Shannon, Narducy & Friends

Chalk, Brighton

Wednesday 2 September 2026

What happens when a respected actor and a veteran Chicago musician take on the mantle of giving the world access to the back catalogue of one of the most beloved bands of the last forty years (and more than a decade after they split)?

First, some back story...

Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy have been collaborating on these niche cover / tribute shows for quite a few years now. It started with one-off shows in Chicago covering the likes of Bob Dylan, but then when they decided to do a special for the fortieth anniversary of R.E.M.’s sacred and special debut album, Murmur, something clicked.

Other U.S. cities wanted a piece of that action, and so a mini tour was formulated. Then, incredibly, various members of the actual R.E.M. got involved – pitching up at shows, coming on stage for a song or two and gradually adopting this merry band as their kind of proteges. This niche tribute event was suddenly something much more; they were the officially validated holders of the R.E.M. flame.

Then, they did the same thing for the fortieth anniversary of third album, Fables Of The Reconstruction, which mercifully, they brought across to the UK. I had been looking at the concert announcements and YouTube clips with envy, and suddenly I had an opportunity to see it for myself.

That takes us to this time last year and their show at The Garage in north London. It was fantastic and you can see my thoughts on that here – but I’m not re-reading that now, as I want to give you my fresh take on what I witnessed this year when they came to Brighton for the fortieth anniversary of fourth record, Life’s Rich Pageant.

So, here we are at Chalk, a small venue (new to me) tucked in just behind the Brighton seafront; we are there with three hundred or so, let’s be honest, mostly middle-aged people ready to relive important music from our past. What can you expect from a band like this, thrown together to recount the music of a band that would become one of the most successful on the planet – is this a covers band, a tribute band, what?

To begin with, you get five musicians, none probably household names, to reproduce those classic sounds. Jon Wurster (Superchunk, Bob Mould Band) provides the same solid beat as Bill Berry used to, adding nice fills only where necessary, with a slightly looser flourish maybe than Berry. Vijay Tellis-Nayak adds some dexterous keyboard depth to the tunes, while another Chicago veteran, Dag Juhlin, adeptly weaves in guitar lines and backing vocals. New boy Chris Murphy (Sloan), hugs the side of stage, replicating Mike Mills lines faithfully, without any flash or fanfare.

Then we get to the two men with their names on the billboards. Jason Narducy (Split Single, Bob Mould, Superchunk etc) is the powerhouse driving the band – he gives it the solid guitar foundations, a little bit of mandolin and the crucial harmony lines for many songs. He is the rock that gives Michael Shannon the freedom to lead from the front.

What can we say about Michael Shannon? Does he try to become Michael Stipe and faithfully attempt to recreate his voice and manner, he is an accomplished Oscar nominated actor after all? No, he delivers the set as an actor performing a critically acclaimed play at a theatre for the first time, throwing every ounce of his creativity, his soul, into singing these songs. Yes, naturally, when you keep singing these songs, occasionally you will inevitably provide the odd sound or move that is a bit Stipe-like, but it is 100% Michael Shannon singing R.E.M. songs in his own way.

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"We are young despite the times"

It’s forty years of Life’s Rich Pageant, and so we get that, in track order, to get proceedings going. We open with the crash and bang of Begin the Begin and These Days, the hearty singalongs of Fall On Me and Cuyahoga. Even the one song that might be considered a little weak link on the record, Hyena, gets blasted with a shot of live energy, before the distraction of the squally, pseudo-salsa of Underneath The Bunker and the delicacy of Flowers Of Guatemala. Just A Touch rocks the house, with its punk roots clearly on show (it was one of the first songs they had written, dating back to their 1980 origins), before the spry folk-rock of Swan Swan H provides more crowd singing opportunities. It’s worth noting here that while Stipe’s lyrics had become much easier to decipher by record number four, their meaning was generally no less abstract. As my gig buddy legend Steve noted, it sounds like you are singing some kind of weird pet shop shopping list – “Swan. Swan. Hummingbird…” 

Shannon drily notes that Stipe once told him that “you should never end with a cover”, but of course the album, and so this part of the set, closes with their epic take of R.E.M.’s epic take of the obscure 60s psych rock tune, Superman (by The Clique).

