Time was when REM, and singer Michael Stipe in particular, were the last people you'd think of as shiny or happy, even when they were the undisputed kings of pop. Today, however, after a period of regrouping, they're settled as a three-piece, and more content with life and music than ever, says Sean O'Hagan. No wonder Stipe is smiling. Sometimes.

Sean O'Hagan
Guardian

Saturday April 14, 2001

There was a time when Michael Stipe would get offended if you called him a pop star, even if that someone was Andy Warhol, who, of course, conferred the term only as the highest compliment. "It was, like, 'I'm a musician, so don't you dare call me a pop star.' Andy said, 'So, you're a pop star?' and I went, 'No, I"m a musician.' He went, 'Michael, you're a pop star,' and I went, 'Andy, I'm a musician.' Then, he said, 'Well, you're very cute.'"

Not for the first time today, Stipe cracks up laughing. He has a good laugh, not hearty but heartfelt, a sort of snorting chuckle. It is not the sort of laugh that I would have expected from someone who often comes across as the most wilfully arty pop star on the planet. It is the perennial puzzle about Stipe: is he really as effortlessly eccentric in his approach to his life and work as he appears to be; or is he someone who has thought long and hard about his bohemian persona and how to maintain it. (Interestingly, "cute", in my Concise Oxford Dictionary, is defined as "clever, shrewd" and "ingenious", as well as "attractive".)

For 21 years, Stipe has been the enigmatic, much-adored front man of REM, who, like U2, have become one of the biggest-selling rock acts of all time while keeping their souls, sanity and credibility intact. Though Stipe has always been the focus of attention, REM was an organism that collectively transcended the sum of its parts. When drummer, Bill Berry, was forced by ill health to leave in 1997, no one would have been surprised had they called it a day. Though Berry has not been replaced - "It would have seemed disrespectful," as Mike Mills once put it - the group have endured as a three-piece, but the last album, Up, sold disappointingly. Creatively and commercially, then, their new record, Reveal, is a crucial one, though you would never guess it from the taciturn, unruffled Peter Buck and Mills. These two remain pretty much as they always were: solid, unassuming, no-nonsense Southern boys, committed rock fans who, you feel, still can't quite believe that they have been elevated to the pantheon of rock gods.

Something has definitely changed in Stipe, however, since I last encountered him in the mid-90s: he seems more open, and more openly mischievous than before, relaxed, even. For someone who is notoriously elliptical in his answers and, of course, in his song lyrics, he is relatively accommodating. He seems at home in the world of pop stardom. "I take my work very seriously," he tells me, almost impatiently, when I press him on this fame thing, "but I don't take myself seriously. If you don't have a sense of humour about all this, it's like, why do it? It's so phenomenally absurd, what can you do but laugh?" I remind him that the last time I interviewed him, he'd seemed much more ill at at ease, withdrawn, troubled.

"Did I?" he asks, for a moment perturbed. "Oh well, I got over that pretty quickly. It did knock me back a bit when we became so big, so ubiquitous, then I realised that my reaction to it was making me more sick than the thing itself. It was my reaction to the fans' reaction to me that was getting me down. So, I decided there and then to relax into it, and fame has been a rose petal-strewn path ever since."

Stipe's close friend, Thom Yorke, the equally enigmatic leader of Radiohead and someone who has had his own troubles adjusting to the role of contemporary pop icon, provides a clue as to how Stipe has managed this feat. "Michael loves all the glamour of pop stardom, but in a mad way. He has fun with the absurdity of it all. He really manages to negotiate the whole thing in such a cool way. When I was close to that whole rock-star-losing-his-marbles stage, he was so generous and protective. I'm okay with it all now and, to tell you the truth, a lot of that is down to him. He looks out for you. That's rare in a business where you meet so many fawning reptiles it just gets fucking depressing most of the time."

REM began back in 1980, when Stipe, then at art college studying photography, met Mills, Buck and Berry in their home town of Athens, Georgia. The son of an American army helicopter pilot (an upbringing he shares with Marilyn Manson), Stipe's nomadic youth was dominated by the daily news broadcasts from Vietnam, where his father served for the duration of the war. He seems to have been a content, if slightly odd, teenager. (According to a recent article in Q magazine, his college paper was entitled, wait for it, Feral Existence In Doplar Society). He once admitted to feeling "slightly removed" throughout his adolescence, a tendency that, one feels, he has turned to his advantage as a rock singer.

