It's them: rocking with R.E.M. as they hit the road with the monstrously popular 'Monster.'

Interview, May, 1995 by Godfrey Cheshire

An explosive version of "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" opens the show, kicking the audience into a screaming, barely contained frenzy. Even that containment ruptures after about twenty minutes, when "Man on the Moon" prompts the front rows to surge past the overwhelmed security personnel and rush the stage, where, for the rest of the concert, fans will clutch at Stipe and dance nonstop. If this is a "riot," as it will later be called, it's a genial, polite Chinese form of chaos. The vanquished security men and even the hall's manager, who momentarily threatened to stop the show to restore order, are eventually seen bobbing happily amid the crowd.

The pandemonium seems to inspire the band, which responds with a raucous, electrifying performance. (Having already stopped in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, the ten-month tour was scheduled to move to Europe and then to the U.S., but most of the European concerts were canceled when Berry suffered a ruptured aneurysm, from which he is expected to make a full recovery.) The three dates in Southeast Asia are clearly special, because the venues the band plays in Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore are far smaller than it's accustomed to. As Peter Buck's wife, Stephanie, notes, while dancing in front of the stage in Taipei, it's almost like seeing the band in a club again.

The shows are also economically anomalous, given the size of R.E.M.'s 1995 entourage, which includes a recently expanded family contingent: The Bucks are the parents of year-old twins, Zoe and Zelda, who by now are road veterans. Getting everybody through Hong Kong customs the next day takes more than an hour, but the island repays the wait. On the way to Queen Elizabeth Stadium, the band members are agog at Hong Kong's blizzard of neon and glittering New Year's decorations. I speak with Stipe, Buck, and Mills before a concert that R.E.M., mindful of the crown colony's imminent return to mainland China rule, will conclude with "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)."

GODFREY CHESHIRE: Taipei and Hong Kong are R.E.M.'s first encounters with Chinese culture. Any immediate impressions?

MIKE MILLS: Not to be overly simplistic, but it's the most foreign of the foreign places we've gone to. The culture is as different here from the culture we live in as any we've seen, except for maybe the Arab world. I love it. I enjoy seeing the people's approach to life and their customs.

MICHAEL STIPE: I enjoyed Taipei. Sitting in the cockpit of the plane and flying in at night in the rain and then driving through the city on Chinese New Year . . . it was like being in the slum of Blade Runner, you know. It was like living the film, which is pretty wild.

PETER BUCK: Meeting people in Taipei was really great. The audience was so excited to be there.

MS: They must have been excited to see a band that usually plays 20,000 seats in the U.S. play a 3,000-seat hall.

MM: I was fascinated. Judging from Taipei, I found the Chinese people to be a little more open and less uptight than the Japanese, much less formal and rigid. I'm sure that's true here in Hong Kong as well, whereas it's probably not true of Beijing or Shanghai.

GC: It would be interesting to see you play Beijing.

MM: You know, I can wait on that. [laughs] I can hold off on that one for a while.

GC: How did the Taipei show compare to others on the tour?

MM: It was probably the highlight so far. It's really nice to start a riot! That kind of reaction we don't get everywhere.

GC: It was funny the way the security just melted away when the kids rushed the stage.

MM: I was actually very happy with the security there. They managed to keep people off the stage and still let people have a good time. Apparently there were instances when they were a little too lax, but I didn't see that. I was afraid they were really going to try to keep people in their seats. But they didn't, which was just as well, because I don't think they could have. It was an unstemmable tide.

PB: But what was with that guy with the bread? You saw that guy. He had a baguette that he'd wave at me every time I'd even glance in his direction. About halfway through the set I just ripped it out of his hands, and we fought over it, and I hit him over the head with it. I was like, "Don't bring bread to my shows and don't wave it at me if you do." I didn't get it. I think he was just stoned. He looked like a real hippie.

GC: I couldn't figure that out. It looked like you were fighting with a guy over a loaf of bread in the middle of a song, but that didn't make any sense.

PB: You know, if somebody waves something at me once, it's funny, it's kind of absurdist. But after about ten songs, I was like, "Fuck this bread." Little things like that bother me. And you know what's the worst? I hate it when you make eye contact with someone and they scream your name not once, but twenty times. Look, I know my fuckin' name!

GC: Was it weird having people so close they could touch you?

MS: I'm used to that. It's just off-putting to have a wall of faces in front of you, because I'm used to being able to look over people's heads. If I can't concentrate, I can look over the crowd's head into a kind of void. I didn't have that last night, so I was having to look at the ground a lot to focus. [pauses] I don't know - that focus and concentration is something that hasn't quite come yet.