THESE DAYS, AN AUDIENCE with R.E.M. is a game of two halves. Peter Buck and Mike Mills are installed in one room, while singer Michael Stipe holds court on his own next door. You are wheeled in for the allotted timespan with one camp and then switched over. It is more like going through a Hollywood sausage machine than spending quality time with members of the rock aristocracy. But you certainly get to see the stark difference in the personalities between the three men who comprise the world’s only stadium art-rock band.
Buck and Mills start punctually at noon. Stipe is nowhere to be seen. He eventually arrives, bleary and hungry. “I’m gonna stumble over my words through the entire interview, more so than usual,” he says. “So please excuse me. I’m quasi-somnambulent at this point. I’m still pulling myself out of my dreams.”
Perhaps the most enigmatic frontman in the pageant of pop, Stipe, 44, comes across as a mass of neuroses and contradictions. He is built to the classic rock star template of small, skinny body and big, dome-like head, his face etched with worry lines that ripple outwards from the furrow of his brow. He radiates a tense, nervous energy as he strides into the room, checks the view from the window and switches off the air conditioning. “Is there a radio playing?” he asks. He traces the noise to a TV playing at an almost subliminal volume and switches that off too. He stares at my tape machine as if it were a timebomb.
Being ushered into the presence of Buck, 47, and Mills, 45, is like entering a different world. A confident, garrulous pair of characters, they chat in an easy, relaxed manner that is the complete opposite of Stipe’s hesitant murmur. Buck is suffering from jet lag, an affliction which he finds gets worse as he gets older. The guitarist flew in, as he invariably does, on British Airways, the airline which two years ago took him to court after an alleged air-rage incident on a flight from his home in Seattle to London. Buck, who was cleared of all charges, describes the episode as “a little misunderstanding, but it’s settled and we’re the best of friends”.
R.E.M. are on the campaign trail, in more ways than one. In America they have hitched their wagon to the Vote For Change tour, a loose coalition of acts including Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, the Dixie Chicks and James Taylor who are campaigning for a change of government in Washington. “We were people before we were musicians,” Stipe says. “We read the paper. We have opinions and ideas. And what we’re doing is something that as citizens of the US we felt compelled to do.”
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But more to the point, the band from Athens, Georgia, also have a new album to promote. I have come armed with my pre-release copy of Around the Sun, which has no artwork and is accompanied by a track-listing on a plain white card, presumably typed up by a harassed secretary. The PR has already alerted me to a small typographical error. A song called The Worst Joke Ever has been rendered as The Worst Joke Over and I have altered it with my pen. But the very sight of it is like a red rag to a bull — to all three of them.
“It makes me crazy,” Stipe says, shaking his head in frustration and disbelief. “God! They still haven’t fixed the f***ing title,” bass player Mills yells later, flying into a comic rant about how the mistake renders the title meaningless. It is revealing of the band’s nature that such a small detail should rankle. You get the feeling that even after all this time they still care with a fierce, obsessive, intensity about every last detail of their work.
Talking to Stipe about the new record is like walking through a minefield. Yes, I reassure him, I think it is a very good album, although it sounds very polished and professional in a rather mainstream kind of way. Is R.E.M. turning into the new Genesis? “Give me a break,” Stipe says, aghast at the idea. “You need to go and listen to this album two or three more times and then we’ll talk about it. Genesis? How dare you. I don’t think there’s anything weird about it, that’s true. But there’s stuff that’s extremely raw on here. There’s raw emotion in the voice. They’re not rock songs. But to me something can be very quiet and still peel the paint off the wall. It can have an undertow.”
Well, maybe so, and there is certainly a heartfelt quality to Stipe’s performance on many of the tracks. But it is nevertheless a very earnest album, that comes freighted with a political message which may have its roots in student radicalism but which has now become very much a part of the middle-aged, liberal orthodoxy.
It is not so much R.E.M. who have changed as the world around them. When I last met them in 1992, at the height of their commercial success with the album Automatic for the People, Stipe had excused himself from all interview chores until further notice.
