1988 12 24 R.E.M. NME

ANOTHER GREEN WORLD

1988 saw REM leave their cult status behind, and home in on the airwaves and turntables of mainstream America. The critically lauded 'Green' album - third best 33 of the year in the NME festive chart! - consolidated the strengths and sublime songs of 'Document' whilst offering further evidence of Michael Stipe's unique lyricism. SEAN O'HAGAN probed the psyche of rock's most enigmatic songwriter.

HORSES

As a rule, the things people won’t talk about are usually the most interesting/ revealing aspects of their self. Today, Michael Stipe is reluctant to talk about his childhood.

Were you a weird kid, Michael?

"Erm. I wrote backwards right up until sixth grade. Perfect mirror image."

That’s pretty weird...

“It's quite common among left handers. This one teacher told me my brain would flip over if I didn't stop and learn to write properly"

So you stopped?

“Yeah. I had this recurring image of two fish inside my head, flip flopping over one another..."

That’s really weird.

“I can still do it, though. A little practice and I'm right back there in mirror image."

The all American alien boy picks a few place mats off the record company office table arranges them in rectangular formation and does his very best to look uncomfortable with this line of questioning.

Were you a happy child?

"Pretty happy. I moved round a lot - Texas, Georgia, Germany. I flew through childhood, didn't touch base a lot. That’s all. I don’t choose to talk about it too much".

Whatever, the young Stipe grew up to the soundtrack of his parent’s record collection - “Film soundtracks, Gershwin, Mancini, The 1812 Overture' with real cannons”.

He claims to have only owned three records as a young teenager - Hayley Mills and Tammy Wynette on 45 and an unspecified Presley soundtrack - and to have been oblivious to the Britbeat colonialism of The Beatles and their peers.

"They meant nothing to me historically except as inescapable elevator music. I have no inclination to rediscover that cos I’ve done pretty well without it up to now. When I'm out of all this, sometime in the future, I’d like to investigate Captain Beefheart. I really respect him a lot".

In the mid 70s Michael Stipe had an epiphany. The earth moved, the sky fell in around his ears and his life was changed utterly. One day he was adrift, an introverted undecided kid with vague “photographic ambitions”, the next, he was liberated; his imagination catalysed by a harsh, iconoclastic noise blowing down South from New York City.

“I guess I was kinda prepared for something cos I had this subscription to two magazines— The Village Voice and Rock Scene - one of those publicity offers. I dunno why I chose The Voice over Women’s Wear Daily, though. Anyway, I was reading all this stuff on The Dolls, The Velvet Underground and Iggy And The Stooges so I started picking up eight tracks of their early stuff. I still have the first Dolls albums on eight track".

Was there any one particular artist or record that changed your life?

“Yeah. ‘Horses’. I got it the day it came out. It killed. It was so completely liberating. I had these headphones, my parent's crappy headphones and I sat up all night with a huge bowl of cherries listening to Patti Smith, eating these cherries and going ‘Oh My God!... Holy Shit!... F—k!' Then I was sick... That was the only record that really blew me away. I loved the first Television album, the first Wire album, all that stuff but ‘Horses' was the one.. "

ADJECTIVES

He hasn’t read a book in three years. Nor does he watch much TV or go to the cinema - “I’m pretty consumed by what I do".

Michael Stipe's world revolves around Michael Stipe.

And the music he makes in REM. Which may be most of the reason why REM sound like no other contemporary rock band. You have to go right back to The Band's early work to find a group so in step and out of time.

With '87's 'Document' and this year’s 'Green', REM have stood alone, arriving at a point where popular acceptance, critical acclaim and consistent creative integrity have merged into a seamless whole. REM's noise has grown from a Byrdsian folk jangle into a robust, melodic hard rock. And Michael Stipe’s singing has gone from a mumble to a mesmeric, constantly startling and uniquely resonant instrument. The insistent otherness that courses like a vein through REM's work is the sole, exclusive property of the singer.

Do you find yourself constantly at odds with the world, out of step with things, an outsider?

“Erm... I'm always trying to convince journalists otherwise - that I’m completely normal - but, yeah, I do... A little. I don't think it’s anything... um .. .special. Just different.”

You perceive things differently?

‘‘Yeah. I do... I dunno. That's a hard call cos I’m surrounded by people who I’d have to say share that.. erm... perspective. I don't feel estranged or alienated in any big way...”

From mainstream America?

"Oh God, yeah! We're talking a different universe, there. My idea of mainstream American culture is pretty tainted. I haye a great joy in having been delivered from the mainstream. A great joy in deliverance...’’

In conversation, Michael Stipe is kinda how you'd imagine him from his songs, though a little more camp. Dressed in Oxfam chic, without the specs but with a pretty impressive pony tail, he veers between the willing boho and the awkward, gauche unwilling pop star.

