What was it like to be at the heart of London’s underground music scene in the late ‘60s? You could do worse than having Joe Boyd and Robyn Hitchcock as your tour guides to that galvanizing era, a role they’ll play March 19 at the Old Town School of Folk Music. 

Boyd’s a Harvard-educated music aficionado who opened the London office of Elektra Records in the mid-‘60s and found himself at the center of a musical, cultural and social revolution. He ran London’s UFO club, and worked closely as a producer, adviser and co-conspirator with such ground-breaking groups and artists as Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention and Nick Drake.

Robyn Hitchcock was a young teen when psychedelia reigned and Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett was the toast of London. An ardent student of the era, Hitchcock went on to incorporate its sounds and attitudes in his music as a solo artist and with the Soft Boys over the last four decades.

Now, Boyd and Hitchcock are teaming up for an evening celebrating that era, with Boyd reading excerpts from his excellent 2006 memoir, “White Bicycles,” and Hitchcock chiming in with the music of Barrett, Drake and other ‘60s heroes and cult figures with whom Boyd collaborated.

In separate interviews, the two discussed the music that forever shaped them:

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What better band to cover R.E.M. than R.E.M.? That’s exactly what the longtime Athens, Ga., trio sounds like it’s doing on its 15th studio album, “Collapse Into Now” (Warner Bros.).

In the tradition of rock legends rehashing their best moves on mid-career studio albums – the Rolling Stones’ “Some Girls” in 1978 or U2’s aptly named “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” in 2000 – “Collapse Into Now” is an echo of past glories. If nothing else it reminds us that R.E.M. is fully aware of what it did best and when. Those glory years are now nearly two decades past – “Automatic for the People” in 1992 was their last indisputably great album (though I’d make a case for the 1996 “New Adventures in Hi Fi”).

The band re-energized itself in 2008 with the lean, pithy, hard-rocking “Accelerate.” It ended a string of snoozy, ballad-heavy Michael Stipe-dominated albums by amping up Peter Buck’s guitar and Mike Mills’ essential backing vocals.

“Collapse Into Now” takes a similarly democratic approach and expands on it, juggling rockers with textured acoustic pieces. Buck’s guitar blasts open the album with promising bravado on “Discoverer” and “All the Best” and Stipe swaggers: “Let’s show the kids how to do it fine.” Mills, always the band’s not-so-secret weapon, adds a big dollop of melody and texture; he brings majesty to even the slower, weaker songs (“It Happened Today,” “Every Day is Yours to Win”) with his wordless harmonies.

A few guests are on hand to dress things up, but they’re used in predictable ways: Peaches brings attitude to the punch-drunk silliness of "Alligator Aviator Autopilot Antimatter"; Patti Smith plays shaman-like muse to Stipe on the eerie soundscape “Blue” (which demands to be listened to once, then never again); Eddie Vedder adds mournful gravitas to “It Happened Today.”

Similarly, riffs and melodies that remind us of past, better R.E.M. songs abound: the acoustic melancholy of “Drive” resurfaces on “Uberlin,” the chanting rock moves of “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” resurface on “Alligator Aviator Autopilot Antimatter” and “Walk It Back” retraces the power-ballad A-B-C’s of “Everybody Hurts.”

It’s all done earnestly. In “Oh My Heart,” Stipe comes home to “a city half-erased” but emerges with hope: “The storm didn’t kill me/The government changed.” On “Blue,” he exults, “This is my time and I am thrilled to be alive.” But if there’s to be a vital future for R.E.M., the band can’t continue recycling its past.

greg@gregkot.com