But even those with standing in the music industry began to sit up and take notice when ageing rockers REM took just about every opportunity during the last 12 months to talk up their new release, Accelerate, the 14th album of a career that many thought to be in terminal decline.

“This is our best work in almost two decades, a return to the confidence and swagger that first established us as rock giants in the 1980s,” they confidently declared.

From the opening seconds of the first track, Living Well is the Best Revenge, you can swiftly tell that the confidence of Mssrs Stipe, Mills and Buck is not misplaced.

For the first time in way too long, Peter Buck is back doing what he does best, by dealing out a host of memorable guitar riffs, and we realise that this is something completely different to the complacency of 2004’s lacklustre Around The Sun and the dreariness of New Adventures in Hi Fi.

The pace never slows, from the first single Supernatural Superserious, to the dark foreboding title track, to the outrageously catchy, Mr Richards, a single in waiting if there ever was one.

You keep expecting the band to eventually lull into the soft sound of so much of their recent work but when they do take the foot off the accelerator, it’s only for the briefest of periods.

Stipe couldn’t let this record go without directing his ire towards George Bush and the US administration, which he does on the still beautiful Until The Day is Done.

At just 34 minutes, REM simply don’t waste a single second on this record and gone is the self-indulgence and complacency of recent times. .

Even right to the closing two tracks, the relentless Horse to Water and I’m Gonna DJ, this is the sound of a band half their age.

With Accelerate, REM will win back so many of their old fans, and surely a new generation too.