Agents of the free - R.E.M. in Helsinki

Update: added links to pics and vids.

There is very little that i can say about R.E.M.’s live performance tonight that isn’t going to sound like a cliché. They were good. Damn good. I’ve read somewhere that Michael Stipe has the ability to turn a stadium into a club, and that is pretty much how i felt it. There were thousands of people in the club tonight and i guess at least the people with me in the front will agree.

Yet it was a stadium gig, and thanks to that go to the miraculous video effects that were pumped out live and would probably have turned U2 jealous. It was magnificent and intimate at the same time. It was like being inside a music video, and it was intense.

It also was very wet. Stipe commented about the rain several times and the band played a couple of songs they deemed appropriate due to the cold and the wet weather. And that we all looked like trash bags (”but very cute ones”). As an opening speech, Stipe asked the audience to say “I told you so”, should a member of R.E.M. slip and fall on his ass. And then we practiced. Much hilarity ensued, even though the sentence never needed chanting after the practice (i was going to say “dry”) run.

As a fan of mostly older R.E.M. material (primarily the L Rich P, Document and Green albums), i was delighted that the band played stuff from practically all of their back catalogue — though despite the loud and repeated proposal from yours truly, they didn’t play Underneath the bunker (nor Swan swan h or Superman). They did however play a lot of weird stuff that “for some reason rarely gets played” and probably made much of the audience go “Huh?”. I openly admit that most of the rarer tracks were rare to me too, but that didn’t mean a thing; the “meno” (groove, but without soul/jazz undertones) was ass kicking. Oh, and they didn’t play Stand either, but they did play Cuyahuga, as was requested by their (other) warm up band Editors.

The only time i feared that i was going to end up ass-kicked in that other, less pleasant way was when a four hundred pound representative of Order And Security with an attitudde from the Third Reich, non-verbally signalled to me that my filming and photographing of the band’s performance was going to get me under his scrutiny and physical display of disapproval. I pulled my XOLO.tv Citizen Journalist badge from my pocket and while hanging it around my neck, feavourishly thought of which of my friends i should call to play my hard mouthed lawyer telling the good gentleman that as a Citizen Journalist i indeed have the right to film whatever i wanted for non-commerercial purposes and this is Finland and you let go of this man you’re holding and show him the professional respect and courtesy or the Finnish legalities would have him stuffed inside a pringles can and rolled downhill while being filmed by and urinated (or at the very least, laughed) upon by a cadre of Citizen Journalistos and lawyer people, and that he would not want that to happen.

Luckily, that didn’t actualize. And before the encores, it was kinda funny to see the message “Tag your Flickr photos remhelsinki, on YouTube tag your video remhelsinki, if you blog about this, add #remhelsinki to your blog entry”, on the screens. Very 2.0, and the bad memory was laughed away in my mind.

Anyway, i’m just back home now, so i’ll just conclude with repeating that i got my ass kicked, seriously, and in that very positive sense, and that i enjoyed the kickage, with equal seriousity and positivity. If you’ll be back, so will i.