Good Southern boys REM went home for a rest before making their next album, due real soon. We barged in on them rudely. Georgia gate-crasher: Parke Puterbaugh

Some bands come from a sort of Mid-Atlantic void, nowhere particular. The singer drawls, the guitars scream and the rhythm section plods, anonymously and internationally, making music that transcends frontiers by sheer force of blandness.

Some bands, though, have deeper roots. Where would the Smiths be without the grey industrial drizzle of Manchester? The Bunnymen without the abrasive wit and proud provincialism of Liverpool? Talking Heads without the edgy, neurotic eclecticism of New York? U2 without the fervent romanticism of Ireland?

And where would REM be without the backwoods oddness and perpetual party spirit of Athens, Georgia? Anyone who knows the town would tell you that it's not like anywhere else at all, and REM echo that with uncanny accuracy.

Athens has a population of 50,000 — small town-sized — but it's sparked more bands than many places twenty times bigger. Pylon, Love Tractor and the Method Actors are all on REM's tail but the most famous have to be the B-52s. The reason all these musical happenings occur is that Athens boasts one of the finest (and biggest) state universities in the southeast US, making it a full-time party town and a place with a lot of young people per square inch.

So to find out what makes REM tick you have to go to the place and find them at home. Singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry still live in Athens, most of them within walking distance of one another, and when in their local environment they stay decidedly unpretentious about what they do. No swarming round in darkened limousines. And no mysterious posturing either. "It's not like we're incredibly complex or anything," shrugs Stipe. "We're just regular people."

It was in this spirit that Peter Buck offered to show me the town. Eagerly playing the part of tour guide, he manoeuvred his van through the Athens streets, pausing at such attractions as the Tree That Owns Itself (it was willed the land it sits on); a record shop that Buck used to manage; the Forty Watt Club, Athens's answer to New York's CBGB; and the old brick church where REM used to live, commune-style, back in 1980. The latter sight was worth stopping at to inspect. We climbed atop a tree stump and peered in at the main body of the church, where REM would rehearse. On weekends they'd throw parties and as many as 600 people would cram inside to hear them whack away at everything from "Gloria" to their own early songs. Recently condemned, the church — now filled with empty beer cans and other debris, every window broken out — stands as a shrine to REM's less-than-saintly beginnings. Ironically, our pilgrimage happened to take place on Easter Sunday.

Next stop was Mike Mills's house. Popping beers and dropping into a worn sofa, Buck and Mills settled in to talk about REM past, present and future. Occasionally Buck paused to toss things at Mills's neurotic cat, and the two passed an acoustic guitar back and forth, strumming distractedly.

The most obvious departure for REM last time out was the fact that they switched producers and locales. Their previous three records — Chronic Town (a mini-LP), Murmur and Reckoning — were produced by Mitch Easter and Don Dixon at studios in North Carolina. Fables of the Reconstruction was made in England with Joe Boyd, the preeminent recordist on the modern-folk scene, who's worked with the likes of Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and Richard and Linda Thompson.

In scouting for a producer, "I wanted to work with someone, who didn't have an overly obsessive production technique," said Buck. "I didn't want to hire someone who was gonna give us a 'sound.' I wanted someone who'd done some stuff I respect and who allows room for the musician to breathe."

REM resolutely resist outside tampering. Mitch Easter once said that their records, per the band's wishes, were "practically field recordings" compared to the work he was used to doing. Boyd fitted the bill well; his projects have always been commendably absent of the heavy-handed stamp that often identifies an album more as the work of the producer than the artist.

True to form, he nudged them along by feel and with "real non-specific directions," said Buck. "He'd say, 'This song has a really cool feel,' or, 'That song has a kind of tango feeling,' so we'd go back and work on that."

"That's the way we like to work," added Mills. "Whatever instinctively feels right."

Fables is, according to them, "unusual" and "different," more adventuresome than 1984's Reckoning, more varied than the previous year's Murmur. REM recorded 17 tracks, and among the outtakes is a bona fide heavy-metal song that sounds like AC/DC: "guitar solos, screams and all that kinda stuff," laughed Buck. It turned up on a B-side. But REM nearly had their first real hit in "Can't Get There From Here," a driving pop-funk number that's augmented by horns. But not quite. Characteristically, they demur at the very mention of chart-making potential. "Our singles always get plugged at ninety seven with an anchor." said Buck, deadpan.

REM are similarly modest about their talents as musicians. Admittedly, they aren't exactly flashy, but they maximize their resources, and in achieving what they do in mood and feeling are a lot more musical than a great many fast-fingered fretboard gymnasts. "I play good with this band," stated Buck. "I fill in the sound O.K. and I'm a good rhythm player. But I wouldn't enter any contests or anything."

