Cuttings

GOD REST YE MERRY GENTLE REM • Ho, ho, ho! It’s the end of the world as he nose it! Well, would you care to ask MICHAEL STIPE to dress up as one of Santa’s reindeer and stick on a foam rubber Rudolph nose? Would you ask him about the size of his penis? How his teeth are? No, neither would we, so we sent JOHNNY DEE to Atlanta to ask him for us. Nose pics: STEVE DOUBLE Three months ago a feature in The Sunday Times carried the strapline: “The camera-shy leader of America’s hippest rock band gives a rare interview.” That camera-shy leader was Michael Stipe. Before he got into wearing foam antlers... foam antlers, a comedy red nose and a Santa suit! Hang on, hang on. What’s going on? This is Michael Stipe, right? The coolest man in the coolest rock band in the world. The biggest rock band in the world. The best rock band in the world. And he’s wearing foam antlers. The NME photographer is rifling through rolls of film, slamming another cartridge into the back of his camera, quick, qui...

ROCK OF AGES: CLASSIC NME INTERVIEWS REM, 1985 OUT OF ANOTHER TIME • Who's been the most successful singles band in Britain this year? Answer (amazingly). . REM . With the current charting of‘It's The End Of The World As We Know It', they've had no less than six top 40 hits. The global sales of their acclaimed 'Out Of Time' album have also confirmed them as one of the world's most commercially and artistically consistent stadium acts. It wasn't always so. In the summer of 1985 they were largely ignored in their native US, while over here they enjoyed only cult status as the cutting edge of a wave of sincere and quasi-classic new American rock bands that included Husker Du and The Replacements. Their just-released third album, 'Reconstruction Of The Fables/Fables Of The Reconstruction', had, however, somewhat muddied the waters, being regarded as both badly produced and without the sparkling songs of its predecessors. ANDY GILL caught them in ta...

THE ONES I LOVE • REM’s PETER BUCK, a former assistant at Wuxtry Records store in Athens, Georgia, is one of rock’s most obsessive and broad-minded music fans. So instead of sitting him down for a regular interview, we played name-that-tune with the guitarist and let him free-associate about the record, the artist and anything to do current activities of REM... EMMANUEL TELLIER cues ’em up.. Pictures: RENAUD MONFOURNY RECORD 1: Neil Young - Tell Me Why’ (from the 1970 LP ‘After The Goldrush’) "I LOVE Neil Young. I think that he's a kind of role model. Even though I'm sure Michael's never really listened to Neil Young, and I know that Bill and Mike don't a whole lot, but just the idea that here's a guy who's gone his own way in the music business and you never really look at him and think. 'Well, here's a guy who success means everything to’. "And we’ve always felt that way. It just so happens that all our records have been fairly successful, bu...