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Michael Interview With The Sun

Michael's thoughts on the new complilation

This interview with Michael is taken from The Sun's website...it was conducted by Jacqui Swift and published on September 8th.

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MICHAEL STIPE looks a decade younger than his 46 years. Dressed in dark skinny jeans and a black leather jacket that accentuates those famous piercing blue eyes, he seems relaxed after flying in from a holiday in the South of France.

Sitting opposite me in a luxurious rooftop suite of an exclusive hotel, the R.E.M. singer is in London for just two days, to talk about a period he clearly holds a great affection for — R.E.M.’s early years on I..R..S. Records, the International Record Syndicate label run by Miles Copeland.

As the people from Russell Brand’s 1 Leicester Square show noisily set up and prepare for the next interview with Michael, he is quickly updated on who Russell is and what is expected of him for the filming. He is co-operative and carries on chatting to me as I wait for the briefing to finish.

Friendly and courteous, there aren’t many singers on his superstar level who would even think about giving interviews for old albums.
R.E.M. — including retired drummer Bill Berry — compiled the best tracks from their first EP Chronic Town and their first five albums for this compilation.

Michael told SFTW: “I’m really happy with the results. We called Bill Berry out of retirement to help us choose the songs and the videos for the DVD release, the B sides and all the extra stuff that’s on there.

“I think it will be an interesting compilation for people who have known the band for a long, long time. But there are a lot of people, who maybe just because of their age, think of R.E.M. as a band who started out around Losing My Religion, and so here’s this whole early period of work which was an intense period for us as songwriters.”

Here in an exclusive interview with SFTW, Michael looks back at R.E.M.’s early years, reveals the shock of beating Jacko’s Thriller in an end of year poll and how the band suffered when drummer Bill Berry retired in 1997, two years after collapsing on stage with a brain aneurysm.

How was it going back to the vaults and picking the tracks for this album?

There were a few songs that surprised me because we don’t perform them live and I had not listened to them for some time, so it was really awesome to hear those. And then to be able to approach the label people and say which songs we wanted.

Each one of you selected an individual track?

For my chosen track Time After Time (AnnElise), I rediscovered the song putting this compilation together. I’d forgotten about it.

Looking back at the recording of that song, from the perspective of a 46-year-old, 20 odd years later, I realised how much the Velvet Underground were such a huge influence in that song.

We were all huge fans and that song sounds exactly like the Velvet Underground’s first album to me from the drums to the vocal melody. But it’s R.E.M.’s take on it.

It shows we were just an embryonic band developing into a band with five years under our belts, and seven years of touring, but it also shows a lot of the influences that are now, to me, very obvious.

What other influences can you now hear in those recordings?

Pop radio from the 1960s was a huge influence. The whole British and the New York punk scene were really what brought us together as a band.

You followed punk and created this new genre. Were you aware of that?

It was completely by accident. We were interpreting our influences and doing what we thought was the best thing we could do at the time, with our limited abilities as musicians and song-writers. Then it became its own thing.

Were you having flashbacks as you selected the tracks?

Yep, especially with some of the interviews and videos, I hadn’t seen some in years and they’re very funny. The time I had DOG scrawled over my forehead. I was really, really sick. I had a terrible fever, and I felt like s**t. There’s that phrase “sick as a dog”. So I wrote it on my forehead. Share the misery!

Which ones stand out?

Us on The Tube — the hairstyles alone were pretty shocking. I remember doing the show with Tom Waits who I was a huge fan of. We talked about make-up as I used to have a look at the time, and he used to put on a lot of make-up.

In those whacked-out memories, I also remember playing The Tube with Wham! and they had 18 dancers, were wearing legwarmers and were lip-synching and we were playing live.

When we looked at the audience, they were all staring at us like we were the most uninteresting thing that had ever stepped onto stage. Yet on camera we were trying very hard to be incredibly interesting.

How do the early years compare to the present day?

I can look back on it and objectify, but really it’s my life. It didn’t feel small at the time to play the Marquee Club and it be sold out.
We were this nothing band who played to eight people in Detroit, Michigan, then flew to London and sold out this famous club that we’d been looking at pictures of from the punk rock days. We were there and there were people there to see us, it was like: “Wow!”

Each album built on the last. Did that mean you enjoyed it more?

It’s a very different time now. I don’t think a band now would be able to grow in that way. We emerged very publicly as a group and we grew up in public. I don’t know if a band would be allowed that now. It just speaks of a very different time.

Your debut album, Murmur, was named as Rolling Stone’s album of the year! How did that feel?

Shocking! I couldn’t believe that they had chosen us as album of the year over Michael Jackson’s Thriller - which had sold at the time tens of millions of records - and War by U2. It was like: “What? We’re just this nothing band?” But more people became interested in what we were doing.

Back then you said you had no idea how to make a commercial record.

I still don’t!

Has it been harder to keep your integrity once your fan base got larger?

No, in fact if anything it’s become easier. As a lyricist I feel more confident in my abilities now. I am more instinctual, which is closer to what I was doing in the early days.

Just trusting yourself as an artist and allowing that to be the creative driving force, rather than trying to interpret what people want to hear or do what radio wants. We have never been a band that catered to radio, and yet we’ve had a lot of success.

Did you have a new-found confidence because of the success of your debut?

We were well aware of the sophomore jinx. After the success of Murmur, we thought: “What on earth are people expecting of us?” So we decided to record and mix that record in 12 days. We just went in and whatever song we had, we put down in one take, or maybe two takes and that was it. We just got the sophomore jinx out of the way.

It was really on our next album Fables Of The Reconstruction that I realised I had a distinctive style, which was basically singing nonsense over words, and stringing them together.

It was on Fables that I started writing narratives which to me made a lot of sense, that were attempting to be understandable to the listeners.

Some twenty years later I am still trying to write clearly understandable narratives, but no one else seems to understand including my band mates.

Fables was recorded in London. That was an unhappy time for you, why?

We had been touring for five solid years and we had just three weeks to write the record, and we found ourselves in a very cold, wet place with no money.

So we were starving and freezing. We love London, but creatively it was a very difficult time for us.

You said then it felt like the band was having a nervous breakdown.

I sure was but I don’t think it’s reflected on the record at all. It remains one of my favourite R.E.M. records.

Your third album, Life’s Rich Pageant, was produced by Don Gehman. How much do you owe him for the larger rock sound that appeared on this album?

He was renowned for his drum sound and that was something we were interested in, so we basically got a lot louder drums. It was a very confident record for us at the time.

But his production style was really to question me, my motives and my lyrics. It stole what confidence I had away. I don’t blame him for that, it was just a clash of personalities and his interpretation of where I needed to go though it was going in a direction that was probably a little bit earlier than I needed to go in.

Your fourth album, Document, had a more jagged sound. Was that to complement the more political lyrics?

I think so. There were some very angry songs on that album, some very overtly, even fanatically political songs. It was reflecting what it was like to live under the Reagan and Bush eras. At that point it felt like enough is enough.

It was a blow for you when Bill Berry left REM. Did your music suffer?

I think the record that we made after he quit, Up, is the one of the most emotionally raw records that we’ve ever made. It’s about two songs too long.

I’m really proud of the record, but it shows a band that had just fallen apart at the seams and which was trying, with Sellotape, to put ourselves back together again.