REM are Buck's first band; he started playing relatively late "because I didn't really know anyone who liked the same music I did. They all liked jazz or something, and rock & roll was like the Grateful Dead. Every musician I met was a shithead. It was like they still had monster bell-bottoms in 1976".

Buck grew up in Atlanta, Mills and drummer Berry in Macon. "It was the peak of the time when to be good you had to be a technical whiz," Mills recalled of the mid-'70s. "Either that, or so fucked up on drugs that nobody cared. Now, fortunately, is a time when, like Creedence Clearwater Revival, you don't have to do anything dazzling, just do it with taste."

Mills and Berry played in cover bands throughout high school, doing r&b and Top 40. Macon was the Allman Brothers' home turf; southern boogie was born there, and the attitude was love it or leave it. In their way, Mills and Berry left it. They sold off all their instruments and stopped playing music altogether.

Enter Ian Copeland. The brother of Police drummer Stewart Copeland and Police manager Miles Copeland, he was busy booking bands in England. Phil Walden, the founder and president of Capricorn Records, enticed him to Macon to work booking his bands. Copeland agreed, on the condition that he could continue to plug his stable of British new-wave talent. Bill Berry, who was working as a go-fer at the agency, made Ian's acquaintance, and through him, Berry and Mills were introduced to a lot of new bands — the Police, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, the Damned — they would never have heard otherwise. The punch line is that Mills and Berry bought back their equipment from the same person they'd sold it to: Ian Copeland.

Copeland soon made his way to New York and his own booking agency, FBI, and Mills and Berry escaped to Athens to go to school in early '79. Peter Buck had likewise emigrated, from Atlanta, and was working at the Wuxtry, a record shop in town. He struck up a friendship with Michael Stipe over the counter and drew him out of his "troglodytic" (Stipe's word) shell and into the circle. In the early days, they'd throw drunken parties at the church and play till dawn. Sometimes they'd aim a PA column out the window of Berry's fifth-floor dorm room, which faced the football field, and blast away. The idea was to offend as many people as possible.

Chronic Town and Murmur quickly put REM on the map, and Reckoning charted high, reaching the mid-20s in Billboard and hanging in for a year, an impressive commercial feat. Yet they're practically self-effacing about their accomplishments and display rapscallion humour in everything they do.

The only subject on which Peter Buck is less than expansive is the equipment he plays. Fact is, the question seemed to irritate him. "I play a black Fender Telecaster Custom — I think," he said gamely, "and a Fender Twin Reverb amp with two JBL speakers and — " he grinned like an errant schoolkid " — a black cord." Luckily, tour manager Geoff Trump was more forthcoming. According to him, Buck's other guitars include a Rickenbacker 330 thin-line semi-acoustic electric, a Rickenbacker 360 thin-line hollow-body electric, a 12-string 360 model, a Gretsch Tennesean, a Guild FF46-12 12-string electric and another Tele, this one a thin-line model with a wood-grain finish.

Buck's only effect unit is an Ibanez UE400, which includes compression, distortion, flanger/chorus and a phase shifter. "But as everyone knows," said Buck, "a phase shifter is one of the most godawful-sounding things ever, so I don't touch that." The distortion he employs on just two songs in the band's live set, the chorus even less frequently, and the compression he uses "to make feedback if I feel like it." In addition to his Fender Twin Reverb, Buck is experimenting with a MESA/Boogie 4-12" cabinet.

The moral of this story is that sometimes less is more, which applies to the other instrumental members of REM, who in this age of ROMs and RAMs have equipment setups that are practically primeval.

Mike Mills plays Rickenbacker basses — two 4001 models and a 4003, both full-scale instruments with maple bodies and necks, rosewood fingerboards, 20 frets and four-way bridges — and Guild's SB-602. His bass rig was put together by soundman Gary Sharp, and consists of two QSC 1151 160-watt amps, a Loft 401 parametric EQ, a dbx 160x comp/limiter and 2-12" and two 1-15" Gallien-Krueger cabinets housing Gauss speakers. "I also have a crossover and a splitter for the high and low ends," he said.

REM's manager, an unflaggingly upbeat character with yellow hair named Jefferson Holt, deposited me at Michael Stipe's doorstep. "I'll leave you to Mr. Natural," Holt winked before zooming off to a barbecue. Stipe is the alleged "eccentric" of the band, as much for what he conceals from public view as for what he reveals. His lyrics, sung in a dusky murmur with less than crystalline enunciation, have kept fans and scribes guessing for years. His darkling personality and penchant for privacy — he rarely grants interviews — hint at unplumbed depths.

