ERM – American Landscape

Exploring the work of REM and the American beat poets - Indie rock meets poetic revolution

ERM (Adam Smith, William Drew-Batty and Mike Davison) began their creative collaboration in 2022, when they performed Flannan Isle, Drew-Batty’s part-scored, part-improvised opera set in the Outer Hebrides. Exploring the REM songbook was perhaps an unlikely next step, but soon the three musicians were playing live in pubs and pub gardens in their home counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. American Landscape took the project further, finding connections with American beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara and Anne Waldman. The combination of classic REM songs on piano, guitar and vocals, interspersed with carefully chosen readings, offers both the familiar and the new, enjoyable and stimulating in equal measure.