In 1976, he underwent what he describes as "the single big epiphanic and defining moment in my life", when he rushed to the local record store and bought a copy of an album called Horses by Patti Smith on the day of its release. "That's when I decided to do what I am doing now," he tells me. What was it, exactly, about Horses, a record that still stands outside rock tradition in its merging of freeform poetry and primal rock noise, that so enthralled him? "Exactly?" he repeats, as if the word is an affront. "I'm not sure if I've thought about it in exact terms, but it just mesmerised me. I had heard her singles and read about her, but nothing prepared me for this. I remember listening to Birdland and thinking, 'Oh my God. this is ground zero'."

By the time REM formed, the rawness and often overlooked arty experimentalism of punk had been and gone, smoothed down into something called New Wave, an altogether more radio-friendly pop. The fledgling REM, music fanatics all, were influenced by English groups such as Wire and the Gang Of Four, but initially they tapped into an older US rock tradition best encapsulated by the jangling guitars and chiming harmonies of the Byrds. The group paid their dues, almost unnoticed, on the local Georgia rock circuit alongside more electronic-led local bands with names such as Pylon, the Method Actors and Love Tractor.

Then they crisscrossed America on the alternative circuit, crossing paths with such brilliant but short-lived post-punk groups as Hüsker Dü, Black Flag and the Replacements. "We were like an arty garage band back then," the affable Buck, easily the most straight-ahead rocker in the group, explains. "We just played and played for whoever whoever would hire us. We played pizza parlours, bars, house parties. We played fast songs mainly for audiences that wanted to dance. And Michael just kept writing. Some days, he'd give us a song at sound check and we'd play it that night. We did that for two years, writing and playing and discarding stuff until we were good and ready. See, we always wanted out first record to be one of those records that sounds like it fell, fully formed, from outer space. We wanted it to be like the records that influenced us - the Velvets, the Pretenders, Patti Smith, Television. I think, looking back, we almost succeeded."

Murmur was indeed one of those records that seemed to fall from the skies. At a time when British rock was in retreat from the twin blights of New Romanticism and synth-pop, Murmur sounded subterranean and otherworldly. Songs such as Radio Free Europe, honed for two years on stage, soared and mesmerised on record. For a long time in the 80s, REM were the music press's best kept secret, a contemporary American rock band whose music seemed out of time, and curiously timeless, and whose lyrics seemed to suggest a whole new language of rock and roll capable of dealing in themes way beyond the received ones of love, lust and essentially adolescent angst. From the start, what set REM apart from their contemporaries, what prevented them from being just another great, no-nonsense American rock band, was the enigmatic figure and enigmatic songs of their lead singer. "Michael's songs were kind of even more baffling back then," says Mike Mills, "because we had to get used to his take on things. On Murmur, there were these references to weird statues and stuff. It only made sense to me sonically back then. Since then, I've learnt not to be surprised by anything he writes."

When I first met Stipe, back in 1988, he easily lived up to the image I had carried in my head since hearing early REM albums such as Murmur, Life's Rich Pageant and Document - he was part-Beat poet, part-visionary rock singer. He had long, curly hair and a strange vocabulary that seemed almost arcane: he used words such as "thereof" and "unbeknownst". His answers came in fits and starts, and his thinking was lateral, to say the least. He told me that the inclusion of mistakes, accidents and typing errors was an essential element of his songwriting approach, and that he had not finished a book since reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road as a teenager, nor listened to rock music since buying Horses. Even then I did not quite believe everything he told me.

Our paths crossed again in 1995, when REM were no longer a music press secret but had become the biggest rock group in the world following the crossover success of songs such as Losing My Religion and Everybody Hurts, the first musically jaunty and lyrically baffling like many REM songs, the second stately and stoical and, unlike many REM songs, anthemic. Back then, Stipe was appearing on stage in a T-shirt that read "SELLOUT", and was given to odd affectations such as standing stock-still for the entire duration of a performance, or, as he did on that particular night, wearing a hearing aid as a style accessory (shades of our own dear Morrissey, who sported the same with the Smiths, and, as it turns out, is now a close friend).

