In the spring of 1991 I was living in London on a college internship. Every morning I’d take the District Line to Tower Hill, walk across Tower Bridge, and head into the East End to a music-video company. The internship didn’t pay a dime, but it got me college credit and dropped me into a world that fascinated me.

There was an old studio lot nearby with a canteen run by an Irish couple. The husband was one of those people you never forget. If you asked for anything, he’d smile and say, “Of course you can. Yes, of course you can.”

Long before London, though, there was R.E.M.

I’d first heard Murmur and Reckoning in the summer of 1984 at camp. A counselor named Kent Kurtz turned me on to a whole world of music that existed outside classic-rock radio. The Violent Femmes. Punk. New wave. The Replacements. X  All of it.

R.E.M. sat right in the middle of that universe.

What I loved about those early records was that they felt Southern, but not in the way I understood Southern music. They gave me a completely different picture of the South. There was folk music in there, country music in there, but there was also something arty and mysterious. The songs were concise. Hooky. Dreamlike.

I would sit and listen to those records and dream.

There was an art-school sensibility married to three-minute rock songs.

They looked cool, too. Not rock-star cool.  Art-school cool.

A little bit of the Velvet Underground. A little bit of Athens, Georgia. A little bit of record-store culture. They looked like people who made things.

And if you listened to R.E.M. in those days, you usually learned about other things, too. The band became a gateway.

They turned me on to the Velvet Underground. Patti Smith. Roger Miller. Sky Saxon. Through interviews, covers, side projects, and recommendations, there always seemed to be another door opening somewhere. You’d read an interview with Peter Buck and suddenly have a list of records you needed to find.

At Ithaca College, my friend Ernie Poole and I watched old I.R.S. Cutting Edge tapes over and over. There was an entire interconnected world behind the music: R.E.M., the dB’s, Robyn Hitchcock, the Golden Palominos, Syd Straw, all these people crossing paths, showing up on each other’s records, turning you on to something else.

You learned a lot listening to records.

By the spring of 1991, R.E.M. were already huge. Nobody thought they were sellouts. They were just successful. They had become one of the biggest bands in the world.

Then Ernie told me they were playing two secret shows in London at a tiny place called The Borderline.  They were playing under the name Bingo Hand Job.

Of course I had to go. I got there early.

The Chickasaw Mudd Puppies opened. Michael Stipe was producing them. I remember thinking they were interesting, though the idea struck me as a little stronger than the music itself.

The Borderline was a Tex-Mex restaurant. Not much to look at. It felt small and informal, the kind of place where musicians and audience members occupied the same air.

And there they were. Loading in. Sort of. One by one.

Mike Mills. Bill Berry. Peter Buck. Michael Stipe.

I knew exactly who they were. I’d spent years looking at album covers, magazine photos, and MTV appearances. They weren’t strangers.

I said hello to everybody. Nothing dramatic. Just hello.

I remember asking Peter Buck if he missed playing rooms this size. “Not really…bigger places are cool too.” He wasn’t rude at all. He just had a show to play.

At the time, I was still enough of a purist to think there was something magical about small clubs and something suspect about success. Buck had already lived through all that.  They’d spent years in vans, clubs, and tiny dressing rooms. They seemed perfectly happy to be successful. And honestly, good for them.

I said hi to Billy Bragg. He said, “What’s your name?” I still remember this. He said, “My name’s Steve, too, believe it or not. But every Tom, Dick, and Harry is Steve.” So that’s why he goes by Billy. I told him I’d actually been to Barking, where he’s from. I was probably more starstruck by Billy Bragg than anybody else there.

A few weeks earlier I’d seen Billy sing at the enormous Gulf War protest in London. There were people everywhere. Trafalgar Square, the surrounding streets, as far as you could see. Billy got up and sang a couple of songs. But on this night he arrived buoyant; he seemed positively delighted to be there.

And I thought Robyn Hitchcock was really cool. He was there with a beautiful woman, she looked like a model. Bill Berry looked like a nice guy.

And then at one point, I remember looking across the room and locking eyes with Michael Stipe. Immediately I looked away, and then a minute later he was still looking at me. That finally made me laugh. Slightly embarrassed, I walked over and introduced myself. I mentioned the company where I was interning and the Irish director Matt Mahurin’s name. Matt directed the video for “Orange Crush.” We talked briefly. He was very nice. Relaxed. Easygoing.

It was a good show. The biggest surprise turned out to be Peter Holsapple. At the time I didn’t really know the dB’s, not the way I eventually would. Holsapple played “White Train” and “Lonely Is As Lonely Does,” and they absolutely knocked me out. Luckily, oddly, I was just at a wedding in LA, and I know him now because we have a mutual friend. And I told him, “I was at that London show when you played ‘White Train’ and ‘Lonely Is’. That was a game-changer for me.” I was like, who is this fucking guy? Great performer, great songs. I love Peter Holsapple.

Robyn Hitchcock was fantastic. Billy Bragg was fantastic. R.E.M. were fantastic. Someone yelled “Freebird!” and Stipe responded with, “Aw, blow it out your ass!”

Holsapple was the revelation for me, but maybe that’s because R.E.M. had already done what they were going to do for me.

They’d opened doors.

They’d taught me to follow my curiosity.

They’d taught me that every great record usually leads to another great record.

And they gave me songs that still affect me the same way they did when I was sixteen.

They were mysterious without being pretentious.

They were Southern without being stereotypically Southern.

They were arty without forgetting rock and roll.

And when I hear those early records now, I still hear what I heard then.

Possibility.    

STEVE KARRAS is a writer, musician and dad living in the Chicago area. Steve’s story is about attending one of R.E.M.’s two fabled, secret London shows (March 14 & 15, 1991), when the band played under the name Bingo Hand Job. R.E.M.’s special guests, Billy Bragg, Robyn Hitchcock and Peter Holsapple, also performed under assumed names. 

It turns out there’s a ton of Bingo Hand Job material on YouTube — both entire London concerts, actually.  Here’s just a sample.

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