"We were sunbathing together outside of the dressing rooms": Thirty years ago, R.E.M. befriended a young British band and helped steer them on the path to greatness

Thirty years ago, R.E.M. had every excuse going to arrive on British and Irish shores in all sorts of disrepair. The global tour to support the amped-up anthems of their 1994 album Monster had begun back in January and had been beset by all manner of health issues. In the most major incident, they’d been taken off the road for two months as drummer Bill Berry recovered from a brain aneurysm he suffered onstage in Switzerland. Then a run of dates in Europe in July were nixed after bassist Mike Mills required abdominal surgery.

But R.E.M. did not arrive on British and Irish shores looking like the walking wounded. They picked the tour back up at Slane Castle in Ireland on July 22^nd and for that and a UK tour that took in huge outdoor shows in Cardiff, Huddersfield, Edinburgh and Milton Keynes, the Athens, Georgia alt-rock giants were in the form of their lives. I can say this confidently because the second Milton Keynes Bowl show on July 29^th, 1995 – 30 years ago next week – was my first gig.

It wasn’t just a landmark moment for me, though, it was also a moment of huge significance for a band who, over the next few years, would completely reshape the alternative-rock landscape. Blur and Oasis also had support slots during the run but on the day I went, Radiohead were second on a bill that was completed by Sleeper and The Cranberries. It was the first time that Thom Yorke & co., huge R.E.M. fans to a man, had met Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry and so began the beginning of a long and close friendship between the two frontmen.

Michael Stipe recalled their first encounter to this writer a few years ago. “We met backstage, I went and presented myself to Thom,” Stipe said. “Then he presented me to the rest of the group. I think we were sunbathing together outside of the dressing rooms. It was a beautiful summer day.”

Yorke also recounted the meeting in a diary entry for Q Magazine at the time. “First gig with R.E.M.,” he wrote. “Mr Stipe comes in before the show to say hello. ‘Hi, I’m Michael. I’m really glad you could do this. I’m a very big fan.’ Wonder how many times I will run this through my brain after today. I’ve never believed in hero worship and so on, but I have to admit to myself that I’m fighting for breath. I’ve had moments in the past two years when time has completely curved and space has become a Hitchcock camera trick. At these moments, barriers seem to break in my head and I never see anything in the same way again. And for days and days all I want to do is run around jumping into people’s earshot waving my hands up and down like Björk and pulling faces. This is one of those moments.”

Radiohead would hook up with R.E.M. for a further five dates in Europe and then rejoin the tour for a further 18 shows in the US in September. It wouldn’t be long before the Oxford quintet would be elevated above and beyond support band status but the stint with R.E.M. would live long in the memory as to how you should act when you’re one of the world’s biggest bands.

“I remember early on when we went out and toured with R.E.M. around The Bends, and seeing how they managed to have that artistic integrity at that level that they were operating at and seeing how they were just decent people, basically,” Radiohead drummer Philip Selway told me a couple of years ago when asked who’d given him the best advice across his career. “You learn by example rather than necessarily somebody being quite didactic about it.”

Speaking about his R.E.M. fandom a few years ago, Yorke said they were the band who put him on the path to making his own music. “Before I discovered R.E.M. in the mid-eighties, I was listening to bands like Japan. Music to kill time with,” he said. “Then I discovered R.E.M. and it turned my life upside down. Michael Stipe was singing about his flaws and weaknesses, and that it is okay to be weird. I was weird. And through his songs Stipe spoke to me, “It’s okay, you don’t have to justify yourself to anyone.” Shortly after that, I signed up for art school and started to take making music seriously.”

The two bands would stay in touch long after the tour, particularly Yorke and Stipe, the R.E.M. man acting as a guiding hand as Radiohead blew up big and Yorke struggled with his first blast of huge success. Asking Stipe for advice, he was told: “Pull the shutters down and keep saying, ‘I’m not here, this is not happening.’” The phrase would become a key hook of How To Disappear Completely, a standout song on Radiohead’s game-changing 2000 album Kid A.

In further proof at just how at ease the two bands were in each other’s circles, they actually swapped singers for an afternoon. Both were playing at the 1998 Tibetan Freedom Concert, with Michael Stipe joining Radiohead for a run-through the soaring OK Computer cut Lucky and Yorke performing R.E.M.’s Be Mine. Yorke also joined R.E.M. onstage in London in 2004 to sing Patti Smith’s parts in E-Bow The Letter, a song he claims is his second favourite ever R.E.M. track (his first is Electrolite – he’s obviously a big fan of 1998’s New Adventures In Hi-Fi). You can hear that collaboration below: