Cuttings

WE ARE TRUSTWORTHY ONCE MICHAEL STIPE COULD sing like a man with a mouthful of ectoplasm and a head full of spells and people would take it on faith that it meant the world. Yet now, the beautiful ascetic with the stained-glass eyes is the consummate striped-trousered superstar, the maps and legends crashed under a pile of celebrity contacts. For eight years REM have been in that hollow place where the glare of fame withers the good, and, as 30 million album sales prove, it's no longer a matter of love, but of trust. It's a matter of trust for the band as much as anyone. Without dummer Bill Berry for the first time, keen to show they don’t exist in vacuum-packed isolation, REM’s take on 'Up' is that it’s just a bunch of guys playing together in a room. There's more than a little preposterous superstar posturing here, but maybe, when you’ve created whole musical solar systems, you just want to be the salt of the earth. For ail the promised adventuring, it...