IT’S ONLY RRRRROCK’N’ROLL . . .

ou should’ve seen it. They should’ve sold tickets. It could’ve been billed as a seminar in cool. Early afternoon, and the marble-floored lobby of Luttrellstown Castle in North County Dublin is aswarm with maybe twenty bodies. There’s a half dozen journalists, a couple of photographers, a TV crew or two and an assortment of record company honchos, all trying very hard not to look overawed by their surroundings. Some of the hacks are chewing gum distractedly, in a way that attempts to convey the impression that they’ve seen it all before. An American is having a very loud conversation on a mobile phone but is only managing to use the words uh and fuck. Two power-dressed young women are arguing and waving clipboards at each other.

Suddenly, a side door swings open. Four guys amble through. They’re each clad in some of the most banal shirt/t-shirt and jeans combinations you could ever hope to see. One of them has a shaven head, another has mutton chop sideburns, the third has glasses and a wispy goatee and the fourth an eyebrow that seems to circle his entire skull. None of them is wearing shoes, and the bald guy isn’t even wearing socks.

Yet, the very instant this quartet arrives, the whole castle goes so quiet you could hear the price of a pin drop. The hacks stop chewing, the American stops shouting and the two women allow their clipboards to swing peacefully at their sides. Like I said, a seminar in cool.

The names of these four lords of the manor are Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry respectively. They are here to talk to representatives of the European press about Monster, the first REM album in two years and the record that has finally encouraged them to break a touring ceasefire that many had feared was unconditionally permanent.

The group splits in two (Buck/Berry and Mills/Stipe) for interview purposes. Peter and Bill are both just out bed while Mike announces to all that he’s already completed a round of golf. As Michael Stipe curls up on the couch in his allotted room, he declares to no-one in particular that he’s finally realised what his favourite REM song is.

“I’ve been wandering around this huge estate this morning singing this brilliant song in my head,” he proclaims. “It was ‘Sweetness Follows’. I forgot it was one of ours.”

Seeing Michael Stipe in the flesh for the first time after all these years of gossip and ghoulish hearsay suggesting that he is suffering from an AIDS-related illness, you find yourself staring at him for a couple of seconds longer than maybe you should. By now, however, he seems well used to such microscopic surveillance and quietly busies himself with his cigarette papers and his ounce of Drum tobacco for a few moments before the interview proper begins, as if to give me a chance to give him a thorough once over.

He looks frail, slope-shouldered and very thin certainly, but there is also a sheen about his skin that you don’t normally associate with the terminally ill. Perhaps now, I’m overcompensating but, after everything I’d been told about the deterioration of his health even up to quite recently, I’d have expected to see someone who displayed all the physical vigour of Mother Teresa after a wild night on the brandy or who at least had to be carted into our encounter on a stretcher.

The most striking thing about Stipe’s current appearance is his bald head. A couple of weeks stubble growth imbues it with a curiously honeycombed look, but the sides of his skull are also furrowed and grooved, like the shell of an egg that’s been lightly tapped with the back of a spoon. Yeah, you’re right, I should probably stop staring now.

Michael is in characteristically enigmatic mood today. After a protracted initial silence, he suddenly turns into a stand-up comedian for a few minutes. He gets up to grab himself a bottle of Volvic mineral water from the table of soft drinks at the other end of the room and begins answering questions in quickfire one-liners.

Did the band members meet much between the making of albums?

“Only in court.”

Is there any particular significance to the way the band has been paired off for these interviews?

“Yes, Bill and I don’t speak to each other anymore unless we’re paid to.”

What does he do when he’s not writing or recording?

“I’m a slumlord. I own a series of hovels and I like to collect and count the rents.”

Once again comfortably coiled up on the couch, however, he reverts to strong, silent type; courteous and responsive but elusive and always only a deep drag of his self-rolled ciggie away from a cryptic evasion.

He says that Monster was made primarily to challenge the band themselves. “Everybody else can listen in, of course,” he chuckles. “‘I Took Your Name’ was the first song I put words to, in September of last year when we were in New Orleans and that pretty much set the pace for me in terms of lyrical content.”

