When REM created a Monster: inside the tour that almost destroyed them

Halfway through REM’s March 1995 concert at the Patinoire de Malley in Lausanne, a bowling ball struck Bill Berry on the side of the head. That’s how it felt to the 36 year-old drummer at least. Beneath the rafters of the barn-like ice hockey arena, the band were negotiating pervy power-ballad Tongue, Michael Stipe’s ode to an intimate act. And then, something rose up and hit Berry. It was all he could do to keep sitting upright.

Berry had in reality suffered a ruptured aneurysm on the right side of his brain. Having somehow finished the song, he stepped from behind his kit, mumbled “my head hurts” and collapsed into the arms of guitarist Peter Buck.

Carried backstage by the crew, he winced and put his hands to his temples. After a quick huddle, it was decided to see out the show. Joey Peters, from support band Grant Lee Buffalo, would take over from Berry. To give the newbie a break, the band threw in an acoustic – and percussion-free –  version of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game during the encore.

In REM’s dressing room, a doctor assured Berry he had merely experienced a severe migraine. Berry’s wife, however, insisted he go to hospital for an X-Ray. Two days later, he was undergoing brain surgery. He would spend three weeks recuperating in Switzerland. The scar across his shaved head stretched 15 inches, according to REM tour guitarist Scott McCaughey.

“There wasn't any warning,” Berry would recall to the Los Angeles Times. “I was just singing the falsetto part on Tongue when it happened.”

“He was a lot sicker than people knew,” Buck told Tony Fletcher for his book Perfect Circle: The Story of REM. “He was paralysed for a few days.”

Berry survived. Yet for some REM fans Lausanne was the night the band died. With the drummer out of action REM cancelled the rest of their spring European tour, including four nights at Wembley Arena. But by the summer they were back in the saddle. And, 25 years ago this week, they finally reached the UK, beginning with a concert before an audience of 56,000 at Cardiff Arms Park on July 23.

But it is true that REM were never quite the same afterward. Berry’s departure in 1997 was almost certainly connected to his health issues. His exit changed REM – who had previously vowed never to continue as a three-piece – and they faded away with a sequence of ever more underwhelming records before finally calling it quits in 2011. By that point nobody cared all that much. REM had long since run out of time.

REM would have appreciated the irony. Death had swirled around their 1995 tour and the album, Monster, they had released the previous September. And yet the plan going in had been to put out a raucous and affirmative record.

Automatic For the People, their previous LP, was steeped in singer Michael Stipe’s obsession with mortality. Monster was conceived as a reaction to all that. This was REM plugging in, glamming up and reconnecting with their indie-rock roots. How did it turn out to be precisely the opposite?

The omens were there from the outset. In October 1993, just weeks after REM had gone into the studio, Stipe’s friend River Phoenix collapsed outside Johnny Depp’s Los Angeles club the Viper Room.

Phoenix, 23, overdosing on heroin and crack cocaine, died on the pavement in the arms of his sister Rain, who unsuccessfully attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. By way of marking the loss, REM invited Rain to sing backing vocals on the Monster track Bang and Blame.

The following April another friend of Stipe’s, Kurt Cobain, died by suicide. The REM singer had been concerned for Cobain’s emotional health for some time. When Cobain went off the grid, Stipe feared the worst.

“I had been talking to Kurt, and when he disappeared, I knew it,” he told Rolling Stone in October 1994.

“We all knew it. For seven days nobody knew where he was. I knew that a phone call was going to come, and I was just hoping that it was going to be a good one. And it wasn’t. So we were a little prepared. But it was bad. Really bad.”

This left its imprint on the record with Stipe writing shoe-gazy ballad Let Me In in honour of his fallen comrade. “I had a mind to try to stop you,” he sang. “Let me in, let me in”.

Bad vibes continue to linger as REM rolled into Cardiff on July 23. That May, radio station KPNT in Collinsville, Illinois had been tricked into reporting Berry’s death live on air. And just a fortnight previously on July 11, bassist Mike Mills had undergone surgery in Germany in order to have a intestinal tumour removed. It was benign. At least Mills was catching a break.

The band, Stipe in particular, hadn’t been all that keen on playing live in the first place. Having emerged from the fiercely independent Athens, Georgia alternative scene, they had built a cult following through the Eighties. But they did so on their own terms. Early on Stipe’s lyrics had been indecipherable; their songs brooded over knotty subjects such as the environment and the rightward drift in American politics.

Even when selling out venues such Hammersmith Odeon, as they were by 1987, it seemed unthinkable REM would ever follow the Rolling Stones or Queen and play stadiums. They were surely too self-aware to become an arena-rock cliche.

“If we ever did a stadium tour,” Buck once observed, “I would imagine it would be about the last thing we’d ever do together.”

The greater their popularity the more pronounced their reluctance to take their hits on the road. A near year-long tour supporting 1989’s Green had worn them down, extracting an especially heavy toll on the sensitive Stipe. When they crashed into the mainstream with Losing My Religion in February 1991 – surprisingly it only reached 19 in the UK – fans were denied a chance to hear the song in the flesh.

REM retreated even further into themselves with 1992’s gorgeously moribund Automatic for the People – a meditation on age and decline from a group now proceeding into their thirties. Stipe refused to promote or tour Automatic. His frail appearance lead to speculation he was dying of Aids.

But he wasn’t, so REM then made Monster, a project designed explicitly with the road in mind. They were as rich as kings by now. And yet a rock band could only avoid playing live for so long.

