it, operated by a switch above a metre above my pillow. I spent hours here, days, weeks, surrounded by a halo of light in the gloom. I long for it still. I read Moby Dick over forty-eight hours, scribbled notes for my dissertation on T.S. Eliot’s monstrous women, sat until the dawn or into the day, the duvet over my anxious, tired body, listening to Diminished, Parakeet and Falls To Climb on a loop, before lumbering over to my ghettoblaster to skip back and restart. Then I’d rush back to bed, wrap up warm and fall once again – with the amount of indulgence a twenty-year-old can do really well – into those textures of a band I loved who were changing, and those feelings I was feeling.

Yo Zushi reviewed the twenty-fifth-anniversary reissue of R.E.M.’s Up in the New Statesman this month. Before anything else, my competitive freelancer gene kicked in – I’ve written and spoken about the album before as a great lost LP, in magazines and on podcasts – in other words, THAT BYLINE SHOULD’VE BEEN MINE. (Anniversaries are handy tools for writers wanting to cast judgment or dwell in the past. They’re also useful for readers wanting to exhale deeply or blow a greying fringe out of their eyes at the passage of time.)

Then I read the first line. “No one f***s to R.E.M,” it began. Steel yourself, Rogers. “Their songs drew you inward, penetrating the heart but no lower.” “Their music was mostly too expansive, too ambitious to take full possession of your body.” 

Now I’m sure Zo’s a lovely person, etc etc, but surely music and its erotic effects on the listener (she says twirling her glasses thoughtfully in her hand) are somewhat subjective. Our responses to particular voices, or playing styles, are also uniquely sensitive. Whatever Zo says, R.E.M. were my introduction to a charged, erotic world of ideas and sounds, helped along by the effects of a voice whispering “fuck me kitten” into a 15-year-old ear.