David Stubbs invites Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe to talk about the 20 greatest singles of their major-label era. But which one does Stipe find “gross and disgusting”? And why does Mills think, “It’s amazing how many songs we’re playing now that we could have written yesterday...
18 STRANGE CURRENCIES
From the 1994 album Monster. Released: April 1995.
Chart positions: UK No 9, US No 47
Proceeding at the swaying pace of “Everybody Hurts”, “Strange Currencies” is nonetheless a more disturbing and far less wholesome proposition. As with most of the album, Stipe was taking the opportunity to explore the themes of infatuation taken to unhealthy, probably illegal extremes: “I’m going to make whatever it takes/Ring you up, call you down…” This has all the trappings of a ballad, yet it’s coated with a film of sleaze and desperation.
MIKE MILLS: Yeah. “Strange Currencies” – I love that sort of thing if it works. Peter was tired of playing acoustic guitar. So we decided to play electric. And it got a bit of a bad rap because between Out Of Time and Automatic For The People we got a boatload of new fans who expected us to continue to make the same sort of record, but we never do that anyway – long-time fans know that, but the short-term ones didn’t.
PETER BUCK: The songs were all kind of third-person. It’s a perverse record generally – all the songs are about peeping and stalkers.
MICHAEL STIPE: For me, Monster was a sonic experiment. I really wanted to experiment with my voice and different textures and push the really grainy, bassy, ugly sounds as far as we could. And yeah, the lyrics match that. They’re kind of gross and disgusting! But it was obvious that I was role-playing.
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17 NIGHTSWIMMING
From the 1992 album Automatic For The People. Released: July 1993.
Chart position: UK No 27
This ballad, which initially did not look like it was going to make the final version of Automatic For The People, is cut from the finest REM cloth, with its wistful orchestration, gently clashing themes of pleasure and melancholy, distantly recalling the innocent skinny-dipping frolics in which the band indulged in their earliest days at a lake near Athens, Georgia. It’s recalled with the distance and regretfulness of age (Stipe was in his thirties by now) and, once put through his lyrical filter, emerges as a vague but effective remembrance of things past.
PETER BUCK: Michael says that song is autobiographical, and I certainly remember that after shows back in Athens in 1980, just when the band started out, we’d all pile into cars and go off swimming naked – it’s something you can do in rural areas. But it wasn’t necessarily such an idyllic time and some people back in Athens didn’t end up leading such idyllic lives. It made sense for the record – it was the first song we finished for the album.
