Michael Stipe: ‘I love fame… It wasn’t always easy, but it’s fun’
As frontman of REM, he sold 85 million records.
Now working on a solo album, he talks about being a fashion ‘fanboy’ and his friendship with Kurt Cobain
A man with a white beard and a red beanie, wearing a brown suit jacket, red shirt, and blue jeans, sits with hands clasped.
Shirt, £684, Bode. Blazer, £3,990, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Jeans, £790, Celine. Hat, glasses (in blazer pocket), necklaces and ring (throughout), Michael’s own
Michael Stipe’s art studio is a cluttered, white-walled room full of ideas and history on a street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
It is the antithesis of what one would expect of an international rock star who sold 85 million records with his band, REM.
If anything, the location shows how far away from all that pomp he is now. REM split almost 15 years ago and Stipe spends much of his time here — behind a heavily bolted door, by graffitied lampposts.
“This is where the magic happens,” he says, deadpan, in his deep, gravelly voice, beckoning me inside from the winter chill as he returns from the local deli carrying water and “wildly overpriced” matcha energy balls.
“Do you live in LA?” he continues, when I tell him where I have just been.
I tell him I was there for the Grammys.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he says, grimacing like a man with no plans to be anywhere near that glitzy orbit ever again.
Pretty much because the Style team spotted Stipe at a Chanel show held last December in an abandoned subway station in New York and thought he looked great.
“Which I love!” he says, delighted, big eyes sparkling behind yellow-tinted specs.
This is who he is now: an artist and photographer who mostly flits between his studio and the shows.
“I’m a fanboy,” he says of the designers, which partly explains why he is wearing so many layers — there are just a lot of clothes that he likes.
A man with a white beard wearing a yellow knit sweater and a pale green ascot, looking directly at the viewer with an intense expression.
Neck-tie shirt, £395, Rolf Ekroth. Jumper, £512, and cardigan, £1,279, Extreme Cashmere. Ring (throughout), Michael’s own
Side profile of a bald man with a gray beard, wearing sunglasses and a striped jacket, with his hand near his chin.
Jacket, £2,330, Louis Vuitton. Scarf, £2,190, Hermès
The musician and style icon Michael Stipe talks all things menswear and reveals the best style advice he has ever been given
Stipe is 66, with a lifetime of eclectic outfits behind him.
In the early days of REM in the 1980s he tended to wear denim.
By the 1990s, when Out of Time and Automatic for the People turned the REM outsiders into critical and commercial behemoths, Stipe wore various hats to hide his thinning hair.
By the time of the release of 1994’s brash Monster, his hair was shaved off and he favoured a T-shirt with a black star on it.
Then came eyeliner, blue glitter worn like a Zorro mask and a Margiela jacket he calls the best in the world.
Finally, when the band split up in 2011, Stipe tried out a big beard.
“You see the fellow on the wall?” Stipe asks, gesturing to a photo of a man who could pass as the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.
“He was my mentor of style and first love of my life. He was a profound influence in terms of how I dress and eat, laugh at myself and how I regard the arts. His name was Jeremy Ayers.”
Ayers grew up in Athens, Georgia, but moved to New York to join Andy Warhol’s Factory studio as the drag queen Sylva Thinn.
In the late 1970s he returned to Athens, the city where REM formed after Stipe headed there, aged 19, to study art at the University of Georgia.
“We met and became lovers briefly but lifelong friends,” Stipe says of Ayers, who died in 2016.
“And, in essence, before thrift stores were a thing, he would put together outfits for himself. I’d wear make-up and dresses on stage, upsetting the frat boys, because dressing up is really fun, and my understanding of how you can put a shirt and trousers together, how you can be really stupid and silly about it, came from Jeremy. All my style came from him — every bit of it.”
Collage of the band R.E.M. in their early days and a current image of lead singer Michael Stipe with blue face paint.
‘I want my album to be great’
Behind Stipe is a large photo of a naked man.
To his right ten shelves form an artwork he made in 2017, each representing a year of the 1970s and filled with Stipe’s teenage influences.
He was born in Decatur, Georgia, in 1960, the brother to two sisters and son to John, who was in the US army, and Marianne.
The family moved around, through the States and to Germany, before Stipe settled back in Georgia — where he met Mike Mills (bass, vocals), Peter Buck (guitars, mandolin) and Bill Berry (drums) and formed REM.
Being in that band was a full-time job.
From 1983 until 1989 they put out an album a year, the release-and-tour schedule barely relenting until their final album in 2011.
Life became bigger — bigger than them — but for decades you could at least guess what Stipe was doing or where he was.
So, aside from the fashion shows and art galleries, what exactly does a very relaxed, semi-retired rock star do with his days?
