Many lead singers have walked onstage at the Royal Albert Hall eager to get something off their chest, but Michael Stipe may well be the first in history to expel something from it. At some point during the title track of R.E.M.’s new album Accelerate, the group’s 48-year-old frontman hoiked up a small pellet from his mouth which, unfortunately for him, shone silver as it journeyed through the spotlight. Perhaps he felt a little too at home in a venue that – filled with fans calling out song titles – must have felt as much like the inside of his head as it resembled the exterior. It’s been so long since R.E.M. seemed comfortable in each other’s company that only a churl would have complained.

How long exactly? After R.E.M.’s monobrowed drummer Bill Berry left the band in 1996, Stipe memorably played down any suggestion of imminent crisis, by insisting that “a three-legged dog is still a dog, it just has to learn to walk differently”. Had he known how long it might take for R.E.M. to relearn what once came naturally, he might have had the damn thing put down. But there’s something to be said for determination (the dogged kind, of course). And on the basis of this marvellously messy set, culled mostly from Accelerate, R.E.M. have rediscovered their mojo by – if you pardon the corny referencing of a very old song that they didn’t play – going back to Rockville.

Peter Buck – a ghostly presence on stage for so much of the past decade – was fully engaged on the bright, opaque squall of Mansized Wreath and Supernatural Superserious. Like much of the new album, both songs seemed at ease among more famous counterparts. Of those counterparts, Losing My Religion was dispensed with jukebox precision – nothing unexpected, here, other than Mike Mills’s decision to startle the enclosure of wheelchair-bound fans by spending half the song among them. Staying in the same emotional and musical postcode, the evening peaked with the acoustic Final Straw – the unjustly overlooked song that the group posted online in response to Dick Cheney’s infamous attempts to mitigate US fatalities in Iraq by pointing out that those troops “volunteered”. For anyone demanding uncharted territory, the defiant classicism of these performances – Stipe has once again welcomed in the joyous harmonies from Mills that once came as standard – may have been disappointing.

But this was a show forged in the aftermath of a few home truths belatedly realised. Stipe’s beloved Radiohead may be able to thrive by ruthlessly junking much of what people think they love about them.

R.E.M.’s biggest strengths, though, are still the things that people loved about them in the first few years of their collective life.

It might be impossible to teach an old dog – three-legged or otherwise – new tricks. But when the old ones work so well, perhaps they’re not needed.

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