What was the inspiration behind ‘King Of Comedy’?

“It’s directly stolen from Leonard Cohen,” Stipe replies, before breaking out in a broad grin and turning to Mike Mills. “Hey, that’s a rhyming line that I should probably use somewhere. It’d be great to mention Leonard Cohen in a song. I’ll write it down.”

From beneath a cushion, Stipe produces a very tattered-looking Filofax and proceeds to scribble out the line in black biro on a page that already seems blanketed with short disjointed phrases and odd doodles.

“I met the man recently in a Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles, behind Donut Time, which is on the worst corner of Santa Monica Boulevard,” he offers while adding this latest Stipend to his store of potential lyrics. “He knows who I am, apparently. He came up to my table and introduced himself and shook my hand. Everybody’s mouth dropped to the table when they saw Leonard Cohen shake my hand. Everyone at my table was like (mimes jaw-opening astonishment).”

By now, it is widely known that, for Stipe himself, the two most traumatic events of the past year were the deaths of his close friends, River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain. Monster is actually dedicated to Phoenix, while the disturbing and brilliant ‘Let Me In’ is “about, for and to Kurt.” Nevertheless, in spite or maybe because of this, the melancholia and obsession with death which made Automatic For The People such an emotionally searing experience have been displaced on Monster by preoccupations with sex, sleaze and the inner thoughts of some real bull goose loonies. Has Stipe lost faith in the regenerative powers of channelling his own hurt and loss into his work?

“I never had much faith in that,” he intones solemnly. “Most of the songs that I’ve written are not even from my own perspective. I have a truly monstrous ego but I am not so multifaceted and endless that I have experienced all that I have written about. My thirty-four years on this planet have not been that rich, thankfully. If you can put yourself into another person’s head and sing as them but not be them, and at times hit common chords, that’s when you’re a successful songwriter.”

Stipe is in deflective mode now and becomes even more so when I raise the unpleasant spectre of the rumours of his advanced HIV infection. Elsewhere, he has categorically denied that he is dying of AIDS, and admitted that, perhaps naively, he felt that by not making such a statement earlier he was expressing some sort of solidarity with those who genuinely are HIV positive.

Today though, he uses the arrival of this topic as an opportunity to procure another Volvic and leaves it to Mills to repeat the official REM line that such rumours are “unfounded and ludicrous.”

Seated once again, Stipe is both indirect and firm.

“Life is really fucking short and nothing could make me do something I don’t really want to do,” he proclaims. “My bottom line philosophy is that we’re all only here for a certain short period of time and there’s no time to waste. There’s a degree of compromise in everyone’s life but we should all try to keep it as low as possible.”

Later, it is Peter Buck who is the most forceful on the subject.

“Nothing personal, but journalists have to write something,” says Buck. “The thing is that they wouldn’t even try to do this with anyone involved in any area other than music. If there are rumours about the President or the Prime Minister they don’t get printed but rock’n’roll journalism is held to much less strict codes than any other type of writing. You can make up anything you want and say it. That is just part of our life.

“Michael has had to put up with a lot more of this than I did but I’ve encountered it too. We always say that, ten years from now, we’ll be around but where the fuck will the people who started all that shit be? Ten years from now, REM will still be regarded as a great band, where the fuck will these journalists be?”

The REM who bring you Monster are a very different proposition from the band who plucked their last stadium string a whole career-span ago, in 1989. The intervening years have brought death, decadence, great tragedy and rumours of even greater tragedy. However, at various times and in their own very different ways, all four members point out that they now feel that they have at last grown up.

Musically, these past five years have been REM’s most successful ever. Out Of Time and Automatic For The People, their two ‘low-key’ and untoured albums, chalked up combined sales of almost 20 million units. It was the worst of times and the best times. A perfect opportunity to let the credits roll.

“Yeah, the last record definitely could’ve been the last record,” admits Peter Buck. “It would’ve been a good way to end. It wouldn’t have been a surprise to any one of us if any of the other four had said, ‘hey, that’s a good note to end it on. Goodnight!’.”