"It reads react. R-E-A-C-T."

Part two opens with a swing, and Lotus, a cut from what is probably one of R.E.M.’s least favourably received (by fans at least) album, Up. But it sounds good tonight, a more keyboard heavy number, guitars moved a little more to the back and showcasing Shannon’s voice and stage presence. He segues into the next tune – “I like to group songs together, so here’s another one about flowers” – and thus we segue into Gardening At Night from the first EP, Chronic Town. What a banger – so much gusto.

The rest of the set follows a similar blazing pattern, covering virtually all album bases – I think only Fables (which they did in full last year), Document (which hopefully will be their next adventure), Out of Time and the run of the last three records (Around The Sun, Accelerate, Collapse Into Now). We get a lively, crunchy Crush With Eyeliner, a hectic Harborcoat, and beautiful renditions of How The West Was Won and E-Bow The Letter.

Sometimes I feel like I can’t even sing

But there are a couple of songs I really want to zero in on. Carnival Of Sorts (another from Chronic Town) blows my mind every time I hear it, live or the record version. It has everything, guitars going all over the place, frenetic pace, singalong chorus and Shannon really leaning into the phrasing – “Cages under Cage”.

Then, when Narducy straps on the mandolin, immediate thoughts go to Losing My Religion, but the result is more surprising and more intensely beautiful; a sparse, stripped You Are The Everything, the sole representative from Green. The strident mandolin riff digs into you, while Shannon soars over the top and knocks you down.

When they come back for an encore, it is just Shannon and Narducy; “we’ve fired the others” quips Shannon. What follows is simply stunning… Narducy slows the riff right down, and Shannon lets rip, all guns firing, “Did you never call? I waited for your call.” Forty something years on, So. Central Rain still opens you up with its raw emotion, and Shannon extracts every sweat drenched moment of plaintive, sorrowful beauty from the words. For the second musical event in under ten days, I am moved to the edge of tears by music (The Cure was the other, for the record).

"The pilgrimage has gained momentum."

How do you follow that? Somehow, the returning band manage to conjure up several more incandescent moments. Pilgrimage is just that, a joyous retreat to our youth, Wurster’s lively drumming leading the way . Radio Free Europe is probably the signature song off of those early records, delivered here full of fuzz and balls. Yet there is still time for one more moment of sweeping beauty. Camera, the bands ode to an Athens friend who had died in a car crash, was Stipe’s other moment of exposed fragility on Reckoning (along with Central Rain). And we get this as well, delivered with the same raw emotion, this time surrounded with the lush accompaniment of the band, recreating the ebb and flow that made the original so completely gorgeous.

We end with a pumped up Star 69, a second offering from Monster, an album I have probably overlooked too much over the years. And we are done, fully sated, a fix of a band that I never got to see (even when they were in their arena / stadium phase), nor would have been old enough to, when the original foursome would have delivered the majority of this setlist when the tunes were fresh out of the box in the mid-80s.

So, is this ensemble just a tribute band?

Well, Steve and I discussed this en-route back to the car.

No. That is the simple answer.

The slightly more in depth version is that they are far more accomplished and authentic than being just a tribute band. Of course they have a head start, they are working with fantastic source material – but they invested everything into the songs, the performances. They play with a smile on their faces and a rather large spring in the step to deliver – they feel like what would happen if R.E.M. had aged, but the music remained frozen in time, delivering big songs to eager, receptive crowds in small clubs and theatres. Roll on forty years of Document! Please?

This isn't from last night, but from the U.S. leg earlier this year - but gives you a flavour.

Begin The Begin (live at Metro, Chicago, March 2026)