That time around, however, Stipe was intriguing for a whole different set of reasons. His sexuality had long been the subject of music business conjecture - he once described himself as "an equal opportunity lech" - and his name had been romantically linked with singer Natalie Merchant, actor Stephen Dorff and even, rock's reigning loudmouth Courtney Love. (In Nick Broomfield's documentary, Kurt & Courtney, she produces an old diary that includes a list of things she must do in order to become famous. At the top, it reads, "Become friends with Michael Stipe".) Around this time, too, a macabre rumour had swept the music industry that Stipe was dying of Aids, a rumour that his shaven head and gaunt demeanour did little to dispel. He had recently lost two close friends, the young actor River Phoenix, who had died of a seizure brought on by poly-drug use, and the aforementioned Cobain, who had killed himself. (Love has since spoken of her regret that a short time before Cobain's death she did not "physically drag" her husband to the airport after Stipe sent them a pair of plane tickets to Athens, Georgia.) Unsurprisingly, the singer had seemed edgy, preoccupied and uncommunicative when I spoke to him before he took the stage in Chicago, and grew visibly uptight when either of his dead friend's names was mentioned.

Back then, REM were touring an album, Monster, which in places seemed as big and ungainly and monolithic as its name. That night's show was lame and uneven, the group floundering during one song when Stipe stumbled over a line, then forgot the next one altogether. I remember thinking that this was a group who were not having fun, whose days were numbered. It was soon afterwards that drummer Bill Berry, who had suffered an aneurysm on stage during the same tour, announced his retirement from REM. Stipe by then had burgeoning extra-curricular activities - he now has a successful production company with films such as Velvet Goldmine, Being John Malkovich and American Movie under its belt, and he recently published a book of photographs, Two Times Intro: On the Road With Patti Smith. Nevertheless the remaining band members persevered, recording an album called Up in 1998. At the time, Stipe said that the record was about, "Falling down and getting up again". In fact, Up was the sound of a band trying to stay upright, a strange and disjointed record, not really that upfull at all, but strangely grey and functional. It seemed that the REM had been reduced to a series of recognisable tropes: Stipe's increasingly abstract, seemingly throwaway lyrics tied to a music that was either mildly interesting in a tentatively electronic sort of way, or big and brown and muddy in a stadium rock sort of way. A world away, in fact, from the REM that had blazed a trail with their beautifully crafted rock melodies and mysterious songs.

As it turns out, Up was almost their swansong. Throughout its fraught creation, Stipe was suffering from protracted writers' block, which meant the other two had to wait around, doing nothing, for much of the time they were meant to be recording. Buck, who lives in Seattle, grew increasingly angry at having to be away from his family for months on end; the atmosphere soured, and seems to have degenerated into a sulky silence. Things got so bad that Stipe, at the end of his tether, convinced himself that the group had split up already, in their heads: "I was working on what I thought would be our last will and testament," he confessed to Q magazine this month.

This almost terminal crisis precipitated what Stipe calls "a new, relaxed and less pressurised way of working. We tend not to work from a state of complete panic any more."

I met Stipe on this most recent occasion in a room high up inside the Warner Brothers building on Rockefeller Plaza in the heart of New York; we were surrounded by the kind of paraphernalia that decorates record company offices the world over: gold and silver discs, framed magazine covers and concert posters, press cuttings. In a nearby ante-room, a gaggle of American music journalists are waiting their turn for an audience, snacking on sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies, as the new REM album, Reveal, plays softly on the stereo. This is what, in the PR-mediated world of rock, is called a press day. It is a mind-numbing, soul-draining exercise for all concerned. Today, though, Stipe, slightly camp and easily distracted, is doing his best to enjoy it .

When I ask him what the enigmatic title, Reveal, means, he responds with a not untypical riposte. "Intentionally, nothing. It was plucked out of thin air by our manager at the very last minute. You can take what you want from it, though. You have my blessing." Another mischievous grin crosses his face. "As a writer, and trusted lover of the arts, take it and make of it what you want."

Would he admit, though, that the title does suggest some of the prevailing themes - the album, for instance, seems full of spiritual imagery and allusion, seems underpinned by the notion of elevation, ascension, of uplift, both physical and spiritual?