For several months last year, there was an unspoken assumption in the camp that the end for REM was nigh. No-one actually quit or anything, but no-one was entirely convinced that they wanted to carry on either. Gradually, however, absence began to work its fonder trick on all four hearts and, at a special band meeting in Acapulco, they decided to continue beating as one. Another album would be made; it would according to Buck, ‘rrrrrock’; it would also form the basis for a worldwide tour and REM Ltd would continue to trade, at least until the end of 1996.

“We called this album Monster because it threatened to consume us all, both before and during its making,” asserts Mike Mills. “I, for one, realised that I still get incredibly excited every time I write what I think is a good song. And then, when we meet up as a group and see what we can do with those songs then it’s incredible, and as long as that is there then we will have no problems making records.”

The others too came to a similar conclusion. “I had forgotten that this is the ideal job,” says Bill Berry. “I’m in one of the better bands around. Actually, there isn’t another band I can think of that has done as many records as strong as the ones we’ve done. From the inside though, it had gotten to seem like a series of chores that I didn’t want to do. If we’d done another tour that would’ve been it.”

In February of this year, the band began work on what ultimately became Monster. It was recorded in Atlanta, Miami and New Orleans and mixed in Los Angeles. And, as I’m sure you are only too well aware by now, it does indeed live up to Peter Buck’s promise. It rrrrocks! Or, to use Michael Stipe’s preferred description, it is “cut-up-thrash-punk-rock, in-you-face, kind of sexy and fuck off!”

“With Automatic, we’d taken the melancholic thing as far as it could be taken and we’d done it as well as anyone could do it,” Buck asserts. “Any one of the four of us could’ve gone in and produced another very similar record that would’ve been almost as good but we don’t like repeating ourselves. Over here, some people seem to consider us to be some sort of mellow folk-rock band. We’re like the young James Taylor or something but nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve always been a lot edgier than that. We’ve always been a rock band first and foremost.”

In the end, after all the trepidation that preceded it, Monster also turned out to be the most fun they’d had in a recording studio in years.

“Pete lives in Seattle now,” says Berry. “This is the first record where he didn’t live in Athens so we couldn’t just spend months and months going in for an hour or two a day to write, which is the way we always worked. But this time, we had this really strong work ethic where we had to go in and work for eight or nine hours. At first, I dreaded it because it sounded like a job. But, very quickly, those eight hours turned into twelve hours because we were having so much fun, playing with tremolos, singing through strange microphones and telephones.

“We’d order pizza instead of going out to eat. Our best work was done late in the evening where, in the past, we would never even wait around for that second wind. We never really applied ourselves that hard before. We never have had as much fun in a studio, maybe ever before.”

It’s time for another one of those minor diversions that are simultaneously the most beguiling and the most irritating features of an interview in which Michael Stipe is involved. Mike Mills has just mentioned that of the forty-seven songs that were originally begun for Monster, there were only four fully-completed numbers that were deemed unsuitable for final inclusion. “They all had lyrics and everything, they just didn’t fit,” he explains.

At Stipe’s initiation, there then begins an intense mini-inquest into the precise status of some of this surplus.

“Peter was talking about ‘Lucky Piece’ last night and wanting to revive that,” he declares, uncurling his legs from beneath himself on the couch, and turning to stare intensely at Mills who, it transpires, seems to have completely forgotten this particular track.

“‘Lucky Piece’, I don’t remember that one,” he says.

“You’ve forgotten ‘Lucky Piece’, it’s the one that Peter plays piano on.” Stipe then begins to sing softly for a couple of seconds. “Bum boo, bum boo, bum boo, bum bum boo.”

Mills continues to look a little unsure. “I like Peter’s piano style,” he avers.

“It’s one of his sort of cocktail, funny kinda things.”

“He’s got a couple of good things on piano.” Still no sign of a penny dropping.

“And ‘Revolution’,” says Stipe abruptly, “that’s another one I don’t want to lose,”

“That’ll turn out. It’s gonna be one of the B-sides,” reassures Mills.

“Is it? With the second verse intact?”

“The second verse didn’t bother me.”

