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R.E.M. ARTICLE AND INTERVIEW IN "THE TIMES"

We are applying for our old job back,” Bono said recently when U2 returned to the live stage. He was laying claim, of course, to the title of the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. Now R.E.M., the only other serious contenders for the job in the past 15 years, are also back.

But Reveal, the first album from the band in three years, is not a re-application for anything, they insist. “We never let go of the old job,” says the lead singer Michael Stipe simply. “It sounds a little insincere because every time we make a record, I say it is the best we have ever done. But I have to believe that. And I genuinely happen to feel that way about this album.”

R.E.M., like U2, hold a special place in contemporary rock, not merely because of their longevity and commercial success but because they have managed to achieve it without any apparent compromise to their artistic integrity. Since their first album Murmur in 1983, the band have sold an estimated 50 million albums. They have enjoyed hit singles with the likes of Losing My Religion, Shiny Happy People and the bedsit classic Everybody Hurts.

When their Warner Brothers contract came up for renewal five years ago, they reportedly signed back on for $80 million for a further five albums, at the time the single most lucrative recording deal in history.

It doesn’t get any bigger. And yet somehow R.E.M. have always managed to stand apart from the corporate rock world while being one of its most valuable properties. They eschew sponsorship. They refuse to allow their songs to be used in television commercials. Like U2 they believe strongly in the social responsibility of the artist, whether it’s campaigning to abolish world debt or to free Tibet.

Above all, though, R.E.M. have continued to make compelling records regardless of popular trends or fashions. Their records are hugely commercial in that millions of people buy them, but Stipe can still talk without hypocrisy about his “deep rage” at the crass commercialism of American culture. Which is why, even with their twelfth album, a new R.E.M. record remains an event.

Stipe and Mike Mills, R.E.M.’s bass and keyboard player, are sitting in a hotel suite overlooking Hyde Park. The band’s guitarist Peter Buck has decided to sit out this whistle-stop European promotional tour of four countries in four days and is back home in Seattle. He explains later by phone that he doesn’t like leaving his young family in Seattle and when he has to fly to London a couple of weeks later for R.E.M.’s appearance in Trafalgar Square, his disappointment at having to do so will boil over in unfortunate fashion.

Stipe, 42, is tense and nervy and talks with all the earnestness of a 19-year-old art student — which is exactly what he was when he joined the band. Mills, who was operating a machine at a newspaper printing plant when he was recruited to the band in 1980, is almost the exact opposite — affable, relaxed and humorous.

Stipe is clad eccentrically in what appears to be a piece of hessian sacking. He has chosen to offset this dour-looking hair shirt of a garment with a purple sash which runs over his left shoulder and meets at his right hip, like a Roman emperor.

Mills, again in stark contrast, is wearing the off-duty uniform of any American male under the age of 50 of designer jeans and open-necked shirt.

He gives a shrug. “Being the best band in the world is what drives some people. But I think you have to get your validation from within yourself. Record sales and critical acclaim are not going to be able to scratch that itch if you don’t have self-belief.”

Stipe agrees. “How many records we sold never really mattered. Honestly. We simply had a freak hit with Losing My Religion that took us into the stratosphere.

“That was nice but we never presumed we would stay there. But if I’m going to work that hard and put so much of myself into the songs, then obviously I want them to go out to as many people as possible. That’s not a selfish thing. Egos are very well in check in this band. But when you have worked hard on something, you want everybody to hear it.”

The dozen songs on Reveal were recorded over 18 months in different locations — Miami, Vancouver, their original home town of Athens, Georgia, and Dublin. When he phones later, Buck offers a succinct and practical reason for the peripatetic recording process. “The main reason for joining a band was not to have a day job, and if you’re in the same studio every day for weeks on end, it begins to feel like a job at the office. So we moved it around.”

Typically, Stipe has a more politically complex explanation, particularly of the three months the group spent in Ireland last summer. “I felt we needed to be outside the US to make this record. American popular music is really stuck in a groove right now and we needed to be in a different environment. I wanted to tap into an energy that wasn’t on offer in America,” he says.

That energy has resulted in a surprisingly upbeat album. It’s not quite Shiny Happy People times 12, but it is an exceedingly warm record full of positive, sunny vibes. One song, Summer Turns to High, even sounds like a Beach Boys tribute, while the closing track goes under the title Beachball.

“Most of the records we have made have been put out in early autumn. This time I wanted to write a summer record that reflected my love of warm weather and the promise that summer offers,” says Stipe.

Whenever he got stuck on a song lyric, he went to the airport and bought a ticket to somewhere hotter. “I followed the sun round Europe for most of last summer. I would hole up in a hotel for a couple of days and finish the song and then come back to Dublin until I got stuck again. Then I would go back to the airport and fly off somewhere else.”

He describes his writing style as “allowing my instinct to vomit out whatever came to me like a cat with a hairball”. And he’s convinced that there are more classic R.E.M songs on the album that will meet the test of time than on any previous record.

“I had to learn to be more instinctive in my writing and I would say that there are maybe five of those special songs on this record. But we’re working with very little talent. I most certainly am. Our success is that we have tried very hard to push the boundaries of our own very limited resources.”

The look on Mills’s face suggests he doesn’t necessarily subscribe to the limited-talent theory. But all are agreed that rock music is in danger of losing its unique significance in modern culture. Buck complains that “the mystery and excitement” has been lost.

“All that hanging out with fashion models has helped to make rock’n’roll less relevant. I feel sometimes that a lot of today’s stars could just as easily have gone into accountancy as music,” he sneers.

Stipe for once, is even more succinct. “It’s a wrestling match between art and commerce, and commerce took steroids,” he says. “There’s a deep rage within me about it. During the dark ages of Reagan, money took over and became more important than whether people were presenting something new or were challenging their audience.”

The talk turns nostalgically to the days when we still believed rock’n’roll could change the world. Stipe cites the musicians who helped to bring about Vaclav Havel’s “velvet revolution” in the Czech Republic, while Mills is full of admiration for the Belgrade underground music radio station B92 and its role in mobilising opposition to Milosevic in Serbia.

“We met those guys and were shocked that in this day and age people could be threatened with prison or even death simply for running a radio station. But it was probably the last case in the world where playing rock’n’roll records on the radio really made a difference.”

The band were all “political activists” before they were in R.E.M., Stipe explains. But despite the many causes the band have espoused, Stipe admits that politics and music can be uneasy bedfellows.

“When you try to infuse your music with a political idea, it often comes out sounding shallow,” he says. Just listen to Nicky Wire’s sloganeering on the Manic Street Preachers’ latest album Know Your Enemy to hear what Stipe means.

R.E.M’s approach has usually been more subtle. “What is perfectly valid is to use your position as a pop icon or a cultural figure to bring issues to people’s attention. I’m not embarrassed that we’ve done that because I think we moved forward several of the things that we felt strongly about in terms of educating people. But there is a point where you have to pull back and recognise you’re entertainers first and foremost.”

The group came close to splitting four years ago when the original drummer, Bill Berry, decided he had had enough and quit. The rest of the band weathered the storm and decided not to replace him. With all three remaining members now in their forties, and having spent their entire adult lives in the band, it seems too late to stop now.

“Bands like us or U2 have this weight of history, which I think sometimes is a problem for people,” says Stipe. “I used to listen to our records and wonder what they were going to sound like in ten or 20 years’ time. But I really don’t care about that any more. I’ve realised pop music is about latching on to something that has its power in the here and now.”

Source: The Times.

By Craig - 27th April 2001

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