“I love my job. I love the position I’m in,” Stipe told Rolling Stone in late 1994, as REM prepared to unleash Monster. “I love all the benefits that come with being what I am and doing what I do. I’ve got everything. Within that, I hate touring. But I’m going to do it. I guess.”

In Cardiff on July 23, they seemed like a band in two minds as to whether they wanted to be there. The production was understated by stadium rock standards. The orange and black colour scheme of Monster’s cover sleeve was mirrored by low-hanging dusky lamps and by Stipe’s Fanta-coloured trousers (full credit to whoever did his wardrobe).

But they weren’t in town to bash out the hits. A mere four songs from Automatic For The People made the setlist. Among them was mega-downer Try Not To Breathe, a dirge told from the perspective of someone on their death bed about to shuffle into the beyond. We Will Rock You it was not. Out of Time, the record that made them stars, was, for its part, represented by just three tracks – though they didn’t dare skip Losing My Religion.

Still, it was a heady evening. With their April UK tour cancelled in the aftermath of Berry’s health scare, the feeling was that REM fans were lucky to have them and so were determined to make the most of the occasion.

The sense of watching history unfold was undeniable. This was the summer of Britpop and REM had booked some of the scene’s biggest names as support. The day before Cardiff, at Slane Castle in Ireland, Oasis had warmed up the crowd.

The performance was combustible and very, very Oasis. At one point, Liam Gallagher stopped the show to remonstrate with idiots up the front trying to take his eye out with airborne coins. On the long walk up to Slane Castle many punters had sported novelty tape-on Noel and Liam eyebrows. At that point, the Gallaghers’s bushy brows were apparently among their most notable attributes.

There was no Gallagher show at Cardiff. Instead, the Cranberries, Del Amitri and Belly opened. Two nights at Huddersfield’s futuristic McAlpine Stadium, on July 25 and 26, meanwhile, saw support duties shared by the Beautiful South, Echobelly and Terrorvision. And oh to have seen REM at Milton Keynes Bowl on July 29 and 30 where, depending on the night, Blur, Radiohead, and – back for seconds – the Cranberries helped warm up the the crowd.

“I’ll always remember doing that REM gig in Milton Keynes,” the Cranberries Noel Hogan said last year. “It was a big proper arena stadium. You go, “I can’t believe this is happening”. That lineup was Radiohead, us and REM. You were going, 'this is unbelievable'.”

“It was certainly a huge operation,” recalls Belly drummer Chris Gorman.

“To me there was nothing odd about REM emerging as a 'stadium' band,” he continues. “By this point they had a very deep catalogue [of] songs suited for the big stage. It’s The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine), Losing My Religion, Man on the Moon, Everybody Hurts. Loads of songs that really translate to the big stage, demand audience engagement and also contain lyrical imagery that leads to a great stage production.”

“Chris had a birthday on that tour, and Michael pulled him out on stage and had an entire stadium of people sing Happy Birthday to him,” says Belly front woman Tanya Donnelly. “ I think this speaks to how genuinely kind and inclusive they are as individuals, and as a band. We’ve opened for a few giant headliners, and they stand apart as a shining example of grace and character.”

Despite the mishaps, the atmosphere backstage was upbeat Belly recall. “It was an amazing stage and sound crew,” says Gorman. “They had a very organic vibe to the production with many moving parts and quite a lot of spontaneity, which I think made it a little more exciting for everyone.

“The big setbacks, from my perspective, were health issues. Bill had suffered an aneurysm. There were rumblings that this would have to be his last tour. So that added a melancholic urgency. Mike Mills was hospitalised mid-tour so there were lost dates and a fear that the tour might not resume.”

“There was a massive sense of occasion at Huddersfield that baking hot day,” adds Dickie Felton, a PR executive, blogger and author of two books about Morrissey, who saw REM at the McAlpine (today the John Smith’s Stadium). “The fact we travelled on a packed bus from Merseyside without such luxuries as air conditioning added to the anticipation. The venue was unique in that it was a futuristic stadium the likes of we’d not seen before.

“It was a bit like watching a gig at a space station. There must have been 35,000 there with a few tickets available on the day for walk-ups. There was a hill to the right of the stage and some fans watched from up there for free. They looked like dots miles away.”

Felton felt the set perfectly judged. Even the bleaker moments resonated. “I remember people being quite emotional when they played Let Me In. This song was about Stipe’s attempts to help Kurt Cobain but how he couldn’t reach and rescue him,” he says.

“I was in love with Try Not to Breathe. I’d only ever heard it on a beat-up cassette. So for REM to be playing it in front of me was thrilling. Ironically, I think I just closed my eyes and let the sound flow over me. It was a hot day but occasionally a cooling breeze would sail over sunburnt faces in tandem with gentler moments like County Feedback, which remains one of my favourite songs ever. “

“They were musically at the top of their game,” says Chris Gorman. “Michael Stipe has a witty subdued charismatic swagger that is wholly unique to him. These guys were clearly in their element but they are a unique type of rock band.  Even in performance it wasn't about excess or explosions or pandering. They played the songs they wanted to play, the way they wanted to play them.”

REM would bring the tour back to the United States that autumn. And still the bad luck continued. In August, Stipe pushed his vocal cords too far and required surgery. “It was a hernia for me from singing a high note in a song, and I know exactly the song,” he said last year.

“And then Peter was watching both ways before he crossed the street because each of the three of the rest of us had fallen ill. Mine was not serious. It was not fun or easy to sing afterwards, but Mike’s was serious. He could have died but they caught his in time. Bill came close to death more than once. We downplayed the severity of his condition at the time, but it was brutal.”