Believe the Stipe

John Updike might have scripted it. Cameron Crowe might have made a film of it. Whatever way you look at it, there’s no escaping mid-life crisis, even – especially – in rock ‘n’ roll.

REM were avatars of the 1980s American underground, unlikely Georgian incumbents who built an empire out of a cottage industry and made the transition from indie to major label with a sense of ethics that saw them venerated by artists like Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder and Thom Yorke as examples of how to maintain punk credibility in the MTV age. For the first 15 years of their career, the band barely put a foot wrong, touring incessantly, each consecutive album expanding their artistic parameters and their fanbase, culminating in the critical and commercial peak of 1992’s Automatic For The People.
Then came the turbulence. Monster (1994) was a fuzzy-sounding and fuzzily-conceived collection boosted by the group’s first world tour in years, hampered by drummer Bill Berry’s aneurysm, Mike Mills’s abdominal surgery and Michael Stipe’s hernia operation. New Adventures In Hi-Fi (1996) received reviews to kill for, but nevertheless signaled an end to the band’s golden age of big sales and critical acclaim.
Following the departure of Berry in 1997, REM seemed to lose some of their essential magic. Up and Reveal were immaculately crafted albums, but something was missing, and 2004’s Around The Sun received the most lukewarm response of the band’s career. They remained a dependable live proposition (although Peter Buck was increasingly starting to look like a guest in his own band), but seemed somehow adrift in the post 9/11 age of anxiety.
Last June the quartet decamped to Dublin’s Olympia for a week of ‘live rehearsals’, and spectators were heartened to see a much more rough and ready band winging it through a set of promisingly short, sharp and serrated tunes, many of which had been recorded in Vancouver and at Grouse Lodge, Co. Westmeath, by Irish producer Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee (U2, Snow Patrol, Bloc Party).
The resulting album Accelerate is, professes singer Michael Stipe, a no-filler-all-killer 34-minute return to form largely informed by, of all things, the kinetic kick of the same punk rock that first inspired the band 30 odd years ago. Here, in a characteristically honest and expansive interview with Dave Fanning in New York, Stipe reflects on fame, writers’ block and how REM weathered the menopausal years, autopsies the Around The Sun sessions, and proclaims himself sick and tired of what he sees as the Bush administration’s eight-year betrayal of the future.

DAVE FANNING: Michael, in the summer of 2007 you played a bunch of gigs in Dublin and road tested the songs for the album Accelerate. Was there any way that the audience might have decided on certain things, like a good reaction to a song means, ‘Hey maybe we won’t leave that out, we’ll put it on’?
MICHAEL STIPE: There was one song called ‘Man-Sized Wreath’ that none of us expected would make the record. I said, ‘Basically this song is filler; it’s not gonna make the record. It’s a b-side’. And of all people, I think Bono was in the audience, and he shouted out “There are no b-sides anymore!” And we played the song and it got an incredible reaction actually, and we had to kind of rethink that track. So we went into the studio and recorded it, and it made it onto the record.
Did you feel those shows were a weird thing to do, with the laptop onstage, still finalising arrangements in the dressing room?
I went out of my way to make people feel sure they weren’t seeing a show, and that it was in fact a live rehearsal. And when we’re in a rehearsal space, that’s what it looks like, except we tend to face each other instead of in one direction. But we did offer that concession to the proscenium stage.
Accelerate is a very short album. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?
34 minutes and a little bit of change. People have been making all kinds of correlations to past work that we’ve done, and I’ve said a million times I’m really bad about looking backwards. But I think with this record, in an abstract way, I wanted it to refer back to the music that inspired me to want to start a band in the first place, which was punk rock. And so there are a number of songs on the record that are under two-and-a-half minutes long and the whole thing clocks in at, uh, 11 songs at 34 minutes. And the artwork looks like a fanzine basically, and that was all intentional. This is certainly not where I would have put myself 28 years later, but here we are.
Would it be fair to say that Jack Kerouac and Patti Smith’s album Horses might have been the key to allow that ideal to happen?
Kerouac and Patti Smith certainly, and then obviously the scene that she was a huge part of spearheading here in New York. The legacy of Kerouac and the more romantic idea of what he and his gang of thugs represented coalesced between myself, Mike, Peter and Bill, and turned us into the kind of band that we became. The only reason we ever made a first single was because there were clubs that would not book us unless we had vinyl. And then it became the number one single of the year by all the critics’ polls. It certainly didn’t make it on the radio, and the whole thing kind of steadily blew up and we had a pretty good idea of what we were doing, I guess. But we never intended to take over the world or anything like that.