Fidgety; preoccupied, always on the verge of wandering off, he answers questions with a slow, measured attention to language. His speech is peppered with strange nuances - ‘‘I’ve shed my Georgia accent in two days” - and slightly archaic words - “therein”, “steadfastly”, "oftentimes". At one point, he speaks of his fascination with language stemming from his “inability to grapple with it", a statement that contradicts the rich suggestion of songs like 'Cuyahoga', ‘Finest Worksong' or ‘King Of Birds’.

“I've chosen my adjectives and verbs with care and I throw them together in as many ways as I can. This week’s adjectives are ‘deeply’ and ‘galvanising’. I'm using them a lot. Heh heh. It’s a way to be serious and humorous simultaneously.”

How do the others feel about this semantic mischief? Baffled?

“They accept me pretty much at face value. They edit me pretty well. I guess Peter's different. He kinda slots me into the Van Morrison tradition. Sometimes I think his great love for Van Morrison’s music is the only thing that's kept him from strangling me over the years”..

BOOKS

So how come you’ve stopped reading books. Pretty drastic move, that...

“WELL, I have some books in my case. I keep adding to them. Let’s see, there’s an Irish author called Christy Nolan - Under The Eye Of The Clock. I gotta read that. What else, The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh. And a book on architecture. Oh yeah I have a copy of Economics As If The Earth Really Mattered for my accountant. He might learn something from that”.

Who’s the last author you read in depth?

"Oh my God... he’s soo sappy and thick, I'm embarrassed. Lawrence Durrell. Before I travelled to Greece. His prose was so thick and tactile, no country could live up to that. I was incredibly disappointed. Y'know Norman Mailer's An American Dream? Is that the one written from a sense of smell? Jeez, I had to put it down. Too suffocating."

ACCIDENTS

I read somewhere that you weren’t too comfortable with technology? 

“Yeah. That’s right. I admit that. The lights even... they sorta bother me..."

Are you afraid of technology? That’s a pretty common response to the late 20th century: techno-fear...

"Afraid - that’s a harsh term. It’s kind of a soft term, too, though. Easy. It doesn't apply. Not fear, more distrust. Nah, misunderstanding. I still don’t understand technology. How my voice goes in the studio microphone, through a process that ends with that same voice emerging out of something that resembles a place mat. Y'know? I'm not a Luddite. I understand the advances ... Give me a manual typewriter over a word processor, though. I get an objectivity, in my writing that comes from the sensation of hitting the keys. You know the ‘4’ on the album sleeve - that's a typo, an error I left in. I meant to hit the ‘R’ and my left index finger hit the '4' instead. I left it in".

As a clue to particular creative tendency? The idea that accidents have a meaning all their own, an artistic meaning?

“You got it"

Is that a recurring basis for your songwriting. I notice how, when you use a repeated phrase, you often alter it in a small, profound way - "Dreams compliment my life/Dreams complicate my life" for instance?

“Intrinsically, I’ve learnt... erm, for myself and a lot of other people—even if they don't recognise it and, if they do, they don't tend to admit it - that mistakes are often the most creative, no, inspired part of anything I do. To be able to recognise that and enlarge on that. To make those mistakes and deliver whatever it is you're doing - I've been able to succeed with that. My entire style of singing - to cheapen it by calling it that - comes from that base. Not too many people have homed in on that before”.

He looks relieved and uncomfortable simultaneously.

It’s a pretty sophisticated approach though not in the accepted sense.

"It is? Thanks”.

You don’t think so?

“I dunno".

Well, your songs have a literacy all their own, a resonance and allusiveness that gives them a certain poetic literacy.

“A leprosy!? A poetic leprosy of writing. Is that what you said? Think about that for a minute."

Is your music's appeal mostly beyond language?

" I think so. I personally find language quite stifling and, simultaneously, liberating. That's what the leprosy of writing is all about. That phrase has made my day”.

SONGS

Have you written a straight narrative song yet?

“Yeah. I’ve succeeded a few times".

Name them.

“‘Disturbance At the Heron House', ‘Harborcoaf - I thought that was a real simple narrative but no one else did. I had to tell someone what it was about a few days ago. God knows what that says about my narrative style. And "World Leader Pretend’—I put the words on the sleeve cos I think that one song summarised the whole motivating idea behind 'Green'."

How do you feel about ‘Green’. In many ways, it seems like your most realised album?

''Good. Good. If there's a mistake on ‘Green’ it's cos I made it. The others have said the same. I don't feel that way about 'Document' though we were pretty 'much in control.'... 'Pageant' was real outta control. I had a lotta input but the mix still slipped away. The process was beyond us right up until 'Green'."

