Their seventh album made them superstars. But the fame cost REM a band member and, nearly, their friendships. In a rare interview, five years after splitting, they discuss legacy, Trump and why they’re still sorry for Shiny Happy People

Michael Stipe stops in mid-sentence. Something is bothering him. “I’m gonna fix your collar,” he says. “It’s gonna drive me crazy. I wouldn’t think of anything but your collar for the rest of my life.” He stands up, walks around the table from his side to mine, and – as every fibre of my being screams, “Do not touch me. I am British. I am repressed. I do not like complete strangers invading my space” – he stands behind me and carefully rearranges my collar until it is to his satisfaction.

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There’s a certain irony. It’s me invading Stipe’s space, for one thing. The former REM singer is, as he puts it, “insanely shy” – he eschews eye contact for much of our conversation, and much of his face is now hidden behind a beard of ZZ Top proportions – and interviews in the latter years of REM often portrayed an antsy man, niggling with his interlocutors, ill at ease with something. He’s here today on a hot October afternoon, back at REM HQ in Athens, Georgia, to talk about the 25th anniversary of the album Out of Time, the one with Losing My Religion on, the one that sold 18m copies and made them famous around the world. And he seems a lot happier than he did in those final REM interviews before they disbanded in 2011. In fact, he’s a delight.

When REM split, he says, he wondered: “‘Well, who am I now?’ But it didn’t knock me over. I thought it would. But I was like, ‘Wow! Now I can read a book! I can listen to other music! I can create a new voice for myself!’ And that’s what I’ve spent the last five years doing. Five years and a few weeks. I love the post-REM me. I actually do. And that’s not a therapist talking. I just like where I’m at. It feels really good.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watch the video for Losing My Religion.

The previous evening in the one Athens restaurant that serves until midnight – having polished off a plate of three different kinds of oysters and a bowl of clam chowder, washed down with three glasses of chenin blanc – bassist Mike Mills seemed equally at ease. It had been the Ryder Cup the previous weekend and he had been watching it – “Davis Love is a great friend of mine” – and you rather get the impression that REM’s principal function was to enable Mills to fulfil a lifelong dream of watching professional sport wherever and whenever he likes. Does he miss REM? “Not really. I went to a U2 show earlier this year. For the first two or three songs, I was thinking, ‘I could be doing this.’ And then … ‘BUT I’M NOT! IT’S GREAT! Let those boys carry on. I’m perfectly happy to be a spectator!’”

It’s easy to forget quite how good REM were. They weren’t always good – Stipe reckons they put out “several great records – and a couple of stinkers” – but whatever way you cut it, they were perhaps the most wonderful American band of the 80s and 90s, the founding fathers of what became known as “alt-rock”. Their first album, Murmur, was perfect, a misty and mysterious reverie. They followed that with one miraculously good record after another, and while people might disagree on where things started slipping, one could make a case for every album up to and including their 10th, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, being a classic, and for much of their later work being unduly neglected.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Stipe – and beard – in New York in 2016. Photograph: Mireya Acierto/Getty Images

Peter Buck, the guitarist who was the onstage rock’n’roller to Stipe’s eccentric performance artist, knew from the minute they formed in 1980 – drummer Bill Berry making up the quartet – they had something remarkable in their chemistry. “Michael and I had been writing songs, and Mike and Bill had played together in high school,” he says down the phone – he didn’t make it back to Athens. “And we met and rehearsed, and at the end of the rehearsal we had six songs we’d written. A couple of people came in, and one of them said: ‘How long have you guys been playing together?’ I said: ‘About three-and-a-half-hours.’ I’m not saying we were great, but we had something, and it was the interplay of our ideas.”

If you look at it coldly, in fact, it is something of a miracle that REM could even exist – four young men, who happened to be in the same place at the same time, with a gift for combining perfectly: not just in the obvious ways, but also in how Mills’s gift for counterharmony complemented Stipe (listen to the chorus of It’s the End of the World As We Know It), how Berry added yet more depth with his own harmonies, how Buck had a gift for guitar lines that sounded both timely and timeless. “A very good band does hold true to the axiom: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” Mills says. “The fact that we all met each other and formed a band is the mindblowing thing. It had to be these people, in that time, in that space, to make this happen.”

In another era, Stipe wouldn’t have been a rock singer. Were he young now, he might have become a video artist, or a photographer, or some nonspecific creative type. But when rock’n’roll hit him in 1975, that was the obvious path for an unusual kid with an urge to make art: “That’s when I thought: ‘This is what I’m gonna do.’” And even then, where many songwriters write because they have a burning urge to share something with the world, Stipe wrote songs for a less driven reason: “I needed 12 songs for an album. And the guys would push me very hard. And I was the slowest. And I’ll always be the slowest.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The band backstage in 1984. Photograph: Paul Natkin/WireImage

You can hear that in Stipe’s writing. Some REM lyrics are terrific. Some are really not very good. But what they had in their favour was Stipe’s unique, oaky voice, one that could imbue pretty much any set of words with emotional force and deep resonance. Take Everybody Hurts, a worldwide hit single so potentially platitudinous that it has become an X Factor staple: Stipe makes it sound like the most comforting and profound lyric in pop history.