“Whaaaaat?” Stipe protests. “You guys hated it.”

“As a B-side, it wouldn’t bother me. As an A-side, it would never work. It wasn’t good enough to be on the record.”

“I never really got a good vocal technique on that one, that was all,” Stipe retorts, a little sullenly.

“Listen, anytime you can kick Ollie North in the butt, I don’t have a problem with it,” enthuses Mills.

“Yeah, but by the time it’ll come out, it’ll already be a moot point. It’ll be redundant.”

At this point, I decide to reassert my presence. Am I to take that you’ve written a song about Oliver North?

“It’s not about him specifically,” Stipe explains. “It’s mostly just a litany of a lot of shit that’s going in the US.”

What’s this second verse that’s causing the problems then?

“I think I can remember it,” replies Stipe, obviously determined to ensure that it’s given a public airing somewhere. “You want me to say it? ‘Oliver North is running for Senate/Bomb the abortion clinic/Reagan’s defences look deficit/The virus was invented/Black man can’t get acquitted/All of the crimes that we committed’.”

And what’s the problem with that?

“The song is pretty, like, in-your-face, but it didn’t work that well,” says Mills diplomatically. “The chorus wasn’t fully realised and . . .”

“. . . I couldn’t get a good vocal technique,” Stipe laughs, waving his cigarette in the air in a concessionary gesture. Or, at least, I think that’s what it was.

What is readily conceded by all four members of REM is that the turn of the decade was a very turbulent time for everyone involved in the band. After almost ten years of single-minded commitment to little else but the making and playing of music, they each found that they had neglected important aspects of their own emotional development. In particular, storm clouds which had long been gathering in the personal lives of both Peter Buck (37) and Bill Berry (36) began to make their presence felt.

Buck was probably the worst casualty. His marriage ended messily and he responded to this by trying to bomb his brain back to the Stone Age with as much booze as he could physically swallow.

“There were a lot of things going on in my life that I needed to change,” he recalls. “I’m really good at change but I have to figure out what I want first. For about two years, I spent most days just drinking wine. There were eight months especially where I just thought, ‘fuck it!’. We were working at the time. I’d go to practise every night but I was not happy with a lot of stuff so I’d drink a whole lot every night, and then drink a whole lot more the next day. But my problem wasn’t alcohol, my problem was my life. I like to drink so when I was unhappy I drank too much. The real problem was my life.”

The name of the central solution to this problem was Stephanie, Buck’s second wife and the mother of his four-month-old twins, Zoe and Zelda. You only have to watch the REM axeman lolling around the lobby of Luttrellstown Castle with his babies for a couple of minutes to realise how eagerly he’s taken to the role of fatherhood. He even likes bragging about it.

“I built a huge fire in one of the rooms here last night and stayed up till 5.30 am with the kids and it was one of the coolest nights of my life,” he beams. “It’s better doing that than leaning over a glass table snorting drugs until 5.30 am. This is not to say that I don’t like to hit the bottle every now and again but now it’s a choice. I’ve just spent nine months where I didn’t touch a drop because my wife wasn’t drinking and that was no big deal. The kids are coming on with me on tour. They’re going to Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, everywhere.”

For Buck, another major contribution to renewed mental health was his decision last year to move to Seattle.

“I decided to get out of Athens because, for me, it’s a town where I am inextricably linked with being in REM. Seventy-year-old women know who I am and they know the gossip about me. I got very tired of that, in a way that the other guys haven’t. In Seattle, shit, Eddie Vedder lives in Seattle, Kurt Cobain used to live in Seattle, it’s not a big deal. I go everywhere and nobody knows who the fuck I am and I’m totally cool about that.”

Bill Berry’s difficulties, meanwhile, were a little more insidious and of an older vintage than Buck’s. From an early age, the drummer admits, he has had low self-esteem. To eventually find yourself in one of the most respected rock groups in the world would, you might think, alleviate this considerably, but not when you then start to regard yourself as the least valuable member of that band.