No, but you had this sort of romantic vision of the city we’re in now, New York. You had a subscription to the Village Voice, you knew about CBGBs...
It was a teenage dream though, Dave, and that’s a real different thing than something you then carry on as an adult. And that distinction needs to be drawn I think. Especially for a generation of people that are unwilling to, uh, kind of grow up or pull themselves out of that whole peer... thing. But in fact it was as a teenager that I first came to New York, and the realities sink in a little bit. That was the same year, at the age of 19, we started the band and at the age of 20 we played our first show.
You really did get very good press from the go. Murmur was in all the end of year top tens, Reckoning happened, Fables Of The Reconstruction, the Green album at the end of the 1980s. Huge tour. And instead of bringing out a rock album next, Peter comes around and says, ‘I’ve got this thing called a mandolin…’
We’ve never done things the right way, and yet things have always seemed to come to us the right way. So, our counter-intuition has led us down a path that didn’t mean immediate success. It didn’t mean overnight success, whatever success means, but, anyway, it wasn’t the path that one would follow if you had a goal. We were basically a band without a goal. And we remain that. I think at this point, if there was a goal for me, it might be that if this thing were to end, it would end in a way that honours the entire journey, and that we do so in a way that doesn’t just kind of slowly deflate.
Well it did end for your drummer Bill Berry: after a gruelling tour he said, ‘Look, really this is not for me, I’ve had enough.’
It didn’t end, that sounds a little morbid.
No, but it did end for Bill in that he didn’t want to be touring.
Right, he wanted to be a farmer.
Could you do that?
Be a farmer? Not on your life.
No, but give up REM. Would you be terrified?
I could give up REM, but REM will never give up me. It’s gonna be parenthetic behind my name for the rest of my life, so better to recognise it for what it is and to honour it. I could’ve broken this band up 30,000 times in the past 28 years, and came very close many times. And recently. But no, uh, we always kind of see our way through.
What’s the best thing about being in REM?
I like being famous. It’s kind of fun, most of the time. Sometimes it blows, but I like it.
One of the things about being famous is that you’re seen as somebody people can come to. For instance, the Monster album was dedicated to River Phoenix, who you knew, Kurt Cobain, you’re the godfather of his daughter. Heath Ledger, I don’t know if you knew him that well, but you took one of his photos.
Yeah, I don’t really want to talk about that. The thing is, while you’re in New York, go to the top of the tallest building you can get to, look west, and there’s all these tug boats that go up and down the Hudson River. I was on the roof of my lawyer’s building, years ago, and she and I were looking at the view and talking about the tug boat operators and how they all probably have a place where they buy their uniforms and they have a little language that their wives and families probably don’t quite understand, and they have a bar that they go to and they have a particular drink that they drink and they sit in that bar and they talk in their little way about their jobs and their lives, and it’s really no different than what I, or Bono does, what Chris Martin does, what Thom Yorke does. When we’re able to come together and realise there’s a spark there, and we understand each other’s work, and a humour and intelligence behind the persona, and a friendship. It’s just great to talk with other people who do what you do about what you do.
Bill Berry left just as you were starting the Up album and you suffered from writer’s block. Could you not write songs because the three of you were fighting, or was it that you couldn’t write songs, and therefore the three of you fought?
Right after Bill left the band we stupidly went right into the studio and tried to soldier through as we always do. And that’s just our own kind of machismo arrogance – if you can see machismo at all in myself, Peter or Mike. It is there. But that kind of arrogance, that we’re just gonna soldier through this and keep doing what we do, put us in this position where I was paralysed literally to the point where, forget writing the songs, I couldn’t sing ’em. My chest was like solid concrete. I couldn’t even catch my breath to sing the songs. And these are, we now know, and I now know, very simple physical stress and anxiety reactions. It’s what happens when people have anxiety attacks, when people are incredibly stressed out. And yet I didn’t have the wherewithal to recognise that, step away from it and say, ‘You know what? I’m gonna take a two-month vacation, and we’ll come back to this record when I’m feeling a little bit better’.
You said very recently about Around The Sun that, while they were great songs, you didn’t give them the full time that they needed, that the songs could have had more impact or whatever.
