Time was when REM, and the band_s singer Michael Stipe in particular, were the
last people you_d think of as shiny or happy. Today, after a period of regrouping, they_re more content with life and music than ever
Sean O_Hagan
There was a time when Michael Stipe would get offended if you called him a pop
star, even if that someone was Andy Warhol, who, of course, conferred the term
only as the highest compliment. _It was, like, _I_m a musician, so don_t you
dare call me a pop star._ Andy said, _So, you_re a pop star?_ and I went, _No,
I_m a musician._ He went, _Michael, you_re a pop star,_ and I went, _Andy, I_m a musician._ Then, he said, _Well, you_re very cute.__
Not for the first time, Stipe cracks up laughing. He has a good laugh, not hearty but heartfelt, a sort of snorting chuckle. It is not the sort of laugh
that I would have expected from someone who often comes across as the most wilfully arty pop star on the planet. It is the perennial puzzle about Stipe: is he really as effortlessly eccentric in his approach to his life and work as he
appears to be; or is he someone who has thought long and hard about his bohemian
persona and how to maintain it?
For 21 years Stipe has been the enigmatic, much-adored front man of REM, who,
like U2, have become one of the biggest-selling rock acts of all time while keeping their souls, sanity and credibility intact. Though Stipe has always been
the focus of attention, REM was an organism that collectively transcended the
sum of its parts.
When drummer, Bill Berry, was forced by ill health to leave in 1997, no one would have been surprised had they called it a day. Though Berry has not been
replaced _ _It would have seemed disrespectful,_ as Mike Mills once put it _ the
group have endured as a three-piece, but the last album, Up, sold disappointingly. Creatively and commercially, then, their new record, Reveal, is a crucial one, though you would never guess it from the taciturn, unruffled Peter Buck and Mills. These two remain pretty much as they always were: solid,
unassuming, no-nonsense Southern boys, committed rock fans who, you feel, still
can_t quite believe that they have been elevated to the pantheon of rock gods.
Something has definitely changed in Stipe, however, since I last encountered him
in the mid-1990s: he seems more open, and more openly mischievous than before,
relaxed, even. For someone who is notoriously elliptical in his answers and, of
course, in his song lyrics, he is relatively accommodating. He seems at home in
the world of pop stardom.
_I take my work very seriously,_ he tells me, almost impatiently, when I press
him on this fame thing, _but I don_t take myself seriously. If you don_t have a sense of humour about all this, it_s like, why do it? It_s so phenomenally absurd, what can you do but laugh?_ I remind him that the last time I interviewed him, he_d seemed much more ill at at ease, withdrawn, troubled.
_Did I?_ he asks, for a moment perturbed. _Oh well, I got over that pretty quickly. It did knock me back a bit when we became so big, so ubiquitous; then I realised that my reaction to it was making me more sick than the thing itself.
It was my reaction to the fans_ reaction to me that was getting me down. So, I
decided there and then to relax into it, and fame has been a rose petal-strewn
path ever since._
REM began back in 1980 when Stipe, then at art college studying photography, met
Mills, Buck and Berry in their home town of Athens, Georgia. He once admitted to feeling _slightly removed_ throughout his adolescence, a tendency that, one feels, he has turned to his advantage as a rock singer. In 1976 he underwent
what he describes as _the single big epiphanic and defining moment in my life_,
when he bought a copy of Horses by Patti Smith. _That_s when I decided to do
what I am doing now,_ he tells me.
By the time REM formed, the rawness and often overlooked arty experimentalism of punk had been and gone, smoothed down into something called New Wave, an altogether more radio-friendly pop. The group paid their dues, almost unnoticed,
on the local Georgia rock circuit alongside more electronic-led local bands with
names such as Pylon, The Method Actors and Love Tractor.
_We were like an arty garage band,_ the affable Buck, easily the most straight-
ahead rocker in the group, explains. _We just played and played for whoever would hire us. We played pizza parlours, bars, house parties. We played fast
songs mainly for audiences that wanted to dance. And Michael just kept writing.
_Some days, he_d give us a song at sound check and we_d play it that night. We
did that for two years, writing and playing and discarding stuff until we were
good and ready. See, we always wanted our first record to be one of those records that sounds like it fell, fully formed, from outer space._
Murmur was indeed one of those records. At a time when British rock was in retreat from the twin blights of New Romanticism and synth-pop, Murmur sounded
otherworldly.
When I first met Stipe, back in 1988, he easily lived up to the image I had carried in my head since hearing early REM albums such as Murmur, Life_s Rich
Pageant and Document _ he was part-Beat poet, part-visionary rock singer. He had
long, curly hair and used words such as _thereof_ and _unbeknownst_. His answers
came in fits and starts, and his thinking was lateral, to say the least.