‘ Murmur’ sounds a universe away now, in comparison...?

"You think so? That's interesting. Why?"

Well, the words for a start, they're pretty indecipherable.

"They’re there, though. 'Radio Free Europe’ and ‘Nine To Nine' are complete babbling - they’re the exceptions. The rest are right there. See, I feel that essentially ‘Green’ is pretty much ‘Murmur' revisited. I went back there pretty intentionally and the rest did too though it wasn’t a spoken thing. To me. everyone was carrying the idea that 'Green' is very much exactly where we were at in the summer of’88".

Looking back, do you have particular songs that stand out for you?

“A series of songs that I think of as perfect? Yeah. In so much as my idea of perfection is that there is no such thing - an unattainable. I like the songs that came out exactly the way I heard them. That were delivered in a way that completely satisfies me and continues to do so. ‘Perfect Circle', 'Feeling Gravity's Pull’, 'Disturbance At the Heron House’... I have difficulty remembering without a track listing... 'King Of Birds', 'You Are Everything’, .. .'Welcome To the Occupation' and all the songs that go with it..." 

How do you mean?

"Well essentially, '...Occupation' is a rewriting of three songs that went before it. Mainly it's revisiting 'Green Grow The Rushes' - a song about Central America. I do that a lot. ’Oddfellows' is a debunking of 'Fables Of The Reconstruction’ which was pretty much my version of the storytelling tradition. Me playing The Brothers Grimm or Aesop. ‘Oddfellows' destroys all that, hacks it off at the knees, strips the myth down to the harsh reality.

“A friend said 'There are seven songs in all of rock and roll and we play three of them. Over and over. Really well'. I thought that a great compliment."

POLITICS

Though you spoke out in support of Dukakis for President, REM aren't a band that immerse themselves in the body politic of America?

“No. We're a pop band. There’s a real time and a place for everything. At the same time, we're aware of being looked on as examples. People look up to us and respect us for whatever reasons. There are times when you have to respond... my support for Dukakis was really a condemnation of Bush, a reaction, a statement. You do what you can. I was aware of pushing the limits of my job..."

Who sets those limits?

“Well... I do. Ultimately. I weigh up the circumstances. I mean, there are subtler ways in which you can endorse things that people pick up on - taking Greenpeace and Amnesty on the road, having their stalls in the lobby during our shows."

DREAMS

As a rule, the things people won't talk about are usually the most interesting and revealing aspects of theirself. Today. Michael Stipe is reluctant to talk about his dreams.

Are your dreams a constant source of raw material for your songs?

“Yes... Erm, I don't tend to talk about that a lot. though. I can start sounding pretty eccentric".

Don’t worry, it’s already too late. 

“Yea. I guess... Whatever, I think dreams are pretty crucial to everyone. Certainly, to me, they’re as real as anything else".

Are all your songs, in some way, dream songs?

“Oh boy. I dunno. Nah. ‘Get Up' is a song about the thin line between the real and the fantastic. Where you draw the line. But it's also a calling out to people song, so... It gets pretty complex if you start dissecting them.”

What about the collective unconscious? A song tike ‘Cuyahoga’ seems to deal with America, the collective dream, the myth..,

“Yeah. Americans are searching for a history that doesn't exist. In a really big way. That intrigues me. We’re a restless people however much we try and placate our spirit. We're still pilgrims, in Europe, you can walk around and the sense of history that seeps out of buildings makes you feel not quite so big. You feel a great sense of place. In America, that sense of place is essentially a myth. Especially in the deep south. We destroyed a culture to build ours - that’s what ‘Cuyahoga’ is all about, in a consciously naive way”.

It merges the personal and the absolute pretty effectively. Another Stipe trait?

“Yeah. I'm glad you caught that. Especially the first person singular songs - they’re very much a microcosm of something much bigger. The metaphor is usually quite clear if you’re tuned in".

How would you describe the Michael Stipe approach?

"I tend to trust my reptile brain rather than my rational thought processes and, with that, the intuitive sense in the music comes out pretty strongly. REM intuit as a band much more than they analyse. So far, it hasn't served us wrong”.

LIES

Tell me about your private life. I read somewhere that fans were starting to make the pilgrimage to Athens, Georgia to seek out Michael Stipe. I bet that’s a real disorientating experience?

‘‘No. That was really nothing. It’s not a problem".

Is it an inconvenience?

“No. To be honest, I was lying. Nobody does that. Nobody knows where I live. Nobody bothers me"

Do you lie a lot?

“Depends. If I feel mischievous"

Are you feeling mischievous today?

Michael Stipe doesn't answer. 

Sometimes the things people won't talk about...