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| REM's Mike Mills: 'To expose yourself, warts and all, was very daunting' | REM's Mike Mills: 'To expose yourself, warts and all, was very daunting' |
| (3 months later) | |
| In the summer of 1990, REM guitarist Peter Buck acquired a mandolin, the idea being that playing a new instrument might provide a different way of writing songs. While he was learning to play it, he came up with a distinctive riff, which became the basis of a new song. | |
| “It was pretty much done by the time he played it for us,” remembers the band's bassist, Mike Mills. “We finished it off at the rehearsal place and then recorded it. The things that Michael, [Stipe, singer] Bill [Berry, drummer] and I brought to it changed it a little bit, but it was pretty much as it was.” By the time the band recorded the tune – which now had lyrics, and a title, Losing My Religion – they knew it was rather special, but they had to convince their record company to release it and had no idea that it would have any particular commercial appeal above any of their other material. | |
| “Are you kidding?” Mills says. “It’s a five-minute song with a mandolin and no chorus. We never thought in terms of hits anyway, but there was no way we could have predicted how many people would have liked that song.” | |
| In fact, Losing My Religion became REM’s biggest worldwide hit, reaching N0 4 in the US – where it spent 21 weeks in the Billboard Hot 100 – and the UK top 20, picking up awards by the truckload and becoming something of a signature song among the band’s considerable canon. Their appeal had broadened with each successive album – Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction, Lifes Rich Pageant, Document and Green – but Losing My Religion became ubiquitous in pubs and clubs and cars around the globe. | |
| Reading on a mobile? Click here to watch the video for Losing My Religion. | Reading on a mobile? Click here to watch the video for Losing My Religion. |
| Largely on the back of that song, 1991’s Out of Time shattered expectations of two or so million sales to sell more than 18m copies, kickstarting the group’s 1990s ascension to the status of one of the biggest bands in the world.“It marked the transition from pretty big to really big,” Mills remembers. “Although for us it felt gradual. We were really lucky in that every record up to Automatic For The People [1992] and maybe Monster [1994], sold more than the one before it. So it felt very natural and organic, rather than this big avalanche of notoriety.” | |
| We’re talking about this now because Losing My Religion is the only song that appears twice on Unplugged 1991/2001, The Complete Sessions, a newly released acoustic live album featuring two long-unheard performances recorded at MTV’s New York studios, which capture the band at two pivotal moments in their career. The 1991 appearance was recorded just as Losing My Religion had exploded; the 2001 performance finds the band, by this point minus Berry, reinventing themselves all over again. | |
| Stipe once described the 1991 rollercoaster as a process of trying to “preserve your sanity and enable yourself to do it for a while and not suck or sell out”. Was that how it felt? “Yes, it’s a balancing act, for sure,” Mills says. “You want to be grateful and graceful about your success, and at the same time not let it go to your heads. That was one of the reasons we never moved to New York City. Staying in Athens [Georgia] helped us keep our feet on the ground. When you’re on tour or in the big city, people know you and want to talk to you. Then you go home and your friends know you and tell you what a dumbass you are. It kinda brings you back down to earth.” | |
| Otherwise, much else was changing. With Losing My Religion, the band had realised that they were able to write songs that could connect universally, which Mills says felt empowering. | |
| “It’s kinda satisfying, to know that your music resonates in such a way that that many people like it and it gives you the chance to do what you love for a lot more people. We were able to go to all sorts of places and do this thing we really loved. We never thought numbers. You’d never think how many people were listening to a song like Losing …. There’s no point analysing it, what you’re doing is organic and it comes from a place in the heart rather than thought. You do what you do whether there’s 10 people or a million people.” | |
| After years on independent label IRS, 1989’s Green marked the first of many records for Warner Brothers. Although Mills has sympathy for those who regard the shift in record companies marking two distinct phases of the group, he insists not much had changed apart from the fact that he finally owned a house and felt secure in his career. However, there were some new pressures. As well as having to coax Warners into releasing Losing My Religion as a single, going against the record company's wishes in refusing to tour Out of Time (because they needed to recharge after gruelling years spent on the road) also suggests a certain unease with the new, far more commercial world they were now in. | |
| Reading on a mobile? Click here to watch the video for Radio Free Europe. | Reading on a mobile? Click here to watch the video for Radio Free Europe. |
| The MTV appearance was a way of reaching millions without hitting the road and found the band in one way at the peak of their powers, but strangely vulnerable. Listened to now, it’s an extraordinary recording. At the beginning of the show at least – Stipe (who was just becoming a superstar and perhaps realising that life would never be quite the same again) sounds unusually nervous. | |
