R.E.M’s ninth album Monster, released 25 years ago, took people by surprise. Unlike the band’s previous work, it was an amped-up, sexed-up, glammed-up charge of distorted fun. “Shiny Happy People” it was not. (excerpt from inews.co.uk)
“It wasn’t really rock though” says bassist Mike Mills. “And it wasn’t grunge either”.
“What’s the Scottish band who wore the short pants and scarves?” singer Michael Stipe asks me. “Like Slade but they were sillier?”
Er, Bay City Rollers? “Yes! It was closer to that.”
“No!” insists Mills, shooting Stipe an affronted look. “Go back to Slade on that one.”
Stipe, previously the impenetrable figurehead of alternative rock, transformed into one of the most iconic frontmen in pop history, influencing Nirvana and Radiohead. But he was often a reticent interviewee, sometimes through obstinacy, sometimes with good cause: his rise to superstardom was met with constant hearsay about his sexuality and scurrilous gossip he had AIDS.
'The health rumours were really disturbing. People were genuinely concerned about me because I was skinny and had such a big head. But I’m still skinny and I still have a big head'
“If I’ve learned one thing from not being in R.E.M anymore it’s humility,” he says. “We had the audacity of youth, and the feeling that we could do anything, do it our way and people would follow, that our voice mattered. It’s wild that it placed us here.”
The success of 1992’s sombre, 18m-selling masterpiece Automatic for the People meant, according to Mills, “they could get away with anything”. But it also required what Stipe calls “an update”, inspired by U2’s ironic makeover on Achtung Baby. “We needed raw and loud, a big gesture that wasn’t ‘Everybody Hurts’. And we went to the extreme”.
It was around this time Stipe publically addressed his sexuality. “It was a personal decision and it was the right time for me. I felt empowered because of our position from the sales of the last two records. The idea that sexuality and desire and gender could be fluid – I’m glad that the 21st century is now backing me up on that.”
“We had to fight harder to qualify our position,” Stipe says of the band’s latter days. “And that was difficult. A big part of that was the articles about the $80m deal,” he says of the high-profile contract they signed with Warner in 1996, then thought to be the most lucrative in history. Apparently not.
“It’s an absolutely incorrect figure. The guy from the LA Times just took the highest record deal at the time, which was Janet Jackson, and just added $10m. That’s where that number came from. But it stuck. And we became viewed as different people, the guys with private planes and cocaine. And we’re so not that.” - To Read the full article click HERE
“Our relationship to the environment has been a lifelong concern, and I now feel hopeful—optimistic, even. I believe we can bring the kind of change needed to improve our beautiful planet earth, our standing and our place on it.”
Your Capricious Soul has already had a live outing, at New York’s Webster Hall earlier this year.
By the time they released this album in 1992, REM had already made the transition from cult college rock band to a rather unlikely stadium act. After the ‘shiny happy’ pop of their breakthrough Out Of Time, the ruminative Automatic For the People turned them into one of the biggest bands on the planet for a while, selling a whopping 15 million copies.
Singer Michael Stipe’s words had long since emerged from the deliberately foggy lo-fi production of their early years but the appeal of REM had always hinged on the hummability of their tunes, and there were more anthemic songs here than on any of their discs before or since. Perhaps surprisingly, though, it’s a more understated record than Out Of Time, leaning strongly towards an acoustic sound, with a third of the tracks even featuring orchestral arrangements by former Led Zeppelin bassist, John Paul Jones.
Bassist Mike Mills lateley decleared: "When you write a song with that much anger, disappointment and discouragement, which is what that song is, you certainly don’t expect that it’s going to be as relevant if not more so in 25 years. I hoped that the world would be a much better place. Indeed, the world did in many ways become a much better place, but unfortunately humanity is a self-destructive organism. America and the British have both made some particularly self-destructive decisions lately."