"That's an interesting take," he nods, apparently serious and reflective, "and Peter [Buck] has been saying the same thing." There is the first of many pauses here, accompanied by a a knitting of the brow."Where do you get that from? Which songs in particular?" I glance at my notes, scribbled hastily on the plane from London to New York. I mention a few song titles: The Lifting, Imitation Of Life, the latter with its echoes of Thomas À Kempis's theological treatise, Imitation Of Christ. These are not, I mumble, regular pop songs; they seem to hover around what Brian Eno once pinpointed as one of the key unspoken ideas of our time: spirituality without religion, without the notion of God. Stipe looks startled. "Um, maybe. I mean, it seems endemic in our generation that, as you get older, you start looking for spiritual meaning. People who reach their forties often seem to start patching together some version of a belief system, pasting together elements of existing religions, maybe a bit of Buddhism or Islam or even a slice of Catholicism. It's the sort of thing you could blow holes in from an academic or theological standpoint, but it's there and it's real. I guess there may be something of that instinct in the songs. It's kind of unconscious, though, it's not thought-out."

We continue like this for a while, me pitching ideas, possible meanings, possible misinterpretations of these new songs; him batting them back at me. After a while, I start to think that this evasiveness is a strategy: a way of undermining the intrusiveness of an interview, as well of avoiding having to explain, and thus reduce, lyrics that depend for their success on a sense of mystery, an abstraction. Stipe, of course, is acutely aware of all this. "I really don't want to reveal anything about a character or a song," he admits, "because I can remember, as a teenager, a record falling into my lap, and how magical and mysterious and revolutionary and unbelievably life-altering even one song on a record like that can be. I would hate to diminish or be unfaithful to that notion. Plus, I maintain that my take, my interpretation of what my songs are about, is, in the whole world, the least important take. I wrote them, but that does not give me some divine insight into their meaning."

But there are some definitive things you can say about Stipe's songs: they tend to avoid the first person and the confessional mode; they tend to be non-gender specific, even the occasional love songs; and, in terms of their often magical, occasionally unfathomable, free association, they are, alongside Thom Yorke's output, far removed from the abiding notion of the pop song. Even the poppiest Michael Stipe songs - Losing My Religion, Man On The Moon, The Great Beyond and the new REM single, Imitation Of Life - are littered with word play, layered with possible meanings."The best songs are the ones I don't have to think about, the ones I don't over-think or have to craft in order to complete. I think the unthought songs, the ones that come pouring out of me, are more real: the vomit songs. Losing My Religion was a vomit song. Man On The Moon. Sad Professor on the last album. Those are the songs that are truly inspired, they just come pouring out. I don't feel I'm a holy conduit to some bigger thing that comes dropping from the heavens. It's just something that I truly believe is inside all of us, whether we can access it or not." He adds, "I know I've written a good song when it just comes out of me like a hair ball, like a cat vomiting."

The new album, Reveal, though not immediately accessible, thankfully sees the group - and Stipe in particular - in inspired form: it sounds like they have delved deep in order to reinvent themselves. Unconsciously or otherwise, this is an album that seems to revisit the almost Arcadian landscape and pastoral imagery of early psychedelic rock: the drowsy underwater feel of Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd on All I Want, with its references to seahorses and dragonflies; the sun-drenched, acid-tinged harmonies of Surf's Up era Beach Boys on Summer Turns To High. Here, Stipe seems to be tapping into a whole other level of his unconscious. "For me, it is all about the present, about right now," he says, "and that's a big change. I used to wonder, would this song or that song stand up in 10 years' time. Now, I don't care. It seems more important that I can suck something out of the air and put it out again as something that speaks of that moment. That, to me, is real, and I think people are looking for the real in music again. All the constructed, mathematical, left-brain, male music is just . . ." he pauses, searching for exactly the right word"... tired."

On the plane back to London, I listen to this odd, fractured, truncated conversation with Stipe, and decide that he is, after all, as eccentric as he appears to be, and that he is also someone who has thought long and hard about his bohemian persona and the maintaining of it. He is, in fact, the modern pop star par excellence: he dances with his celebrity in much the same way as he dances with language - flirtatiously, elusively, mischievously. "I used to think he was quite mad," Thom Yorke tells me a few days later, "because there is this improvisational quality to everything he does, from writing to talking to singing. He's improvising all the time, even when he's not being a songwriter. In fact, he spends a lot of his time forgetting that he's a songwriter.You can quite easily, and without thinking about it, fill your life with music and get overwhelmed by that kind of living but, with Michael, it's not a 24 hours a day thing. He tries his best to live in the moment. That", says Yorke, seriously, admiringly, "is a real and beautiful thing"

• REM's new single, Imitation Of Life, is released on April 30. The album, Reveal, on May 14.