No matter how famous he gets, however, his house will never be included on the "Athens of Old" tour given by the local Chamber of Commerce. It qualifies as antebellum only in the sense that it looks as if it hasn't been cleaned since before the Civil War. The interior suggests an explosion in a Salvation Army mission. Personal effects are strewn about, and there is a noticeable lack of amenities and possessions, such as a record player. "I don't own anything," he said. "My alarm clock doesn't even work anymore."

Somehow, Stipe is able to fashion order out of this chaotic household of his. I found him hunched over the kitchen table, assembling and framing a group of his photographs for an exhibit at the Tate Gallery on the University of Georgia campus. "Photography's kind of my first love," he said. "I like it as much as music, and maybe more in some ways."

Stipe's pictures tell a lot about the way he approaches music. For this exhibit, he's taken Polaroid color prints, then had them reduced really small. You have to look closely to make out the subjects, but everything about them — color, mood and so forth — has been intensified and concentrated. He was pasting them on 4"x4" glass squares and being kind of random about it: dropping the pictures onto the glass and letting that determine the positioning. "I think mistakes are really what power life along," he said by way of explanation. "That's where most of its inspiration comes from. I think the ability to recognize those mistakes and pull them aside and say, 'Wait a minute, there's something here,' makes everything worth waiting for."

His visual sense carries over into the recording studio. For Fables, Stipe says he would describe to Joe Boyd the way he wanted a song to look. "That didn't translate too well," he laughed. "But he got used to it. At first, he probably thought I was this incredibly pretentious artist, which is not the case." Stipe paused and looked out the window. "No, that's not the case at all."

Stipe has spent most of his life in Georgia, except for a period when he lived in Illinois. When asked if he's ever thought about moving away now that he has a measure of success, he said, with a straight face, "I've thought about moving to Jefferson." Jefferson is a crossroads about fifteen miles from Athens. "Outside of that, no. This is the land I'm used to.

"One of the greatest things about the South," continued Stipe, "is that it's got this perfect balance between real eccentric and real high-powered weirdness, and you take that and couple it with the absolute sludge pace that everything moves at, and that's where you come up with things like the B-52's and so on."

And REM. The next day, over a plate of soul food at a downtown Athens eatery, Bill Berry was discussing Fables of the Reconstruction. As Berry related, REM had enough new material for an album by the time they finished their last tour. But if they'd recorded those songs, they'd have had to go out and play what was to them old material on their next tour. So, they blocked off a month and wrote a batch of new tunes. "As a result, we went in not knowing the songs very well at all," admitted Berry. "It was like, 'What the hell are we doing? What is this song, what should we do with the bridge?' It really came down to the wire, and the songs sound tense in that way, but in a good way." When pressed for a more specific description, he deferred to Stipe, who likened the sound of the album to "nailing two oranges together." Ponder that.

As with Buck and Mills, taste and restraint seem to be the bywords as far as Berry's approach to his instrument. "I have a very simple approach to the drums: Hit 'em hard and don't hit 'em very often." He plays a five-piece Rogers kit that he's had for seven years. "I've updated the hardware," he said, "but other than that, it's the same kit I've always had." Drum sizes are 22" bass drum, 13" and 14" rack toms, 16" floor tom and two 14" snares that he alternates, one a Rogers, the other a Tama. Berry also uses a timbale on stage. Cymbals are Profile, manufactured by the West German Meinl company: 20", 17" and two 18" Rock Velvets and 14" Rock Velvet hi-hat. Pedals are Tama; stool is made by Ludwig. Berry also plays guitar and piano; always for songwriting, but rarely on record and never on stage.

The topic of songwriting brings us right up to date in the REM story... they're at the moment hard at work in their Athens rehearsal rooms on songs for the next album, due around April.

"It's going to be a little different," revealed Mills. "We aren't going to go to England and use Joe Boyd as producer again. Not that we've anything against either, mind you.

"No, we're just treating this as a totally different idea, and we'll be using a lot more things on the record.

"At the moment we're looking at a studio in Indiana which we really liked, and which a friend of ours helped set up. As for producers, well... I can't say as it's all a bit unorganised yet.

"I can say that it may be a radical departure. Or it may not. We'll just have to wait and see."

So will the next REM album be an Indiana Country epic with strings, brass, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Or will it be just like the last one?

The former is more likely. REM may revisit Athens with clockwork regularity, but they won't go back to Rockville again.