This is my perception, and I think this is actually accurate to what happened. We started to make a record, called Around The Sun as it turned out, and then we decided to release a Best Of. So we poached two of the best songs from the record that we were making for the Best Of. Put out the Best Of. I did all the videos, the merchandise, all the stuff. We went on tour for the Best Of, and after that was done, we went back to finish the record that we had started at the very beginning. So the process of making the record took much longer, and Peter lost patience with it and Mike and I kind of went down the rabbit hole, left to our own devices. And the record got away from us. We just lost focus on what the songs were about. So, I wanna say this, this is very important to me. I have no one to blame for this except the three of us: myself, Mike and Peter. Pat McCarthy is, I think, a tremendous, amazing producer and he’s a great friend. And he had perhaps the most difficult job in the world on that record and a few before it, trying to get the three of us even in the same room at the same time to communicate, and to do something we could be proud of.
Would you go so far as to say that, if you go back from ’98 to 2004, Pat was almost a psychiatrist, he was the glue that kept the band together?
Pat was the glue that kept the band together.
So what about Jacknife Lee, another Irish producer?
What’s with the Irish guys? I don’t know. I didn’t know that when we went to talk to Jacknife, that Pat and Jacknife are childhood friends. They’ve known each other a very long time. I really like the work that Jacknife has done, and having finally come together, the three of us, we had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted to do with Accelerate, and Jacknife seemed to fit into that.
Some of the songs on the Around The Sun album were very directly political. Did you find that they had greater resonance live, and people understood your anger and your annoyance better with those songs?
I took a few pages from our man Bono here. I got to the point where I’d introduce the songs and be very clear what songs like ‘I Wanted To Be Wrong’ and ‘Final Straw’ – which we released online the week that we invaded Iraq – were about. Live, I went as far as to have the video guy that travels with us print out the lyrics, so that when people who didn’t speak English as a first language, or were at one of the shows and weren’t necessarily huge REM fans and might not know what the song is about, they could actually read it and get some understanding of some the frustration of what it is to be an American living in this first decade of the 21st century, under this administration, with the ludicrous choices that they’ve made. And the frustrations of being an American and a patriot and someone who certainly loves this country, and recognising that what we represent is an idea that I’ve refused to let go of, and I hope no matter how bad things get in terms of my life, that I never let go of that idea, ’cos I think that idea is very important to the human spirit. And so there it is in a nutshell.
You’ve said before that there was a gig at the Beacon here in New York that Radiohead played, and one of their songs ‘No Surprises’ has a line in it about how ‘we don’t need the government to tell us what to do’. And you’ve called this thing the great calm. In post 9/11 New York, people were traumatised, not just a generation, everybody was. And then, it ended. What happened after that?
I actually think mass confusion. Not in New York, but I think in the US in general, and then in the world. And it’s a little bit of what this record is about. I’m looking at where we are. We’re eight years into the 21st century. I’m looking at it from the perspective of a 13-year-old in the 1970s and my idea of what the 21st century was going to represent. I honestly thought we were all gonna have jet packs and we’d be flying around. The environmental science class that I took when I was 14 years old talked about pollution and renewable energy sources and what we needed to do to make this a viable part of a cleaner future. And I really believed at age 14, this was something that by the 21st century certainly, if I lived that long, we would have all these things.
Of course.
And now I’m looking at eight years into the 21st century, and what will mark this decade for historians in years to come. The only thing I can think of is not 9/11 but our administration’s ludicrous response to it. And that’s all this decade represents, and how very sad is that. And how very sad is it also that this many years after I’m 13 years old, 35 years later, who would think that (the fact) a black man and a woman are running for President of the United States is the only thing people want to talk about, or are afraid to talk about. Not what they could possibly bring as individuals, as policy makers, as intelligent people, as leaders, but the fact that she’s a woman and he’s black. This is not the 21st century.
I understand.
Like, I want my future now. I’m 48 years old, I’ve had it with what I’ve been looking at for the past seven years, with this administration. I’m tired of having these people in positions of power who seem to have this 1950s idea of priority. Pulling all of us backwards. This ludicrous idea of power. I’m afraid the ripple effect of this time will be with us for the rest of our lives. I can’t wait for this to be behind us. And I’m kind of tired, I’m fed up with it. So that I think is a lot of what Accelerate is about. I just want my future now.

REM’s new album Accelerate is out on April 1. The band headline the Oxegen Festival at Punchestown, July 11 to 13