“I’m certainly in the right job to justify the kind of abuse that I was directing against myself,” says Berry. “If you’re an insurance salesman, you can’t really drink on the job but it’s okay for rock stars to abuse themselves. Towards the end of our touring days in the ’80s, I was adding a lot more baggage to my stress load than really was there. I was kinda inventing it to rationalise the way I was treating myself. A lot of it was that I had never had a chance to grow up and have any perspective of being other than the least important member of REM. My problem was that I took that home with me after the touring stopped

“I was drinking very, very heavily. I’ve never really taken drugs, I’ve certainly never done heroin. I did cocaine for a while but that wasn’t a problem because I didn’t like it that much. Alcohol was a problem. It doesn’t really screw things up on the road because having a hangover all the time is sort of your natural state on the road but when I got home I realised that this really wasn’t right. I stopped drinking long enough to learn that I don’t really need it. Things started coming into focus. My marriage improved. I’ve been married since ’85 but it wasn’t really a marriage until I got off the road and realised that I have other attributes apart from being a reasonably okay drummer with a very good group. I started respecting myself more and things just took care of themselves.”

Having been the only member of REM to vehemently oppose the collective decision to not tour the last two albums, Berry now believes that the hiatus from road was the best thing that ever happened to him. “Looking back, we very easily could’ve ended up like Aerosmith or somebody,” he insists. “We were at a point where we could’ve lost it. I certainly was. And, unlike the guys in Aerosmith, I might not have come back again. Right now, I’m happier than I could’ve even imagined a couple of years back. My wife and I are gonna have kids. We’re not pregnant yet but we’re gonna start a family about half way through the tour. We’re removing the barriers now getting our practise up.

“Spending the last few days in this house with Pete’s kids has been great. You turn a corner and you see them, and they get to recognise you very quickly. Their faces light up when they see someone they know. It’s amazing how someone four months old can make you feel a lot better than some thirty-five year old journalist raving about your record.”

As two bands with reserved seating at rock’s top table, it’s probably not all that unusual to discover that the members of REM regard the members of U2 as “mates.” Various combinations and permutations of the two fab foursomes were spotted around town during the Athens quartet’s recent sojourn here. Late one particular night though, Michael Stipe and Bono were espied in a corner of Lillie’s Bordello engaging in what can only be described as “intimate” conversation.

“Oh shit, caught,” laughs Stipe. “We were forehead to forehead, right?”

Right. So, who was bending whose ear and about what?

“What were we talking about at that particular time?” he muses to himself, half smiling. “Oh, the standard stuff. We were listing all the supermodels we’ve fucked and comparing notes. Real estate, that’s another of our regular topics. No, I’m kidding. I frankly don’t remember the conversation. We were both pretty drunk.”

“When I meet someone like Bono, I find that we talk a lot of politics, music too, but mostly politics,” Mike Mills interjects.

“Now, we’re talking real,” concurs Stipe. “Bono and I talked a lot of politics that night. Just personal stories about things that we’ve encountered, maybe funny things that have happened. We talked a good deal about John Gormley, he’s great.”

I had hoped to probe a little deeper into the specifics of these intriguing little Ard Fheiseanna but mention of Dublin’s Green Lord Mayor brings both Michaels onto one of their favourite subjects at the moment.

“It’s such a wonderful thing, and it makes me so jealous and envious that Dublin can have a Mayor who’s a Green,” asserts Mills. “In America, every politician is a self-serving asshole who can’t wait to get his check and carry on ripping off the American people. It’s so exciting to come here and see that this can happen within the mainstream political framework.”

I remind them that it’s largely only a ceremonial post, and that normal service on the self-serving asshole front continues at the real positions of power in this country.

“Sure,” says Stipe. “But, as John Gormley described it to me, he’s genuinely attempting to do things with his position. For instance, to get the Dalai Lama to visit Dublin and that in itself is such an incredible thing. I saw the Dalai Lama speak last year in Los Angeles and he is truly one of the kings and (pause) positive power centres in the world today.”

“He’s an inspiring person,” adds Mills. “He represents a lot of freedom and a lot of things that people should be striving for right now, but are not. He’s very spiritual and that’s what we have a dearth of in this world.”

