R.E.M.

Had it not been for the R.E.M. concert, Friday would have felt like a schoolteacher's joke. The cold, dry day did not promise much, and offered even less.

Most Belgraders were simply getting through the end of the working week, while a handful of us lucky ones (around 10,000, by Belgrade standards) waited to hear live, two and a half decades after the band was formed, the group whose spell not even President Tadić himself could resist.

First on stage were the likeable lads from Latvia, Brainstorm. As they say themselves, they grew up under the musical influence of local pop and Soviet cartoons, and the result is a surprisingly cheerful, singalong Baltic pop.

Anyone who had the slightest doubt about R.E.M.'s live power can go ahead and eat their shoes. In a word: brilliant! The band sounded tight and rich, delivering their recognizably concise musical pulse - put simply, they gave us pure R.E.M. delight.

Like dessert, we have saved the visual side of the concert for last. To the canons of art for the eye, raised to a near-unreachable pedestal by Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel, we can confidently add last week's performance.

Unpretentious yet strikingly evocative, their lighting (a “canvas” of light and vertical neon lamps) and especially the films on the video screen accompanying the show offered the audience the truest escape from reality, an unfinished revelation of which we were co-authors.

What's The Frequency, Kenneth?