It seems all you need to join REM is a jangling guitar and a sprinkling of elementary chords. Well, it worked wonders for Peter Buck...

Peter Buck is lead guitar player with REM. He disagrees.

Peter Buck has evolved a distinctive style of his own which mixes jangly Byrds Rickenbacker lines with virtuoso picking. He disagrees.

Peter Buck writes some of the most interesting, melodic songs to have appeared out of the American guitar band boom. He disagrees.

In fact, he disagrees rather a lot for someone who is so unfailingly polite and friendly. Not that he ought to agree with all those statements, mind you — they are just some of the misapprehensions that have plagued (or at least followed) the Georgia band who are at present mapping out an elliptical course around the rest of the nostalgic American bar-band boom.

Their recent album Fables Of The Reconstruction, or Reconstruction Of The Fables depending on how you read its deliberately circular title, has confirmed them in their position as trailblazers of the guitar/bass/drums/voice format. Vocalist Michael Stipe's cloudy, incomprehensive lyrics match the melodic drive of the rhythm section, drummer Bill Berry and bassist Mike Mills, to produce a new and different sound which also echoes many another great US groups.

Buck, of course, plays lead guitar...

"I'm not the lead guitar player. We're not a Heavy Metal band, we don't make statements like 'hey, watch the lead guitarist'. It's much more of a rhythm instrument, the way I play it, I don't like solos at all, it's like an easy way out.

"You have to fit something in during a song to break it up, so rather than getting ambitious and writing a bridge, so many people just let the guitarist wank off for a while.

"So I said 'no guitar solos'. I just tried to be a rhythm guitar player and if I do any single-note lines they are melodic, they add something. Like in Camera off the second album Reckoning, there's a teeny little four-note statement which reprises the vocal without following it exactly. That was because we wanted to give it a claustrophobic feel, we didn't want to widen it out with a bridge, and that four-note melody was ideal to just split the chorus and the verse a little.

"There are songs with — quote, unquote — "solos" on, but they're always adding to the melody. They could be done by, say, a cello just as well.

"In fact, if you gave me a cello I could be a really good cello player within a year. Not because I'd be able to do really fast complicated things, but because I'd play two notes and they'd be the right two notes to enhance the song.

"I could play lead guitar. I played lead with Green On Red at a gig last night. They were kinda drunk and they asked me to play guitar so I played lead on five or six of their numbers. It was pretty easy, because all their songs are in that 'California key' — E minor, G, D. You can play those Neil Young solos over them.

"And I've played with the Fleshtones — fuzz, block chords, real '60s kinda things — and Jason and the Scorchers — fake Hank Williams pedal steel licks — and I'm sure I could play with most people. I heard that Prefab Sprout song on the radio this morning, Faron Young and I'm sure I could sit in with them. Great song, too.

"When I go home to Georgia, you see, I practise maybe four or five hours a day. I work real hard, and I play all styles. I like to know what you need to be a Heavy Metal guitar player, or a Soul guitar player, or a Folk guitar player, or a Blues guitar player.

"I mean, everybody's got a little demon inside them that wants to play Heavy Metal. We did a date with Billy Bragg and we dragged him onstage to play guitar on Route 66 and Wild Thing. He really went for it. Duelling guitar solos, everything. And if he wants to play like that, surely everyone must.

"But the thing is that it's just not right for the band. REM is not about that."

Why, Peter?

"Well, when we started I wasn't the best guitarist in the world. I was pretty slack.

"You see, I didn't start playing until I was about 20. It had always been a secret ambition of mine, I guess, but my brother is a classical musician — a guitarist — so to pick up a guitar and start plunking around was embarrassing because he was doing really amazingly complicated stuff, he was a brilliant musician. And there am I, his older brother, sitting next door playing two notes and trying to figure out how Chuck Berry did it. It did embarrass me. A lot.

"So when I got together with Michael Stipe and I started playing regularly — more than about once a month or so — I didn't really know what I was doing, I had a couple of ideas I'd picked up from the radio or local Country or Gospel bands but most of the time I just stayed out of the way, I just tried to fit in with the drums and the bass.

"But although I was so bad at it, I wouldn't let them get another guitar player in the band because I knew if he could play he'd end up with all the fun things to play and I'd get stuck with the chords.

"So being the only one I had to learn how to fill up space. At first I used arpeggios all the time, real fast arpeggiated chords because my right hand was faster than my left. I started listening to Country records and Lovin' Spoonful records where they intersperse melodies with broken chords and strange chord voicings and stuff, all serving to back up the vocals like part of the rhythm section. And I worked riffs in so rather than go A, E, D like I used to I'd work out a run that went from one to the other and took in the notes on the way.

