REM comes to town

Skinny wee Michael Stipe cocks his head like a bird, flutters his eyelashes, moves gingerly. He's an artsy aesthete dressed as The Littlest Hobo, with his schoolboy's satchel, tatty T-shirt and shapeless cotton trousers (which probably cost a bomb). He is a gnomic gnome, chewing a boiled egg methodically and carefully. He's 44.

In the gaunt flesh, Stipe talks very softly and deeply, with a catch in his throat. Pauses ... for ages ... between sentences, then burbles all-of-a-rush. Digs a small bottle of Celtic Salt out of his satchel, for precision sprinkling on aforesaid egg.

Stipe is not above a slightly lecturing tone. Especially if he thinks a question is wrongheaded, or stupid. For example, I asked him, "Did coming out in Time magazine three years ago liberate you lyrically?" (Pop-cultural lore has it that it was this interview in which Stipe finally confronted long-standing rumours about his sexuality.)

Stipe, briskly, "No, I felt free 10 years earlier when I actually talked about it for the first time. I'm so frustrated by the UK press. Somebody wrote that I've been outed by the UK press more times than Frank Sinatra sang My Way! It just seems that every time there's a slow news day, I get pulled out of the closet again. The fact is, I started talking about my sexuality openly to people beyond my family, my band and my friends in 1994; I was on the cover of Out magazine in 1995. I've been pretty frank about my sexuality for the better part of 10 years; publicly, and privately since I was a teenager. Did it provoke some phenomenal change in my writing?"

He pauses, makes a face that says, duh! "No! The only real news a couple of years ago with Time magazine was, that (a) I was misquoted, and the guy's a great writer so that happens _ it's a tape recorder and you can mishear something. And (b), that I have one partner, who's a man, and it's been going on for longer than most of my relationships do, and that's a great thing." Another pause, before summing up. "Has that changed me?" he demands, voice rising. "I don't know. I don't think so. Certainly not for the worst."

REM's 13th studio album, Around The Sun, is plush and measured. For a band built on the clang and chime of guitarist Peter Buck's riffing and picking, there aren't many electric guitars on this year's model. At its best, it's magical: the opening track Leaving New York is one of the great REM ballads, a love song directed at Stipe's adopted home town. Still, the album lacks adventure and excitement. The songs are ballads or mid-paced; REM sound tired.

In these charged times, we might have expected more from this most engaged of bands. That said, there is some sign-of-the-times stuff on Around The Sun. The track The Outsiders seems to be taking potshots at the American Establishment. "That could be an interpretation; I'll accept that," Stipe says, non-committally.

I suggest I Wanted To Be Wrong might be talking of the values that have been lost as America has rushed to secure its borders ("We can't approach the Allies 'cause they seem a little peeved, and speak a language we don't understand").

"That's good," he replies, schoolteacher-like. "I'd take it further than that. For me it's the strongest political voice I've ever had in an REM song. I've been referring to it as the State Of The Union address."

Then there's Final Straw, which REM posted online in protest at the invasion of Iraq. "As I raise my head to broadcast my objection, as your latest triumph draws the final straw," sings Stipe. "Who died and lifted you up to perfection?" A dig at Bush and his cadre of neo-con zealots?"

Oh, absolutely," says boyish, bespectacled, 45-year-old drummer Mike Mills. "There's a whole group of men around Bush who believe it's America's duty to spread our greater morality to the rest of the world. America is, if not the most decadent country in the world, certainly up there! But yeah, these guys think it's our job to spread our morality around the Middle East."

I say to Stipe, "I thought the record would be more declamatory, or even just louder. But there isn't even much electric guitar on it. Why?"

"People associate 'political' with 'government', and 'angry' with 'loud'," Stipe says evenly. "And I'm sorry but Final Straw is a very quiet song until you fall into it."

Me: "Yeah, that does have a boiling strum to it, a turbulence. And The Outsiders is loudly quiet, or quietly loud. But maybe I thought you were going to be sounding ... roused."

Stipe: "I've learned my lesson: everyone had their expectation of what this record was gonna sound like. And it's neither loud nor political nor chaotic. When I said it was gonna be a political record, that was a year ago. And the record changed course and it became what it was because we wrote so many songs. I'm really proud of what we wrote. It's not simply political in a government way _ there's the politics of relationship, of place, of a time that you're living in."

REM began work on Around The Sun in Vancouver at the end of 2002. They would finish the album many months later, after further stints in studios in the Bahamas and Miami, and after breaking off recording midway to tour In Time, last year's best-of collection. For the first time in their career, REM hit the road leaving an album unfinished. But for Stipe, releasing and promoting In Time was liberating. "It was just an immense relief to have our entire catalogue not looking over my shoulder every time I wrote a song." Or, as the bear-like, 47-year-old Buck puts it, "Michael likes to have things in his head one way. That means that door is shut to the past."

In Time covered the 15 years since the band from Athens, Georgia, signed to Warner Bros. The record deal that took REM, darlings of the alternative-rock underground, into the mainstream of the music industry was, for the time, whopping: US$10 million ($13.4 in today's money). But it was peanuts compared with their next deal. In 1996 they would re-sign to the label for US$80 million.

