On the basis of their album launch show at the Albert Hall, it would be hard to explain to a teenager why REM were once so important. Yet today, everything from emo to alt-country sounds as it does because of the Athens, Georgia, band’s 1980s records, and when Radiohead and Coldplay graduated from cult status to stadiums, they used REM’s once unimaginable career path for reference. A quarter of a century ago, an REM show was an unprecedented experiment in forbidden musical fusion, as the synaptic psychedelic cascades of the Byrds tumbled over the jerky postpunk rhythms of Gang of Four.

Tonight, though, we see men who have long ceased to discover anything new seek to replicate those distant moments of inspiration in a choreographed facsimile of the artistic process. Though arguably constrained by the show’s simultaneous broadcast on Radio 2, REM might as well have been miming to backing tracks, so precise and lacking in playfulness was their performance.

Their new album, Accelerate, revisits their straightforward late1980s sound rather than the opaque mystery of their 1983 debut, Murmur, and its immediate successors, or the more varied musical palette of their 1990s releases. Of the new songs, the opening rush of Living Well Is the Best Revenge was undeniably attention-grabbing, and Horse to Water showed that Peter Buck still knows how to drive home an all-conquering guitar riff. Only 2003’s Final Straw, however, originally recorded as a swift response to George W Bush’s declaration of war, sounded genuinely impassioned, as Buck’s sturdy acoustic mined folk memories of purposeful protest music.

The 1991 hit Losing My Religion was a highlight, not simply because of its adoption as a universally applicable anthem by a generation of indistinctly dissatisfied baby-boomers, but because Buck’s mandolin at last offered some tonal variety.

The group’s singer, Michael Stipe, has now abandoned his late1990s voodoo Pierrot persona, but his shaven head, stylish suit and considered manner made it seem as if REM were now being fronted by the director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner. Indeed, REM’s current cross-platforming, in the shape of a film and photography tie-in with London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, is exactly the kind of brand awareness high-profile arts institutions such as REM and the National need to survive in today’s cutthroat world.

Nonetheless, some of the gauche gestures Stipe adopted in the late 1980s, as the group’s following swelled to fill stadiums, remain. When he impersonates the hands of a clock during the “tick tock” refrain of Drive, for instance, it’s more Pan’s People than Lindsay Kemp.

At one point, Stipe tossed away a sheaf of song lyrics, requiring him to ask scuffling fans to share sheets with their neighbours. It’s a telling moment that reveals the gap between REM’s noble hopes of taking the idealism of the American postpunk community into the mainstream and the tawdry grubbiness that inevitably accompanies the best efforts of any artist cursed with celebrity status and the invasive realities of mass adulation.

The 21st-century REM package is like the BBC2 motoring show Top Gear: you don’t have to like it to admire its crowd-pleasing professionalism, and it is fronted by a trio of middle-aged men who ought to know better. Yet how is it possible for REM to develop or recapture the spark they once had when they are obliged to work in the heavy harness of stardom?

Sonic Youth found a way to take Geffen Records’ money and still matter, and the superstar actor Brad Pitt was rumoured to have participated in a fiddle festival in the Appalachian Mountains last year, learning at the feet of the masters, masked by a false beard. Perhaps Michael Stipe could borrow his disguise.

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