“I’m working on a solo album,” he replies, smiling. “But it’s taken longer than I wanted.”
What happened to REM, the house band for Generation X?
His first solo song, Your Capricious Soul, came out over six years ago.
“Covid didn’t help,” Stipe says of the delay, “but I’m finishing it. When the band split, I just needed a break. I took five years but I got pulled back into music. It’s been a struggle. That’s the main thing. I want it to be great, but I’ve got the pressure of having been in REM and it’s a high bar, because I want this to be as good as that, and that’s near impossible. So it’s f***ing exciting but also terrifying, and I’m doing the music for the first time too, and I think I’m good at it but not great.”
“But I love my voice. I don’t like my speaking voice but I love my singing voice, and I so want to immerse myself back into offering music to the world.”
He still has another eight songs to finish — mostly lyrics.
He finds inspiration everywhere: in the shower, at a dinner.
He has a deadline and says, fingers crossed, that it will be out before the end of the year.
Indeed, just this week, Stipe released a new song, I Played the Fool, for the Steve Carell TV show, Rooster — an upbeat number that feels very late period REM.
“And my album will be great — I hope.”
“Not yet. But I did think about Meet THE Michael Stipe.”
We wander about his studio, over crates, boxes and signed books, photos and frames, chewing matcha energy balls and gawping at his past.
One feels a real calm in the presence of Stipe.
Like the Gandalf of alt-rock, he slowly and carefully points out various snaps of people he loved and lost — not sadly, but with the sense that at least he knew them.
Tucked away towards the back of the room is a set of photos of River Phoenix — his actor friend who died outside the Viper Room nightclub in Hollywood in 1993 and who Stipe calls “a profound loss”.
Then there are the close-up images of hands; he shows me his father’s, plus those belonging to Kurt Cobain.
He took pictures of both men on the same 36 roll in the early 1990s.
(Cobain died in 1994, and his father in 2015.)
“Rule one? Show up,” Stipe says about how to make the most of people you love.
“That’s the most important thing, and we are only human, we can only stretch ourselves so far, but it is important to at least make the effort. I scroll through my phone from time to time and land on, say, the Fs and think, OK, who have I not reached out to in the past six months? I pick a name, call and say, ‘Hey, how are you doing? How is your mum? When is that f***ing album coming out?’
“But as a gay man,” he continues — Stipe is in a long-term relationship with the photographer Thomas Dozol — “as queer me, going through the 1980s and Aids? You have a very clear understanding of somebody’s there, then somebody’s gone. You’ll never hear from them again. You’ll never see them again, they just disappear.”
“And, now, at my age? People are dying. You once went to weddings and now you’re going to funerals — that’s just the arc of life.”
Collage of two images, with the left image showing Courtney Love and Michael Stipe, and the right image showing Michael Stipe with Thomas Dozol.
Stipe with Courtney Love, 1997; with his partner, Thomas Dozol, in New York last year
Kurt and Courtney were fans
Cobain and his rock-star wife, Courtney Love, were very close to Stipe during the last years of the Nirvana singer’s life.
They were huge fans of REM and Cobain had told Stipe what future Nirvana music would sound like.
It would be quieter, with more strings — a little more REM.
When Stipe realised Cobain was struggling with addiction, he bought him a plane ticket so he could travel to Stipe to make music, but Cobain never turned up.
When he killed himself, Stipe felt helpless.
How does he look back at that era?
“I was texting Courtney yesterday,” Stipe says.
“But back then I had been through what Kurt was experiencing a few years before,” he says of his bond.
“I too had stepped down from a tour and had that adrenaline drop. I knew all the pitfalls, so it was a friendship and I had more experience with how to emerge intact.”
Did Stipe himself ever need help?
Was there a similar elder statesman to give him guidance?
“Sometimes, sometimes not. I had to pull pretty deep to emerge intact and to survive, truthfully — that’s not too strong a word.”
Could Stipe ever enjoy fame?
“I love fame,” he says, as if it would be mad to say otherwise.
“It wasn’t always easy but, yes, it’s really fun. Of course it is fun. It’s ridiculous. People pay attention to what you say or do, it’s a fascinating position.”
This is, I say, refreshing; lots of famous people just moan.
“But I’m lucky, because I get to take the subway. Courtney doesn’t take the subway,” Stipe says.
“I can walk the streets and people say, ‘Hey, thank you,’ but I am at a tier, and have been most of my life, where I can be a normal person. I don’t shut down a restaurant because people are gawking at me, but I’ve friends who do and that’s quite a limiting life.”
Is it true that Quincy Jones once asked Stipe to look after Michael Jackson?