"Another good thing to do when you've got sort of wooden hands is that drone chord thing where you slide the D shape up and down so it forms an A, for instance, elsewhere on the neck but still with the D bass. Richard Thompson does that quite a bit, in a traditional style, but I amp it up a little bit. Open strings against fretted notes higher up are good for filling space when you're not very good. And I wasn't. That first F chord was a real big step.

"One song where I use that a lot is Catapult off the first album, Murmur. There's those sort of hectic drone chords all the way through and then just before the chorus where Michael sings 'did we miss anything' I stole a bit of a Country'n'Western record. It's that classic downwards run on a chord change from F to D but I dropped a beat out of it and amped it up a bit.

"I used to use open chords, you know, first position stuff, all the time, but after I learnt to play bar chords I don't use them as much. There's just one song on the latest album, Good Advices, that uses them. But that's in E and I play against that with different inversions of the chords and stuff.

"I really like weird chords. You can get the best ones with tunings. Like Bill Berry, our drummer, he's a great guitar player although he doesn't know any of the chords or anything. But he's got this tuning where you tune the B to a C and the A to an A sharp. You get this real neat drone sound. We've written a song using it which we haven't played in public yet but we will. "I also use a couple of other tunings, like the Rock and Roll open G and tuning the Es down to D.".

Do you use them for songwriting?

"Well, sometimes; what happens mostly is we go to a rehearsal room we rent in Athens, Georgia, and we turn up loud and we just play. And songs come out. Eventually.

"Sometimes one person will have one bit and one person another, then we'll put them together like a jigsaw. Then you change the key and put some words on it and then you drop this bit because it doesn't fit... and there you are. And there's enough of a band 'twist and pull' process to make sure that it's a band song rather than one person's, even if they came up with the majority of it."

Tell me about guitars, Peter.

"Oh yeah, my main guitar at the moment is a Telecaster, a custom one with a humbucking pickup in the neck position. And I have a thinline Tele as well, with the two humbuckers and the F hole. They're both stock. I only changed the tuning keys because the Fender ones are shitty."

But I thought you used Rickenbackers?

"I do, yes. It's just that they're not very roadworthy. I shouldn't be saying this, because the people from Rickenbacker have promised to help me with parts and repairs and things and so I'll probably start using them live again. But they're sort of fragile. The wiring's kinda shitty and I'm not so good at electronics and stuff so I could never repair them myself properly. I use them all the time on the records, because the sound is great.

"But I started with a Telecaster — because I loved the way it looked, it played okay and my boss was selling it so I could pay for it every week from my wages.

"Then that got stolen or busted or something and the Rickenbacker was the cheapest second-hand guitar I could find that didn't have a horribly warped neck or something. I fell in love with the sound and I've used them ever since. Except when they break."

The Rickenbacker is probably the reason why people tagged you as a Byrds copyist band, isn't it?

"I suppose so. We played with Roger McGuinn a while ago, though, and he didn't think so at all. And he should know. The Long Ryders, though... now they do sound like the Byrds."

What about effects?

"I've got an Ibanez effects rack, the 4001E or something, which I use a little bit. I have a touch of chorus on most of the time and occasionally distortion to give a thrashier tone. It's not as cool a distortion sound as the old Vox things — they give you that Electric Prunes '60s sound — but it's okay.

And amps?

"I use a Mesa Boogie now. I always did use Fenders, and I thought the Mesa was too complex and technical when I first saw it. But now I've got used to it I use it like a Fender but with extra capabilities. At the volume I play at the Fender got too piercing, because I like to get the volume set so that it gives me sustain and just a bit of distortion but it'll be clean if I play quietly."

Strings?

"Heavy ones. I use an .013 top to a fifty-something bottom. I never bend strings, you see, and I hit them pretty hard, so they don't go out of tune easily. You have to adjust the neck a little to use strings that heavy, though."

Picks?

"Jim Dunlop. Medium... the one I've got in my pocket at the moment says .73 on it, so that must be the thickness. I like the ones with the grippy bits so I don't lose them when I sweat."

Do you always talk this much?

"It's funny you should say that, I was talking to this guy the other day and he was saying to me he knew a man who..."

Peter Buck most definitely is a man who can talk and a man who can play the guitar. And he has a lot to say both ways.