| “I think we were all nervous,” Mills says. “The last time we’d really played before that was the 89 tour, which was full on, big PAs, big amplifiers, and also MTV was really big at that point. We knew there was a big audience. So to sit there and expose yourself, warts and all, was very daunting. You really have to get yourself up for that.” | |
| Mills remembers the fact that there was a small audience – some friends but mostly fans, after the band had to “work with” MTV to ensure it wasn’t made up of industry people – in the room as being “as daunting as anything, because of the immediacy. So you’ve got that factor and the fact that its being recorded for posterity so you don’t want to mess that part of it up either." | |
| After Radio Song, three songs in, Stipe reassures himself – “Not bad” – and you can almost hear the nerves evaporating. It becomes a great performance by a band starting to embrace their history and their enormity. In today’s marketing-driven world, the choice of tracks seems unusual. Mills insists REM had no time for retrospection at that point, and were focused on the “present or the near future, all the time”. And yet, there they were, on a relatively new label with an album to promote, playing a set containing swathes of songs – Disturbance at the Heron House, It’s The End Of The World As We Know (And I Feel Fine), an ethereal Perfect Circle and a sublime Fall On Me (which Stipe introduces as “my favourite song from the REM catalogue") – from much earlier in their career, when they were far from the ultra-mainstream. | |
| Was that because you felt that they were good songs as well, and that the wider world should hear them too, or was it a reticence to play the promotional game of the world you were now in? | |
| “It was a bit of both. We never did things as we were supposed to do. That was part of our ethic. We did what felt right to us, not what someone told us we should do. We did want to play some of the old songs. It was much more than a promotional show. We never thought in that manner: every show was a specific event and we’d always try to make them special. We wanted to hear how some of the older songs would sound under the acoustic spotlight.” | |
| Another curveball is a beautiful Mills-sung cover of the Troggs’ Love Is All Around. As the bassist tells it, he and Buck had found an old 45 of the song in a garage sale and had started covering it. “We really enjoyed playing it, so tossed it in.” | |
| Reading on a mobile? Click here to watch the video for Love Is All Around. | Reading on a mobile? Click here to watch the video for Love Is All Around. |
| Three years later, a near-identical arrangement of the same song would be an international hit for Wet Wet Wet, which Mills admits was a bit odd. | |
| “I don’t know if they got the idea from us or they were Troggs fans,” he says, sounding quizzical. “The thing about that song … Love Is All Around is actually a much better song than Wild Thing.” A chuckle. “Wild Thing’s not the sort of thing we’d have done at MTV Unplugged.” | |
| By the time, REM returned to the MTV studios a decade later, they were minus Bill Berry, after he suffered a brain aneurysm and succumbed to increasing disenchantment with the demands of being in a globally enormous group. It was the band’s first line-up change since forming in 1980, after Stipe and Buck had met in Athens’ Wuxtry Records and bonded over a love of the Velvet Underground and Television. | |
| “It took some getting used to, for sure,” Mills says of Berry’s departure, which was long rued by many fans. “We had to decide if we were going to keep going and then we had to decide how we were going to keep going, and view it as an opportunity rather than a setback. It certainly freed us up to do anything we wanted to so we took advantage of that and tried to branch out in different directions.” | |
| You can hear that in the separate performances. Even though both are acoustic, the 2001 set – largely from that year’s Reveal album –sounds more fragile, almost redemptive. Even a turbulent and caustic song such as The One I Love sounds more becalmed and regretful: markedly different from the original. | |
| “It was new when Bill left the band, but it was part of that process of constant growth and change,” says Mills. “Bill just accelerated the process. It was 10 years on, we were a different band. We approached it with a different mindset; we were older and more experienced. Did I miss Bill? Yes and no. It wasn’t like he was dead. He wasn’t happy, and all that mattered was that he was happy. If he’s happier staying at home then by all means stay at home.” | |
| Which is pretty much what Mills did himself after REM finally disbanded in 2011. He took a year off to tend to his ill mother, but after she died plunged himself back into work. As we speak, he’s en route to Madrid to play with Joseph Arthur, and he and Buck still play together in the Baseball Project. Ending the group that made them all famous was, he says, “sad and bittersweet but it was the right time, and we all felt that it was the right thing to do at the time. We’re all pretty much at peace with it. I know I am.” | |
| • Unplugged 1991 & 2001: The Complete Sessions is out now on Rhino | |
| Reading on a mobile? Click here to watch the video for Pretty Persuasion. | Reading on a mobile? Click here to watch the video for Pretty Persuasion. |