Over the weekend, R.E.M. legends Michael Stipe and Mike Mills joined us at Esquire Townhouse 2019 for a rare onstage interview discussing the 25th anniversary of 1994's 'Monster', Michael Stipe's close relationship with Kurt Cobain, the impact of global success and their careers so far.
Before the talk (which you can watch above), we sat down with the pair to get an insight into where their heads were at as they prepared to follow-up the critically acclaimed 'Automatic for the People'.
How does it feel to look back on your career like this? To re-examine all those songs and images from your past?
Michael Stipe: I couldn't believe how cool we were. I mean, I was 33 when we put out Monster, and we were fucking handsome!
Mike Mills: We're not a very good band at looking backwards, we were always very concerned about the next thing. But now that we've disbanded and we've got a little time to reflect, it's kind of fun to see what we were up to 25 years on. It's not something we would do without this impetus. But it's kind of fun to see that. I'm hopeful that we'll bring a new generation of fans, too.
You hadn't toured in almost five years before you made Monster, and you wanted to get back on the road. Did that impact the songwriting process?
MM: Absolutely. When you write songs on electric guitar, you get different songs than if you write them on mandolin, or acoustic guitar, so we knew we wanted to have something in contrast to 'Automatic for the People', and to a lesser extent 'Out of Time'. So we made sure this record was as loud and as ballsy as we possibly could.
MS: Also, things had changed dramatically since our last tour, and we were part of that change. We needed to update how we presented ourselves and what we were doing, what kind of material we had to work with. At the time we were the most popular band that we would ever be. We'd just sold 20 million records with the two before and hadn't toured. So we knew it was going to be something very, very different and we needed to kind of step up to the challenge.
Is that what inspired the rockier sound?
MS: The last tour had been 1989. The next album after that had 'Everybody Hurts' and 'Man on the Moon', and we all became incredibly famous. So we had two albums worth of material that we knew everybody had gone out and bought, and wanted to hear live. But they were all really slow songs, and some of them were quite sad. So we tried to create something that was really raw and really big and really loud, and with more than a modicum of swagger.
MM: A lot of it was due to Peter Buck's rediscovery of the electric guitar. He'd moved away from it for two records and was ready to embrace it again, and start having some fun playing loud rock music again.
You were eight albums deep at that point, but did you still feel a lot of pressure to follow up Automatic for the People?
MM: Well, there's always a pressure for us to improve on ourselves. We wanted to make every record better than the last record, the best it can be. And also to challenge ourselves to do something that we hadn't done before. One of the last things we ever wanted to do was repeat ourselves. When you've written eight albums worth of songs and lyrics it's really hard to to continue to move forward, and that's what we insisted on doing.
What albums and artists were you listening to, and what were you influenced by?
MM: We don't really take from other bands, we get inspiration from other bands. However, there was a very good guitar renaissance going on at that time. There was the whole Seattle scene and the grunge thing, which we were friends with and impressed by but not of, and of lot of great Britpop. The British invasion was happening, and that was all very exciting. But it only made us want to do better, and didn't really affect our sound per se.
MS: From over here you had Blur and Suede and Blue Aeroplanes. We were playing a lot with glam rock, and our love of glam rock. That was something we had never exploited as REM. And so we were able to present ourselves in this very swaggering way. We had a little bit of distance from the music, kind of commenting on the idea of rock while playing rock.
You took on the role of different characters in the record's lyrics, did you go in knowing you were going to do that?
MS: I don't think it was intentional, I was just trying to write good narratives. And, you know, my life was great and fantastic, but who cares what a pop star is doing in their time off? I don't.
Monster (25th Anniversary Edition) is out 1 November.
