Tony Fletcher - Remarks Remade: The Story of R.E.M

T he original edition of Remarks was researched and written during the first six months of 1989, at a time when R.E.M. were finally breaking out of cult status and into the public domain of hit singles, platinum albums and sports arenas. At least that was the case in the USA, where Remarks was published in 1990. In the UK, where it came out in the autumn of 1989, R.E.M. had yet to score a Top 50 single. They were critics darlings for sure, and their imprint was indelibly stamped upon the Eighties as one of the decades most influential groups, but they were hardly a household name.

Myself, I had been an impassioned fan of R.E.M. from the moment I first heard Murmur in 1983. I witnessed all three of the bands dbut performances in the UK that November (at The Tube TV show, where I was then working, at Dingwalls in London the following night and at the Marquee three nights after that). I interviewed the group on several occasions when they visited the UK; I saw the band at least once on every one of their five further trips to Britain up to and including 1987. Somewhere between the release of Document, the bands fifth album, and Green, their sixth (and first for a major label), I moved to the bands home country, the United States. Shortly after the release of Green, the subject of an R.E.M. book came up in conversation with Andrew King and Chris Charlesworth at Omnibus Press (for whom I had written the official biography of Echo & The Bunnymen); the band seemed a suitable, if somewhat uncommercial, subject for a biography, and the fact that I was now living in the States and a committed fan with first-hand knowledge made me a suitable candidate to write it. I was delighted to take up the challenge.

To attract R.E.M.s passionate but limited following, Remarks was kept short. It was then artfully laid out by Liz Nicholson with nearly a hundred photographs, many of them rare and/or unseen. The upside to this was a book both attractive and inexpensive, an accessible and accurate introduction to a group that had long been shrouded in mystery. The downside was that some people looked at its photo-intensive layout and took it to be frivolous and/or lightweight, as if it had been assembled from press cuttings rather than solid research.

Hardly. In assembling Remarks, I spent a full week in the groups home of Athens, Georgia, interviewing friends and acquaintances, visiting first hand the locations from which R.E.M. and their sound had emerged, and experiencing for myself the sometimes intangible attributes that make the town so unique. I travelled to Winston-Salem to interview Mitch Easter, to Charlotte to meet Don Dixon, and to Cincinnatti to present my case for the biography to R.E.M. themselves, then on a major arena tour.

The group initially took the perfectly logical view that they were still a work-in-progress and therefore not yet ready to be ossified in print. At the same time, they understood that biographies were an inevitable by-product of the fame game. Peter Buck, in particular, as the bands resident rocknroll obsessive and archivist, seemed to agree that they would be better off telling their story than letting others tell it for them and volunteered to be interviewed on behalf of the entire group. I rejoined R.E.M. in Florida for a couple of days, interviewing Peter on the tour bus between shows. The office then helped me track other interviewees down, and confirmed my credentials to those I contacted myself. Personal lives and family backgrounds were considered firmly off limits, a rule I respected. None of this was mentioned in the introductions to the previous editions of