Product Description

R.E.M.'s public image has always been tightly controlled. Icons of anti-celebrity rock, who bacame huge celebrity rock stars, they were, according to the story, the first U.S. post new-wave band who were both commercially successful and cool. Drawing on exclusive interviews with Mike Mills, Peter Buck and other members of R.E.M.'s nuclear family, Fiction re-evaluates the music and career of a group who sold almost no records for the first half of their existence, then became 'the biggest rock group in the world' in the second half.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #489998 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Record Collector
Buckley has created a straightforward and enjoyable document . . . this is as good as it gets

Rolling Stone (US)
Reconstructs their fables with an insider’s sense of authority

Q
A fine job

Customer Reviews

Revealing
I have been an REM fan for as long as I can remember and I came away from this book feeling like I had got so much closer to the band . I have been going back listening to the cds and interpreting them differently knowing what was going on in the band at the time . There is some fascinating information including talk of an REM and Nirvana colloboration (unfortunately kurt put a stop to that ever taking place:() . The only reason im not giving it 5 stars is there are no new contributions from michael stipe , he's not that keen on interviews but it would have been nice to have some non archive words from him seeing he is the sole figure on the books cover.

Stranger Than Fiction
It says at the start no side-projects will be discussed - so no critiques of Michael Stipe’s film projects or photography books and no detailed analytical breakdowns of Peter Buck’s moonlighting with just about every other Athens, Georgia band on the go throughout R.E.M.’s existence - and so is a very straightforward look at each record made by the band so far, from their 1981 debut single RADIO FREE EUROPE up to 2001’s REVEAL album.

Each record is looked at in the context of things going on in the band’s life during the making of it and how they may have affected or impacted upon the album itself. The passages which record the making of 1985’s FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION, for example, spend as much time detailing the band’s unhappy time in London making the album, with cramped living conditions and slowly self-destructing inter-band relationships dragging everyone’s state of mind down, yet making for strangely compelling reading nonetheless.

Author Buckley also rings another refreshing change within the circle of biographers and sycophants that R.E.M have managed to pick up during their twenty-plus year existence – he’s not afraid to criticise where necessary. The OUT OF TIME album, for example, generally accepted by all sundry as being one of the band’s masterpieces (AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE being the other one) is here taken apart song by song, with most songs coming across here as underdeveloped or, occasionally, poorly executed. While never unfair in his taking R.E.M. and their “distiples” to task, Buckley is always even handed, dishing out praise where it is, in his opinion, warranted and giving the band and their music a good, rigorous going over at all times. This is how all music books should be written

No R.E.M sleep permitted
Of all the rock giants that have dominated the airwaves over the past 15 years, its is REM that have remained the most aloof and mysterious. I always found this refusal to play the celebrity game refreshing and was sceptical when I heard of Fiction's release. It was out of respect for David Buckley - author of the excellent Strange Facination (a David Bowie autobiography) - that I bought the book and I've loved every page. Buckley cuts through the myth and gets close to the real REM (if such a thing exists) and its a really refreshing take on the tired rock biog formula. You can read as a serious muso or as someone with an intererst in the bizarre world of rock and roll - either way its a winner.