This is a brain-bogglingly daft amount of cash, for sure, but you can see the business sense: after breaking into the charts with their first album for Warners, Green (1988), REM just got bigger and bigger. They went from being "the American Smiths" _ artsy, underground, evocative _ to being a globally powerful stadium band able to stand toe-to-toe with U2. Pre-dating the Pixies and grunge, they became the first alternative outfit to cross over into the mainstream _ and, unusually for a rock band, managed to remain cool, big and clever. And silly: this, remember, is the band who made Shiny Happy People. Their back-to-back masterpieces Out Of Time and Automatic For The People each sold around 13 million copies.

The latter album was marked by the visual reinvention of Michael Stipe. Automatic For The People was REM's full-fathom emotional masterpiece, yet here came the band's frontman and lyricist toting a new, "no hair/no interviews/no gigs" asceticism. Speaking on Channel 4's UK Music Hall Of Fame last month, muscle-bound punk-poet and counter-cultural sage Henry Rollins admiringly described this new Stipe as "a Gandhi lightbulb-headed dude". Stipe had become one of the rock icons of the age, and REM a giant band who had retained the shadows and intrigue despite the glare of the arena spotlights.

Then the wheels began to come off. In 1995 they were touring the world in support of Monster, their scorching, grunge-era album, the making of which was coloured by the deaths of two of Stipe's friends, River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain. In Lausanne, Switzerland, drummer Bill Berry suffered a brain aneurism on-stage. Stipe and Mills also required hospital treatment on the tour.

Remarkably, Berry would be back with the band within two months. He soldiered on for a further two years. But in 1997, after the release of the underperforming New Adventures In Hi Fi, he left the band. Now he's a hay farmer back in Athens. Would REM, whose every song was always credited to Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe, continue? They had often hinted that they were all for one and one for all.

But, patently after some serious soul-searching, Buck, Mills and Stipe kept going. There followed the two weakest albums of their career, Up and Reveal. It seemed that, as well as his ear for a melody (much of Everybody Hurts was written by the drummer), Berry had taken REM's grit back to the Georgia countryside with him.

You can see why Michael Stipe might have liked to draw a line under all that. Unlike Bono, and like good friend Thom Yorke, he was never comfortable in the skin of a musical superhero. Sure, on stage he's a charismatic performer with devastating voice and interesting dance moves. But on his own, tap-tapping away at his laptop, he's The Quiet Man of modern rock.

By his standards, then, the lyrics on Around The Sun are bold and emphatic. Making it, he says, was an energising experience.

"I wrote more songs for this record than I've ever written for an REM record," he continues, "and that again speaks of the confidence that I feel. This sounds arrogant, I'm sorry, it's not, but I'd never been so ... they'd just never ..." Stipe stops and carefully gathers his thoughts. "You know, I've never been that prolific. But they just flew out of me, and then kept coming. I finished 19 songs for this record. That's never happened before. I've always finished a record and collapsed poetically on to a couch and gone 'I can't do this again; I am an empty shell."'

Why was REM's 13th album the one where he suddenly had a rush of ideas, and of confidence?

"It's a bunch of things. It's the world we're living in. It's examining what was my motive early on, and then realising how much that had changed as a 44-year-old. When I go to music, I go for something that is epiphanal and liberating and moves me emotionally. That's what music is for me, emotion. It's a church to me."

Then, on top of the creative space freed-up by In Time, one of his rock-aristocracy pals had a word. "Bono sat down with me a year and a half ago and said, 'Just do what you do. We write songs. Just write songs. They don't all have to be great. Just do it.' And that meant a huge amount to me at the time ... What he was saying to me was, 'Quit thinking so hard about what you're doing and just do it' - and," Stipe claps his hand triumphantly, "it worked!"

It's good that Stipe - and Mills and Buck - are so gung-ho about Around The Sun. It suggests that they're still enjoying being REM after all this time. And when they're on their game, in terms of globally important rock bands, only U2 can touch REM.

Yet they find themselves at a strange juncture. Around The Sun is the first REM album to receive a critical mauling. Buck acknowledges that their profile has dipped in the US (although they remain fairly huge in Europe _ next summer they're playing British cricket grounds and rugby stadiums). Greatest Hits packages are often viewed as the last throw of the dice for bands. As Mills says, In Time and the accompanying tour served as "a sort of reassertion of our qualities". Buck acknowledges that they "don't fit in with what's on the radio just now," and that "the 'relevant' word is always thrown around. Relevant to whom? Eighteen-year olds? Not most of them I would imagine." They have talked about how they came close to splitting during the making of Up, after Berry's departure. Stipe battled writer's block at the time.

Around the same period, the singer's extra-curricular activities took off: he has two film production companies, Single Cell and C-Hundred, and has co-produced films such as Being John Malkovich and Velvet Goldmine. He recently executive-produced an HBO film, Everyday People, a drama about race relations, and is currently working on the film of The Miracle Life Of Edgar Mint, Brady Udall's 2001 comic novel about the trials of a young boy dispatched to a series of institutions after the postman's van runs over his head.

"It's about the politics of family," Stipe says. "Finding something that you never had, and how different that path can be." He pauses and smiles. He's making a point here, and it is: "Everything's political to me," he laughs. "Everything in the world."

- INDEPENDENT