Tom York

And he taught me so much.

And he would say, use some of what I taught you about making yourself invisible and

um so he said do the stuff i taught you put the shutters down you know walk away and uh i was in a really lucky position at that point and they taught us how to be gracious with people and have fun and uh

Anyway, REM, when I was a kid, they were the link for me between the art student part of me and the musician part of me.

And Michael and the people he worked with had this attitude about what they were doing, which to me was like folk art.

you know, strangeness, mystery.

And this first record, Murmur, was just, again, another door opening in my life, making me think about music in a completely different way, even at that age, even now.

You know, it's simple, but the words are there, but they're not.

What are they?

I still don't know.

There's a sort of joy in it and a madness to it.

Talk about the passion by R.E.M.

Tom York, you clearly feel things very deeply.

I think you've described waking up every night as a newish father, worrying about climate change.

Oh, my God, I sound like a nightmare.

I did then.

Yeah, I was obsessed with it.

And I think actually, in retrospect, for good reason.

And my response was to try and do something about it.

Before that, I'd got involved with the drop the debt thing with Bono, the Jubilee 2000 campaign.