He told me that the inclusion of mistakes and accidents was an essential element
of his songwriting and that he had not finished a book since reading Jack Kerouac_s On the Road as a teenager, nor listened to rock music since buying
Horses. Even then I did not quite believe everything he told me.
Our paths crossed again in 1995 when REM had become the biggest rock group in
the world following the crossover success of songs such as Losing My Religion
and Everybody Hurts.
Back then Stipe was appearing on stage in a T-shirt that read _SELLOUT_, and was
given to affectations such as standing stock-still for the entire performance
wearing a hearing aid as a style accessory.
But then Stipe was intriguing for a whole different set of reasons. His sexuality had long been the subject of music business conjecture _ he once described himself as _an equal opportunity lech_ _ and his name had been romantically linked with singer Natalie Merchant, actor Stephen Dorff and even
rock_s reigning loudmouth Courtney Love. (In Nick Broomfield_s documentary, Kurt
& Courtney, she produces an old diary that includes a list of things she must do in order to become famous. At the top, it reads, _Become friends with Michael
Stipe._) Around this time, too, a rumour swept the music industry that Stipe was
dying of Aids, a rumour his shaven head and gaunt demeanour did little to dispel. He had recently lost two close friends, River Phoenix, who had died of a drug seizure, and Kurt Cobain, who had killed himself.
Back then REM were touring an album, Monster, which in places seemed as big and
ungainly and monolithic as its name. That night_s show was lame and uneven. I
remember thinking that this was a group who were not having fun, whose days were
numbered. It was soon afterwards that drummer Bill Berry, who had suffered an
aneurysm on stage during the same tour, announced his retirement from REM.
Nevertheless, the remaining band members persevered, recording an album called
Up in 1998. At the time, Stipe said that the record was about, _Falling down and
getting up again_. In fact, Up was the sound of a band trying to stay upright, a strange and disjointed record, not really that up-full at all, but strangely
grey and functional.
As it turns out, Up was almost their swansong. Throughout its fraught creation,
Stipe was suffering from protracted writer_s block, which meant the other two
had to wait around, doing nothing, for much of the time they were meant to be
recording. This almost terminal crisis precipitated what Stipe calls _a new,
relaxed and less pressurised way of working. We tend not to work from a state of complete panic any more._
I met Stipe on this most recent occasion in a room high up inside the Warner
Brothers building on Rockefeller Plaza in the heart of New York. In a nearby
ante-room, a gaggle of US music journalists are waiting their turn for an audience, snacking on sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies, as the new REM album, Reveal, plays softly on the stereo. This is what, in the PR-mediated world of rock, is called a press day. It is a mind-numbing, soul-draining exercise for all concerned. Today though, Stipe, slightly camp and easily distracted, is doing his best to enjoy it .
When I ask him what the enigmatic title, Reveal, means, he responds with a not
untypical riposte. _Intentionally, nothing. It was plucked out of thin air by
our manager at the very last minute. You can take what you want from it, though.
You have my blessing._ Another mischievous grin crosses his face. _As a writer,
and trusted lover of the arts, take it and make of it what you want._
Would he admit, though, that the title does suggest some of the prevailing themes _ the album, for instance, seems full of spiritual imagery and allusion,
seems underpinned by the notion of elevation, ascension, of uplift, both physical and spiritual?
_That_s an interesting take,_ he nods, apparently serious and reflective, _and
Peter [Buck] has been saying the same thing._ There is the first of many pauses
here, accompanied by a a knitting of the brow. _Where do you get that from? Which songs in particular?_ I glance at my notes, scribbled hastily on the plane
from London to New York. I mention a few song titles: The Lifting, Imitation of
Life. These are not, I mumble, regular pop songs; they seem to hover around what
Brian Eno once pinpointed as one of the key unspoken ideas of our time: spirituality without religion, without the notion of God.
Stipe looks startled. _Um, maybe. I mean, it seems endemic in our generation
that, as you get older, you start looking for spiritual meaning. People who reach their 40s often seem to start patching together some version of a belief
system, pasting together elements of existing religions, maybe a bit of Buddhism
or Islam or even a slice of Catholicism._
On the plane back to London, I listen to this odd, fractured, truncated conversation with Stipe, and decide that he is, after all, as eccentric as he
appears to be, and that he is also someone who has thought long and hard about
his bohemian persona and the maintaining of it. He is, in fact, the modern pop
star par excellence: he dances with his celebrity in much the same way as he
dances with language _ flirtatiously, elusively, mischievously.
Reveal is released by Gallo on May 14. Look out for the promotional _REMDay_
celebrations at a traffic light near you and on 5fm on May 25
04