Easy. You play the small rooms. The type of places you played twenty years ago, and you can still say that you’re playing that there’s no ticket unsold. Which, when you’re playing to 3,700 people in a town of eight million, it’s no hard feat. Fans still scramble for tickets and claim they got a rare ticket for the show, and yet, there’s still thousands - thousands - left for the Hyde Park stadium gig in July, three months after they went on sale.

As a reward for the devotion of the hardcore, despite the clarity and precision of their performance, REM tonight provided a listless performance that failed to truly connect with the audience despite aiming to please everyone with a selection of hits, obscure album tracks, and newer songs. With the exception of some rare moments where they played The Big Singles - especially near the end - the vast majority of a rammed Hammersmith Odeon was waiting for something that never came.

Perhaps it was the choice of songs – the thinking that since this is the smallest show on the tour, and thus, it must be a devotees choice, that saw the band exhuming a number of songs not played in decades : sometimes songs that deservedly had remained unplayed, with the exhumation of "7 Chinese Bros.". For vast portions of the set the crowd remain steadfastly immobile, even after the first thirty or so seconds of the opening song, the near-the-end-of-side-two-of-"Monster"-track "I Took Your Name".

TheLondon crowd is traditionally, a hard one to impress. Having seen it all before, London sits at the back, arms folded, waiting. It waited a long time tonight before anything happened. Unlike the previous, celebratory tour from 2003, which saw the band revelling in its abrasive hard edges, the current set sees the band smoothing out their kinks, and in some respects drifting towards a self-contained, sterile, hermetically sealed irrelevancy. The newer stuff seems to commit that greatest of crimes : being boring.

Despite the lyrically fervent protest of their most recent, and most political album, "Around The Sun", the music fails to match the vibrancy of the words. On stage, the likes of "I’ve Been High", "I Wanted To Be Wrong", and "The Final Straw", whilst performed with passion, never left the stage, never breached the divide between the stage and the crowd, never connected with the audience. The weaknesses of the newer material was only highlighted by the thematic sandwiching of the two subdued protest-ballads between the bitter "Orange Crush" and the celebratory "Imitation Of Life."

In many respects, it’s as if REM have become aliens in their own country : trapped in a land run by a man with whom they have nothing in common. This sense of hyper-disconnect is reflected in the songs written during the Bush Administration : songs that feel sterile, stillborn, yet intellectually fierce in their protest. If anything, the slow pace, and near-perverse running order of the first half of the set constantly places the bands few limitations in sharp relief. Aside from the agenda-setting "The Outsiders" - a song that reclassifies dissenting voices as romantic heroes of the old-school tradition and tenderly declares protest as patriotic, and the heartbreaking "Leaving New York" - which reduces grown men to tears with it’s microcosm of a crumbling relationship - the new material is lacking in the mysterious X Factor that makes a great song great. It’s not until the set dovetails towards a series of movie-style climaxes with a closing suckerpunch of classics, and an encore that climaxes in an delicate balance of hits and fan favourites, that the band appear to conquer the legacy of their history and engage with their constituency.

The best indicator for their future was the British premiere of the new song "I’m Gonna DJ", a masterful mixture of lyrical precision, the sharp musical teeth that is only hinted at in tracks like "Bad Day", and some new sense of confusion, anger, and celebration all inside something as simple as a four minute pop song. With luck, REM will give us reason to talk about their passion for the next twenty years : the alternative is a slow and steady decline into a world of literate, but boring, mid-paced stadium rock. They, and we, deserve better than that.

No doubt by the time the tour rolls into the stadiums in the summer - by which point the band will probably be playing a more tailored, crowd-pleasing selection - these rough edges will be smoothed out. The undeniably impressive, panoramic stage, and the deft use of visual imagery from stock footage, specially shot sequences, lyrical snatches and live-as-it-happens footage on video screens are geared towards a massive stadium set, and will, like the "Monster" tour, present a cohesive and more focused performance than the one witnessed tonight. REM can be, on their night, the best band in the world.

Sadly, tonight was not their night.

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