R.E.M. broke through to the big time in 1991 after a decade as indie darlings, with what would soon become their signature song.

There are some songs that grow unlistenable over the years simply through overfamiliarity. Then there are ones that lift the spirits every time you hear them. This is one of the latter – at least for me.

R.E.M. had been big on the radar of indie kids for a decade when Losing My Religion came out in 1991. They’d even broken into the lower reaches of the charts. But this is the song that took them to the next level.

It wasn’t their biggest hit – it peaked at a lowly No.19, and they made seven more singles that went higher (but never cracked the Top Ten).  But it was (and is) their best; their signature tune.

The minute I hear Peter Buck picking out those notes on his mandolin it’s like someone creating magic. And I can never get tired of it.

As for Michael Stipe, a guy who once had a hyperactive stage presence now acquired a quasi-religious seriosity, singing those cryptic words as if in a trance; a twitchy trance, emphasising words with hand movements, seemingly at random.

There’s no chorus; no verses really. Words and lines repeat, or threaten to repeat only to change slightly: “That’s me in the corner, That’s me in the spot… light,” Stipe sings. “Losing my religion. Choosing my confessions.” Other times he repeats a word, almost to himself: “Like a hurt, lost and lonely fool… (fool).”

It’s hell to try to sing along. What does it all mean? Heaven knows, though Stipe has explained that the title is a kind of Southern slang for losing one’s temper, or losing one’s cool. Not that that explains much about the song. 

I wasn’t aware of this performance on the BBC’s late lamented arts programme The Late Show until it popped up on some dreadful anthology of ’80s pop on Saturday night, shining like a jewel in the dust.