Classic REM album for Harrogate Vinyl Sessions event

Released in 1992, Automatic For The People is REM’s best-selling and most loved album and will be played on glorious vinyl on vintage hi fi at Starling Bar Café Kitchen on Wednesday, March 18.

Held, as always for Friends of Harrogate Hospital charity, Vinyl Sessions has now raised more than £10,000 for equipment to enhance patient care not available from NHS funding since it was first launched nearly two years ago.

Previous Vinyl Sessions events have featured bestselling albums from the 1960s to late 1990s including Led Zeppelin IV, ELO’s Out of The Blue, Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms, The Beatles Sgt Pepper, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, The Who’s Who’s Next, Oasis’s What’s The Story, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Blondie’s Parallel Lines.

REM's eighth album was the follow-up to the almost as successful Out of Time album released in 1991 which was the band's breakthrough, partly thanks to the track Losing My Religion.

But Automatic For The People soon eclipsed even that, producing five hit singles. It is still widely regarded as the peak of this once-cult band’s lengthy career.

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The most famous numbers on the album include Drive, Man in the Moon, The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite, Nightswimming and Everybody Hurts.

Formed in Athens, Georgia in 1980, the influential alt-rock band was made up of vocalist Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry until the latter left the band in 1997 after surviving an almost fatal medical condition.

Although their biggest seller, the eclectic album was also furthest from REM’s jingly-jangly guitar roots and featured string arrangements by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones

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REM were inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 2007 before bowing out in good grace in 2011.

The Vinyl Sessions team will be in action at the event - MC and hi fi expert Colin Paine, video curator Jim Dobbs with an intro by Graham Chalmers of the Harrogate Advertiser.

Entry is free but advance booking is advised at www.eventbrite.co.uk

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