“Yes,” he says — it was in 1992.
“I was at Quincy’s house and the band were going to the desert to shoot a video for Man on the Moon, so I wrote Michael a letter and said, ‘Hey, Quincy thought we should meet. We’re going to the desert and if you like you could join us.’ I knew he needed to be away from a lot of people. But I never heard back and we never met.
“But I did see him backstage when Bill Clinton was inaugurated,” Stipe adds, referring to Clinton’s first term in 1993.
“It was an insane Secret Service security thing. Jesse Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Lauren Bacall, Jack Nicholson, Oprah Winfrey and me. And then Michael Jackson came running through with 12 security guards. He was literally running. It was nuts. I don’t know where he was going. But Quincy was a sweet man who understood that Michael was going through a painful period and just needed normal friends.”
Stipe was the most normal person Jones could think of?
“Well, I am pretty normal,” he says, a little put out.
“Quincy just wanted people who are not yes men. He needed somebody who would just sit down with him and say, ‘Hey, what’s up? What’s your favourite vegetable?’ I don’t know!”
Stipe has spent a lifetime picking up famous friends, special souls from Patti Smith to Thom Yorke via Bruce Springsteen.
He drops names not to show off but because meeting these people is how he spends his time, from Billie Eilish to Ian McKellen.
He remains thrilled by music.
“Berghain by Rosalía? That song felt like the first time I heard the Sex Pistols.”
What will not happen, though, is a return of REM.
Indeed, the one time he bristles is when I suggest a recent photo of the band having dinner together might have captured them plotting a reunion tour.
“What?” he says, annoyed.
“No. We’re just very good friends who somehow survived this 31-year crazy thing that usually divides people.”
‘I am an optimist, ultimately’
It is time, then, for others to take the spotlight.
A long-time activist, Stipe is delighted that, at the Grammys, Bad Bunny and Eilish “stepped up” to speak out against what is a testing time for anybody with Stipe’s politics.
“It is upsetting and — as an American? — good lord, my apologies,” he says.
“These are tough times, but I try to remind myself we are moving through them…”
He has been here before — old enough to know the cyclical nature of things.
In 1991, during an acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music awards, Stipe stood on stage to engage in a fine bit of protest.
One by one, he removed the T-shirts he was wearing to reveal a series of slogans: “Wear a condom”, “Choice”, “Alternative energy now”, “The right to vote” and “Handgun control”.
A man with a white beard, black glasses, and a brown and blue patterned shirt looks directly at the camera.
White shirt, £1,250, The Row. Print shirt, £1,240, Prada
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
A man with a white beard and orange glasses wearing a dark grey velvet hoodie, pink sweatshirt around his waist, dark patterned skirt, pink socks, and green shoes, squats with his legs apart.
Hoodie, £1,450, sweatshirt (round waist), £670, and socks, £99, Tom Ford. Skirt, £575, Rolf Ekroth. Shoes, £99, Clarks
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
It was a striking display but all the slogans remain relevant.
“Sadly, yes,” Stipe says, sighing.
“And that’s really upsetting to me, because I thought, oh, I can use this public forum and my generation will understand…” He shrugs.
“I’m not terribly binary, but there is right and wrong and I thought people would know what is bad, how one behaves, what is human or inhuman. And I’m disappointed and sometimes take it personally when people emerge who did not get the note. You think it is going to make a difference…
“But,” he continues, “maybe it did?”
“I mean, from time to time someone approaches me to say they became an environmental lawyer because of such and such a song. Wow, that’s incredible.”
And this is how I leave him — buoyantly, the way his cathartic songs have made people feel for generations.
Even Everybody Hurts focuses on the line: “No, you are not alone”.
Stipe says that his writing offers an “escape hatch”, and if there are bleak lyrics, REM songs tend to bounce along on a beautiful melody anyway, which hides pain.
“I was thinking about this last night as I went to sleep,” he says.
“There is always hope in my writing. I am an optimist, ultimately — even if it’s a realisation in one’s last breath that they blew it. At least they are aware they blew it. To move through a life not recognising one’s mistakes or regrets is pretty sad.”
I say he appears to look at his own life and, indeed, his songs fairly objectively.
“Well, an ability to separate oneself from one’s work is essential, to step back and not convince yourself you’re brilliant all the time,” he says.
“It allows me to not be a raging arsehole, egomaniacal crazy person, because I was a pop star with a lot of light for most of my adult life.”
He looks around the room entirely contented, at the many memories, a star who neither burnt out or faded away but simply decided to shine somewhere else.
“A lot of people don’t emerge intact from that,” he says.
“But I feel quite grounded — I feel quite intact.”
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