Category: Fanclub singles

No Matter What

Chris BickleyLeave a comment

Release date: 25/12/2002 | Length: 2:55 | Release: 2002 fanclub single | SuE: #254

No matter what you are
I will always be with you

For 2002’s festive fanclub single, the boys treated us to a double dosage of 70s power pop, from Big Star and Badfinger. Despite hailing from Memphis and Swansea respectively, the two groups are not worlds apart in their history. Whilst critical favour was on Big Star’s side from the start, both groups are retrospectively acclaimed and their influence is dotted on many bands of the 80s and 90s, such as Jellyfish, the Replacements, and Teenage Fanclub.

Often christened as the unluckiest rock band in music, even today Badfinger find themselves airbrushed from history. If No Matter What or Baby Blue are new to you, you’d surely know one of Badfinger’s tunes, even in a different form, often credited as a Mariah Carey cover of a Nilsson song, not Badfinger. But listen to Without You in its original form and it does feel incomplete, like the band didn’t have faith in themselves to really launch the song stratospheric. Maybe that’s emblematic of their career, an impressive nucleus of creativity, but without a structure to support it. Any success from their quartet of US top tens was scuppered by fraud and fraught disputes. Manager Stan Polley’s financial unscrupulousness took its toll, leading to singer Pete Ham’s suicide in 1975. Sadly, writer and bassist Tom Evans met the same fate in the 1980s after disagreements over royalties.

Early in their career Badfinger struggled to shake off disparaging comparisons to the Beatles, probably not aided by their first hit being the Paul McCartney-penned Come and Get It, which sounds unmistakably Beatles-esque. Determined to stand on their own two feet, Ham wrote No Matter What, which graced the top ten in the UK, US and Canada. It is, to some, a perfect slice of power pop. It’s unambiguous in its motive, and defined by its close harmonies and sprightly vivace. It’s not exactly rapid, but it does have a briskness to it. At the same time Ham and Evans composed Without You, a song which McCartney described as a “killer song of all time”. The Badfinger identity was born.

Whereas the crisper production of R.E.M.’s cover gives the song a faster pace, it’s a pretty basic, if effective cover. It’s certainly not Michael Stipe signing (he’s brooding faintly in the background, and seems to disappear halfway through), and I’m 80% sure it’s Mike Mills on the mic, but the 20% of doubt lingers purely because he doesn’t sound quite how he does on say Superman or Near Wild Heaven. A comment beneath the YouTube video remarks “This is R.E.M.???”, and they’re not wrong. It sounds like a band covering R.E.M. covering Badfinger.

The line-up for the single is a curious one. Complementing Stipe, Buck and Mills are long-time associate Mitch Easter and Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster. Let’s turn to Easter first, as this marks the producer’s first fresh credit with the band since 1986. Easter mixed, engineered and added guitar to the single, though it remains to be said whether this was for both tracks or just one. Easter’s involvement at first made me think this was an unearthed recording from the early 80s they’d knocked out to fulfil a requirement, but then we’d see Bill Berry credited on percussion instead and besides, the production is far too crisp to be early R.E.M. too.

Jon Wurster would’ve been most known at the time for drumming with indie rock band Superchunk, but to some his later work with the Mountain Goats (all albums since 2008’s Heretic Price) supersedes that. His CV also includes comprehensive work with Bob Mould, Rocket from the Crypt and Jay Farrar, but this was Wurster’s only addition to the R.E.M. fold. He’d recently hooked up with Peter Buck whilst touring with all-star supergroup The Minus 5, so maybe him and Easter found themselves round the R.E.M. studio and fancied a jam? With limited information available about these singles, we must concoct our own lore.

Academy Fight Song

Chris BickleyLeave a comment

Release date: 25/12/1989 | Length: 3:10 | Release: 1989 fanclub single | SuE: #145

I’m not judging you I’m judging me

From 1988 to 2011, R.E.M. released a limited edition single to their fanclub over Christmas, a nice way of ameliorating the bond between them and their followers. Typically these would consist of two songs, a festive ditty (traditional or original) and a cover. Many fans around the time have said that these felt very exclusive and personal, as the releases were never made commercially available. However over the course of the career, it could be argued that quality began to decline, particularly as these singles became CDs instead of 7″ records, and often included live recordings instead. But that’s for another time.1989a

Their second offering featured a cover of Mission of Burma’s Academy Flight Song, the first single by the Boston outlet. One would expect an R.E.M. cover to strip back the song, rather than beef it out, but the opening bars of Mission of Burma’s 1980 original sound more like R.E.M. than R.E.M. do. It’s the simple but pronounced bass notes that do it, and could easily be mistaken for something from Chronic Town or Murmur, holding a particular likeness to Gardening at Night and Standing Still.

Whilst Michael Stipe comes across distinctively, the music has the guise of their live performances, so it’s no surprise that this song had several outings on tour in 1989. I’m not going to argue too passionately about this, but the raucous element of this takes away what made Mission of Burma’s recording ahead of its time. The piano plonks are a nice chiming addition but on the whole, I don’t think R.E.M. did too much with this cover.

It’s a disservice to Mission of Burma that their two most well known songs are possibly because these have both been covered by other artists. It might just be a coincidence, as R.E.M.’s version was hardly out in the open, but Moby covered That’s When I Reach for My Revolver on his bizarre Animal Rights LP and as a single in 1996, reaching middle ground on the UK singles charts. But the end justifies the means, so more people flocking to their excellent Signals, Calls, and Marches EP the better, right?