Rome, 14 June 2024 – Thirteen years after the dissolution and sixteen after their last public performance Rem are back singing on stage. They did so, singing ‘Losing my Religion’, on the occasion of their inclusion in the Songwriters Hall of Famea museum celebrating America’s greatest songwriters.
The surprise reunion
Just a few hours earlier, in an exclusive interview granted to CBS, the band members had declared that to get them back together “it would have taken the passage of a comet”. Apparently the comet must have passed since, much to the surprise of those present, all four were there at the gala held at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City for their inclusion in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Millsand also Bill Berrywho had already left the group in 1997. The quartet played, in an acoustic version, what was their most famous and best-selling song: Losing My Religion.
Vocalist Michael Stipe then spoke on behalf of the whole band: “writing songs and having a catalog that we’re all proud of and available to the whole world is undoubtedly the most important aspect of what we’ve done. Secondly, it was very important that we managed to do this all these decades while remaining friends. And not just friends, but dear friends. That’s one thing extraordinary”.
The history of the group
Rem was born in 1980 as a band indie rockwhich was known at the time as college rock as that type of music was broadcast mainly on university radios. The four members of the group, at the time, were all studying at the college in Athens, Georgia. Over the next decade, REM went from being an indie band to being one of the top groups best known and best-selling of the 90s, unone of the musical symbols of that decade. In 1997 the problems began: drummer Bill Berry suffered a brain aneurysm during a performance and was forced to leave the band. REM continued as a trio until 2011 and in that year they broke up: “at that point there was nothing we agreed on, musically speaking: what kind of music, how to record it, whether to tour and where to go”, said this week the guitarist Peter Buck at CBS.
The legacy
The group hadn’t been back on stage since 2008, the year in which their last tour took place. The four musicians, however, do not seem intent on getting the band back on their feet, not even after this performance. Yet their legacy remains present and strong in the world of music, even just for having valorized a subgenre (indie-rock) which, before them, didn’t even have the name by which we know it.
