At best, I’ve got an ambivalent attitude to tribute bands. I have to admit that is has evolved over the years. For me to buy into them, they need to fulfill a few criteria.
The original music needs to mean something to me beyond being presented with a facsimile. I’m not looking for pale imitations. The original music needs to be honoured, not in a verbatim note for note methodology but more in spirit. We’re into the realm of tributes rather than cover.
There needs to be a scarcity value attached to it. The original form needs not to be available. Otherwise, with apologies to vegans and vegetarians, why have hamburger at a restaurant when you have steak at home?
Earlier in the year, I saw Adrian Belew and Jerry Harrison play the music of Talking Heads, largely centred upon Fear of Music and Remain in Light. This ticked the scarcity box. Despite the excitement when the four members of Talking Heads were together for the recent reissue of Stop Making Sense, there’s no evidence of reunion on the cards. David Byrne has a new album out soon and an upcoming tour. The most fleeting of moments appears to have passed.
Besides, Harrison and Belew were part of the Talking Heads band. Is it really a tribute if it involves original members?
I’ll stop being defensive.
There’s good reason why myself and Pete find ourselves in the room with Hollywood A-lister Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy in August 2025. They’re here playing the music of REM, specifically Fables of the Reconstruction. The album was recorded a few miles from here in Wood Green, under heavy weather (it was also the studio where That Petrol Emotion recorded Babble). The band were disaffected by the grey British winter, trudging out from their Mayfair hotel to a grim north London suburb. N22 still isn’t the most inviting place forty years later.
The album was the first that they had recorded outside of the US with a change of producer – Joe Boyd who was renowned for his work with Fairport Convention, John Martyn and Nick Drake. Joe was in the audience at the Garage, another tick of approval. The whole enterprise is REM approved, with the band’s manager Bertis Downs actively encouraging Shannon and Narducy.
As much as we may will it to happen, it appears that REM have engineered the perfect split. They broke up in 2011, and remain on amicable terms, occasionally performing with each other or with the Shannon/Narducy project. There was a beautiful and revealing interview recently in 2024. It did acknowledge that splitting allowed them to remain friends but drummer Bill Berry’s emotional response was touching. He left the band early after a brain aneurysm and regretted that he didn’t find away of hanging on.
Going back to 1985, Fables was the first REM album I purchased when it was released (I’d already picked up Murmur and Reckoning). It was a conscious shift away from those preceding records. The treble was dialled down, the mid range muddier. The lyrics arguably more opaque. That tour was my first time seeing the band at Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre.
The Liverpool gig, the album and the Shannon/Narducy show opened with Feeling Gravity’s Pull. It is an undervalued song. My personal opinion is its angular guitar with the plucked harmonics and the dragged chorus running just behind the beat set the template for much of what was to follow. It demonstrated that as attractive as the Rickenbacker jingle jangle of those first two LPs was, that paths to another future also existed. Finest Worksong, How The West Was Won and even Losing My Religion all benefited from the freedoms afforded from Fables opening song.
At the Garage gig, we had scarcity value (no REM reunion incoming), we had tribute to the music (textures and details were skilfully added) and we had expertise. Shannon in particular was magnificent. This wasn’t like listening to Michael Stipe. As good as Shannon’s vocals were, they didn’t have the unique grain of Stopes voice, that gentle restrained abrasiveness that you so seldom hear. Shannon’s voice was arguably fuller and deeper but it was his performance that was gripping. Rather than being an imitation of Stipe, this was a methodical theatrical interpretation of the front person. It wasn’t studied though. It was impulsive and immediate, charismatic without detracting from the remainder of the band.
Narducy and Dag Juhlin picked up Peter Buck’s guitar parts, with the latter handling the signature Rickenbacker. Ted Leo (who I had seen a few months earlier playing incendiary guitar with Gang of Four) covered Mike Mills’s bass but without his harmonies, which were dealt with by Narducy. Jon Wurster on drums and Vijay Tellis-Nayak on keyboards completed the band. The keyboards especially filled out the sound additively but without being overbearing, another interpretation that didn’t exist on the recorded music.
The first part of the show was the Fables album. It reinforced that the record wasn’t a poor relation to the first two groundbreaking LPs. Its slower songs (Wendell Gee and Old Man Kinsey) were forerunners of Automatic For The People’s balladic beauty. Driver 8 and Auctioneer, whilst more oblique than Life’s Rich Pageant, showed that the more straight forward velocity could be maintained. The divisive Can’t Get There From Here’s white funk signposted REM’s willingness to move beyond college rock, as was evident after they signed to Warner Bros.
The second set was broad in range. REM weren’t a band blessed with big hits so there wasn’t an urge to play the unmissable. Instead we got tracks from the debut Chronic Town EP, a gorgeous Daysleeper from Up and a smattering of the cover versions and b-sides that appeared on the Dead Letter Office compilation. A spare version of So. Central Rain featuring just Narducy and Shannon included lines from Peter Gabriel’s Red Rain, as it did back when it was Buck and Stipe playing, back in the day.
There was much love evident in the room and when Shannon announced they were tackling Life’s Rich Pageant in 2026, the idea was audibly embraced.
If you had any place in your soul for REM (a hugely special band for me), I’d recommend catching Shannon and Narducy. Think of it as Miles Davis or John Coltrane picking up Thelonious Monk or Duke Ellington’s music. They’re maintaining a lineage.
And we can still dream of the impossible reunion. It may require a comet but if so, it would be truly written in the stars.
The Setlist was as follows:
1-11: The Fables of the Reconstruction album played in order
12: Femme Fatale (Velvet Underground cover, which REM played around the time of Fables
Short break then:
13: Romance
14: Strange (Wire cover included on Document)
15: New Test Leper
16: Bandwagon
17: 1,000,000
18: Gardening at Night
19: World Leader Pretend
20: Moral Kiosk
21: Daysleeper
22: Sitting Still
23: Cuyahoga
Another short break:
24: So. Central Rain (played acoustically including Peter Gabriel’s Red Rain as they performed live in 1987 (but without Time After Time)
Encore:
24: Crazy (Pylon cover)
25: Radio Free Europe
26. Let Me In
27. Pretty Persuasion (Shannon commented that it is Michael Stipe’s favourite song to sing when he joins the band)
BlackCountryRock 