I ask if this admiration extends to either of them wanting to travel to Tibet or, perhaps, to actually becoming a Buddhist? Stipe sucks deeply on his cigarette and leaves it to Mills to answer.

“The Dalai Lama always represented a pure essence of spirituality which is maybe reading too much into what he is. But, in the context of the oppression that China has been exerting on Tibet for the last forty years, he is an important inspiration. It’s his quest right now to insert himself into the public mind because he wants people to be aware of what’s going on in Tibet. You don’t have to actually be a Buddhist to respond to that.”

After another lengthy silence, Stipe does acknowledge my question, but only obliquely and in a reverential whisper. “I just draw a great deal of personal inspiration from him and his attitude about the hardships that his people have gone through,” he says. “His full devotion to bring about positive change is very inspiring.”

One of Stipe’s few public appearances in recent years was when he spoke at Bill Clinton’s inauguration as US President. Mills too has been a guest of the White House. All things considered, Clinton’s administration must be turning out to be a major disappointment?

“Not at all,” Stipe insists, with uncharacteristic ardour. “He’s made some really bad moves, a lot of mistakes but you have to understand that he’s in a position of great compromise. I happen to personally think that he’s an extreme radical in terms of his personal political views and ideals. The United States is not an extremely radical place. Well, it’s radical in the wrong way, and it takes a lot to bring about a lot of change there in a short amount of time, particularly after twelve years of the most oppressive rule that our country has seen this century.”

“He was unaware going in of just how recalcitrant people would be and how resistant they would be to change, especially in Washington DC,” posits Mills. “The people he has to deal with there are more concerned with bringing him down than in helping the country. Their own interests are primary.”

What’s the best thing about having pots of money?

“Being able to help people who need it,” suggests Mills. “Being able to help the Athens Homeless Shelter or contributing to our candidate for Mayor, being able to help the Athens AIDS Clinic. Being able to help out my parents who definitely needed it. The things that you can do with it like that are far and away the best things about it. The worst thing is probably that a lot of people think that because you have money you’ve done something evil to get it.”

And Mr. Stipe, what tickles him the most about having loads of dosh?

“You wanna know the truth, I don’t even think about it that much,” he says. “That’s the honest to God truth. It’s all I can do to keep up with the time. Or the day of the week. I mean that. Like, I’ve just remembered that I really meant to shave today. Let it so be. I’m not the least materialistic person but I must be one of the least materialistic people I know.”

Is anger still a motivating force for Stipe as a writer?

“I think, as a human being, it’s a motivating force,” he replies. “It should be for everybody. That’s not to say I’m an angry young man. (Laughs) Anymore than I’m a c-note (sic) maudlin young man, anymore than I’m a shiny happy young man, anymore that I’m anything else that looks good in quotes.”

Towards the end of January next year, REM will kick off a tour that will last until some time in November ’95 and no later. In the meantime though, they are all dropping large hints about pulling off a few surprises during the coming year or so.

“Bill and I are pushing the band to be ambitious,” Peter Buck declares. “We’re pushing to write a bunch of new songs and record them on the road. Maybe do a live record with brand new material and without the greatest hits. If we had fifteen or twenty songs that we could work on at soundchecks and Michael could come up with stuff, we could short-circuit the expectations of our next record. It’ll be good for us to make a record that isn’t the mega video/interview thing. It’d be nice to just slip one out.”

Stipe too claims to be itchy to get started on new work. “People are gonna get real sick of us over the next year,” he promises. “We’re gonna be everywhere. We should make this year count.”

And when the eventual REM demise comes, will it be with a bang or a whimper?

Peter Buck: “As a fan of this band, I want to see several more records come out of it but I don’t want to get to the point where I’m doing things I don’t want to.”

Bill Berry: “It’s a democracy. When one person wants to stop this, it’ll probably be easy to get the others to agree. I don’t know what goes on in the other three guys’ heads all the time.”

Mike Mills: “I haven’t thought beyond November of next year when the tour will end. I don’t even want to. At the very least, we’ll be taking a long vacation.”

And, Michael Stipe: “It’s like the end of Blade Runner. Who cares?”