Out of Time, Stipe thinks, is where he started to write well. “I had a pretty clear idea of what I was good at and how I could manifest that, but also the power of the word.” He realised that “a shitty nonsensical lyric” could work in one song, but equally that he could deliver words that “actually fucking resonated on a very deep level. And so Country Feedback resonated on a very deep level. I knew that instantly. It wrote itself. I began to realise around Document [in 1987] that I had skill and I honed it. In time it went from skill to art and my job was to forget everything and allow the instinct to take over, and that’s when the great songs came. Losing My Religion was instinct, Country Feedback was instinct, Me in Honey …” At the time, Stipe said Out of Time was their first set of love songs. Not any more. “I think I just said that. I needed a line. But they’re not love songs, are they?”

It appears to gall him, still, that a lot of people remember Out of Time not for the great songs, but for the sugar-sweet bubblegum pastiche Shiny Happy People (“I’ve made my excuses over and over again and I’ll go to The Hague with my excuses for that song”), but it’s him who brings it up, not me. And then he tries to rationalise it with an anecdote that involves James Franco making a TV series “about identical twins and the high jinks that happen”, which reminded him of an Elvis Presley film about identical twins and, yes, their high jinks, about getting the name of that film wrong, but how the soundtrack to that film – Kissin’ Cousins – was the first album he bought because he loved the title track. “It’s still a really good song. Anyway, that was Shiny Happy People.” I try my best to look like I have some idea what he’s talking about. “I have great stories, but I’m a terrible storyteller,” he says, accurately.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watch the video for Everybody Hurts.

Out of Time was released just as the first Gulf war got underway. It’s coming out again at another troubled point in American life. It’s a coincidence, but an odd one. “We still have a Gulf war going on,” Buck observes. “I’m just so disgusted.” Mills observes of Donald Trump that “he was bad enough as a private citizen, but he’s much worse as a politician”.

Stipe is most damning. “Donald Trump shouldn’t have made it through the third week of the Republican clown car of candidates,” he says. “The media jumped on him because he’s a great reality TV star and we’re watching the greatest reality TV show of all time unfold in real time through the American presidential election.” That morning, Stipe says, his French boyfriend had told him how France needs to update the Fifth Republic. “America has never updated,” he notes. “We’re still working like the Bible or the Qur’an, we’re working off a set of rules from another era. We need to really seriously look at who we are and where we are and bring things up to speed.” Or, as he sang on Cuyahoga 31 years ago: “Let’s put our heads together / Start a new country up.”

REM’s politics was something that defined them at the height of their fame. At the 1991 MTV video music awards, where the band won six awards, Stipe used the group’s appearances to strip off his T-shirts, revealing a series of slogans – “Wear a condom”, “Choice”, “Alternative energy now”, “The right to vote”, “Handgun control”, “Love knows no colours”, “Rainforest”. That was just the tip of the iceberg: Stipe, especially, always seemed to be talking up his favoured causes; it was something he felt was both a duty and a privilege, but it created pressures. “The hardest part was being put in the position of being ‘the voice of a generation’,” he says. “It’s not a pretty place to be. It’s not easy. I tried. I did try to use the platform of being a public figure. But you find yourself sitting at a table, with someone saying: ‘Describe to me the problems of global warming from a sub-Saharan perspective.’ I’m a pop star. That’s not what I went to school for.”

When the group began, Buck had insisted on a series of guidelines – moral, ethical, personal, financial, aesthetic – that would steer them throughout their career. Some were fairly trivial – no leather onstage, so they didn’t look like every other rock band. Some were crucial – sharing all songwriting credits equally, regardless of who wrote the song, so there would be no arguments about money down the line. Some of those guidelines are still in use – Buck tells me that earlier in the day we speak the group had turned down a multi-million-dollar offer to have their music soundtrack an advertising campaign (“I don’t want my children to see me being a whore”). And it’s still the case that any one of the members can veto any decision related to REM, as was the case throughout their career.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest REM, with Stipe in one of the slogan T-shirts he wore at the 1991 MTV awards. Photograph: The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

So who used the veto most often?

“I think Michael might have done it more, but as the face of the band, things affected him more than us,” Mills says.

I put that to Stipe. “Ooooh!” His lips form a little moue, and he raps the table twice. “We had a run-in last week, me and Mike Mills,” he says, and he laughs. “And I gave in to his desires. I don’t know if that’s the case. If he says it is, then he doesn’t say things like that without a reason.”

“Off the top of my head, I’d say Michael,” Buck says. “But it might be me.”

I tell Buck that Stipe had seemed surprised when I said Mills had nominated him. “He shouldn’t be. I would be fairly comfortable saying he and I would be pretty close to tied. I can rant for 10 minutes about why something is morally, ethically, culturally wrong. And Michael might just say: ‘I don’t wanna do that.’”

