6 STAND
From the 1988 album Green. Released: January 1989.
Chart positions: UK No 48, US No 6

With its almost do-si-do/line-dancing-style instructions, and Bill Berry and Mike Mills providing supporting vocal interruptions, “Stand”, like many tracks on Green, is a slightly affected yet effective exercise in musical and lyrical contrivance that works either as a piece of clever silliness or as an existential call to arms, personal or political. It depends how seriously you choose to take it – but it’s a further example of REM’s duality at a time when they weren’t quite sure where they were at in pop’s food chain and were handling their success with kid gloves.

MIKE MILLS: It is a big, dumb pop song and very silly in its way. And yet the message it’s putting out is a very good one. Be aware of who you are, where you are and why you’re there. You can’t get any more universal than that. Think of what you’re doing and why. It’s almost a carpe diem sort of song.

PETER BUCK: I get the feeling that it’s certainly a song about taking control of your life and look where you stand, and stand there and be what you are. Play that song to 10,000 people and it’s something else again – or you could play it at a party and dance to it. We’d been on the road in 1987, and we’d certainly played big places in America. And with that and having a new record label, a newish producer, there was this thought, ‘Hey, let’s really put those drums up there.’ I could remix that whole album and create a much warmer record. With Green, we did stop doing things completely intuitively and started to think about what we were doing.

MICHAEL STIPE: It’s a wake-up call – I think I felt the need for that at the time. Politically, and whatever.

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5 MAN ON THE MOON
From the 1992 album Automatic For The People. Released: November 1992.
Chart positions: UK No 18, US No 30

Although Andy Kaufman tragically died of cancer several years before the track was released, “Man On The Moon”, with its rangy slide guitars and epic simplicity, exudes some of the warmest, fondest, most uplifting feelings of any REM track. Sublimely nostalgic, it’s as if Kaufman isn’t so much being lamented as reborn through the song – which, in effect, he was, since he’s gained a posthumous reputation to rival that which he enjoyed during his eventful life, spent baiting TV audiences with his conceptual pranks and wrestling women.

MICHAEL STIPE: I wouldn’t let him go, man. I’d never had the intention of bringing him back to the degree that I did by writing that song. I didn’t even know the song was going to happen like it did. He was absolutely original. I don’t think I’d want to sit at a dinner table with the guy, but from a distance… he was doing on TV what I was talking about wanting to do on radio. He was just blowing the doors wide open.

MIKE MILLS: Andy’s reputation is two-dimensional at best, especially in Britain, where if he’s known at all it’s as Latka in Taxi. But in America, he was unpopular. He wasn’t really a comedian, he was a performance artist who occasionally did funny things. He was an agitator, a provocateur. He loved to mystify and enrage. He was on Saturday Night Live, where he came out and did routines like Mighty Mouse. But eventually he became so unpopular that the show eventually ran a vote, probably at Andy’s instigation, asking people to choose whether Andy should ever come back again. And they voted “No”.

PETER BUCK: He was someone we all really loved. And because he was so generally loved among musicians as a whole, it took me a while to realise just how out of step he was with the world. He never stopped pushing it forward, to the point where you genuinely wondered if he was actually insane or schizophrenic, he was that far beyond the norm of what you were supposed to do. Here’s an idea – a comedian who doesn’t make you laugh. All right, there are quite a few of those when you think about it, but here’s a comedian who’s not actually trying to make you laugh, who’s setting out to make you feel totally uncomfortable.