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“I just got tired of starting sentences with the word ‘I’,” he explains. “I didn’t have that much to say, but so much was read into anything I did say about my contribution to the band that it became exhausting. I just get tired of reading about myself.”
The drummer and fourth founding member, Bill Berry, was similarly reluctant to be interviewed, but his input to the band, particularly as a writer and arranger, was crucial to its chemistry. When he left in 1997 after suffering an aneurysm on stage it triggered a period of great uncertainty and caused simmering tensions among the remaining three members to surface during the making of their 1998 album, Up. Buck later admitted that he had been thinking of leaving the group at that point, and described finishing the album at all as a miracle.
“It took a while to come to terms with R.E.M. as just the three of us,” he says. “I still consider Bill to be a member of the band. He just doesn’t do anything any more. We spent so much time together that I still think of it as the four of us. But he’s gone and I feel comfortable with who we are.”
Whether Stipe feels comfortable with who he is seems more open to question. He insists that he has had a good couple of years personally. “But I do develop sinister thoughts from time to time about what it is to move through this life and have to deal with some of the things that are thrown in our path as people.”
While Buck and Mills are both settled family men, Stipe leads a more peripatetic lifestyle. He was romantically linked many years ago with Natalie Merchant, formerly of the group 10,000 Maniacs, but has since spoken of being in a long-term relationship with a person he describes as “a great guy”. He has occasionally performed on a gay rights ticket. Was that something he felt comfortable with? “Yes. I had a nice suit on and it wasn’t too tight,” he says.
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R.E.M. are no longer angry young men, but they still have a hunger to be where they are. “Continuing to be the best band is hard work,” Mills says. “Every time you put a record out, start a tour, you have to earn it all back again. You have to not be willing to coast and rest on what you’ve done. Nobody else is. The new bands that are coming out, they’re going to raise the bar for you. If you want to stay with it, you’ve got to try harder.”
U2 also have a new album out soon. “Of course they do,” Mills says. Is the old rivalry about to resurface? “The great thing about rock’n’roll,” Mills says, “is that any band can be the greatest at any given moment. I’ve seen lots of bands who for five minutes I’ve never seen anything better.
“Greatest band in the world? I’d have to vote for U2, just because of the bigness of it all. I’m not sure we should even be in the running. We mean a lot to the people who like us. But I don’t know if that translates to the supermarket, the tabloids, the big mass market.”
R.E.M.’s contract with Warner Bros was said to be worth $80 million when it was negotiated in 1996, one of the most expensive ever signed at the time. Has the company made its money back yet? “Not yet,” Buck says, “but I think they will by the end of the deal, which is two more albums after this one. Our albums sell about four million worldwide, which is not bad. We just don’t have hit singles any more.”
“It was never about the money,” Mills says. So what keeps them going? “I think all of us had the realisation that we were no good at anything else. We certainly couldn’t do anything else with our lives that would give us the satisfaction or the thrill of doing this.”
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R.E.M. tour Britain next February, June and July. Tickets go on sale tomorrow. Around the Sun is released on October 4.
FROM THE TOP . . .
MURMUR (1983) Considered by many fans to be R.E.M.’s finest moment. Named Album of the Year by Rolling Stone, its opaque lyrics and mysterious acoustic textures made the band the pin-ups of college rock and Michael Stipe the epitome of student angst
DOCUMENT (1987) First break into mainstream success, featuring the top-five single The One I Love. Last album made with indy label IRS
GREEN (1988) First album with the Warner label. R.E.M. thought it their “most positive work so far””
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OUT OF TIME (1991) International hit, with anthems such as Shiny Happy People and Losing My Religion. First album by a rock group to top the Billboard charts in over a year
AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE (1992) Another album deemed a masterpiece. It included the hit Everybody Hurts and featured string arrangements by John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin
MONSTER (1994) Prompted the first concert tour in five years which ended in tragedy when drummer Bill Berry had a near-fatal brain aneurism. In 1997 he decided to leave the band
UP (1998) The band’s first post-Berry. Quiet and fragile, it returns to the introspection of Automatic for the People. The band used guest drummers, drum machines and tape loops in place of Berry.
ZÖE STRIMPEL