The different members of REM took to their superstardom after Out of Time in different ways. Mills sounds as if he was utterly untroubled by it: “Nothing felt like it came on too fast, nothing felt like it was more than we could handle.” (“Of course he would,” Stipe says. “That’s his personality.”) Buck professes to having thought “it was all kind of bullshit. We just made a record – big deal. When we went around to do the next record, Automatic for the People, I just disappeared off the face of the earth. Grew a big beard and drove round in my car and flopped in motels for a year. So I never really had to confront the overwhelming nature of it until 1995 [when REM toured after six years off the road], which was mindblowing for all of us.”

Stipe, though, was the frontman, the one who had to stand in the headwind. “The face. Mike Mills called me Face. I was the recognisable one to the world at large.” He relied on the other three to stop becoming, in his words, a monster. “If I believed everything that was said about me and all the adulation, anyone in that position would [become one],” he says. And yet Stipe’s insecurities plagued him. If a show wasn’t sold out, he was horrified. “If I was going to put that much effort into it, and I did, I wanted to know that I had a rapt and captive audience. I would always, always look around and find the one person who was yawning or looking at their watch. You have to believe that what you’re doing is so important that everybody is going to be absolutely and completely captivated and in the moment with you. And when you see that one person putting on their lipstick or checking their watch or talking to their girlfriend … wow.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watch the video for Shiny Happy People

He got increasingly fed up, too, with the portrayals of his public persona. He became bored with who he seemed to be, what he was saying. He wearied of being called “enigmatic” by people trying to boil down his sometimes contrary, sometimes diffident personality into a single word. Recalling that causes him to reflect on his father, who shared similar traits. “His humour was really dry, and really smart,” he says. “He reacted to things that he saw, and he reacted to them in a way that was hysterically funny. Most people didn’t understand that. Or would take a day or two before going, ‘Oh my God, that was really astute and hysterical.’ I got a little bit of that. So the enigmatic thing I understand. But it became hideously close and I became really bored with myself, and I didn’t think I had anything new to say. I’d played that character. I didn’t think I could do it again.”

Perhaps the one most affected was Bill Berry. He left the group in 1997, explaining simply that he wasn’t enjoying it any longer. They continued without him for 14 years, in which it sometimes seemed they stumbled more than skipped. “The three-legged dog went through the meat grinder and ended up in … where’s the place they grind up the bones and turn them into glue? The rendering factory,” Stipe says.

You might expect Mills, Berry’s high-school friend, to have been the one who missed the drummer’s presence most. He says not. “I think it was harder on Peter, because Bill was the balance. Bill and Peter wanted more concision in the songs. Michael and I tended to elaborate and add more things.”

“The power dynamic shift that occurred between the three of us was so profound as to literally break up the band and put it back together and break it up and put it back together,” Stipe says.

“No one really wanted to listen to me,” says Buck. “Which was fine. But no one really had a lot of set goals in mind either. Bill was a no-bullshit guy, and with him gone, it feels to me in retrospect that I was more aggressive than I should have been and everyone was pushing back not to have me bully them. We were all pushing in such different directions, and we were feeling such frustration and anger about it. I started backing away from the whole thing: I had to be talked out of the tree a couple of times, when I said: ‘I don’t want to do this any more.’ After the 2005 tour, I was totally fed up and we just didn’t talk for, I don’t know, a year.”

Stipe remembers things being just as bad seven years earlier, when they made Up, their first album without Berry. “We made choices that were not great choices, because we simply weren’t talking. That record really needed an editor, but we could not only not arrive at a decision, we couldn’t be in the same room together. It was bad.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Live at the Milton Keynes Bowl in 1995. Photograph: Mick Hutson/Redferns

All three agree – they would, wouldn’t they? – that REM were back on track by the time they called it a day in 2011. Their final two albums, Accelerate and Collapse Into Now, seemed more in touch with what had made REM great in the first place than some of their immediate predecessors, and the three were able to part once again reconnected with what Buck describes as “a deep and abiding friendship. It was nice to have nothing but the music and our friendship tying us together, as opposed to the music, the friendship, the contracts, the upcoming tour, the 300 employees we’re hiring – all the other things that tend to get in the way of interpersonal relationships.”

REM gave Stipe something that nothing else ever has: adrenalin. “It’s a very powerful drug,” he say. “And you have to wean yourself off it carefully. I still miss it. But, hopefully, you find other things to get excited about.” Buck, for his part, longs for particular eras of the group’s lifespan. “I miss being in REM in 1983 and 1987. Which is to say, I miss being young and in the centre of my culture.”

What REM have left is a legacy, of both music and of how a band should comport itself, one you see replicated whenever a band with principles crosses over to a mass audience: Radiohead, for example, might consider how much they owe to REM. “We did a remarkable job of maintaining integrity throughout a very difficult period and in a difficult industry,” Stipe says. “We forged a new path. We created a new way for people to look and approach this and not become an empty puppet or a dog and pony show.” He pauses. “What’s the other part I’m proud of?”

The records?

Stipe looks up and laughs. “Yeah!”

The 25th anniversary deluxe edition of Out of Time is released on Universal on 18 November. Michael Hann’s trip to Georgia was paid for by Universal.