Michael Stipe misses his hair. All bald men miss their hair, but his was especially useful.

You may have seen the episode of the BBC’s Seven Ages of Rock that focused on US alternative rock. If so, you’ll remember the clip of a young REM performing Radio Free Europe. In it, the 23-year-old frontman skulks behind a curtain of hair, clutching the microphone and slurring cryptic lyrics that, one suspects, are not entirely comprehensible even to the man who wrote them. What makes him so perversely compelling is that he seems to shun being looked at in a way that makes him all the more interesting to look at.

“The hair helped a lot to hide who I was,” he says 24 years later. “So that went away,” he adds with a short chuckle, “and things got a little more difficult.”

But he is an infinitely more self-assured figure now. Has fame, on balance, been good for him?

“If I’m worth talking to in a room, then yes, it’s been great for me. I’m not sure that I’m worth talking to in a room. The insecurities are there, as they are with anyone. But I would say, yeah, fame has been great for me in finding some confidence. There’s a confidence that experience offers. It might not be wisdom, particularly. It might just be trial and error and, in my own way, I’ve found what works and what doesn’t work.”

Today, in the library of one of the few London hotels that actually has a library, Stipe’s insecurities swim a little closer to the surface than usual, thanks to jet lag. He flew in yesterday, slept badly and gives the impression of someone moving underwater. But I’m not sure that the jet lag alone explains his peculiar stillness. When he looks away and freezes, lost in thought, he is as im But carry on they did. While their contemporaries stalled, REM became stars and, in the process, prime examples of how to sell out arenas without selling out your principles. Their biggest successes happened almost despite themselves. They wrote Losing My Religion, a song featuring a mandolin and no chorus, declined to tour the accompanying Out of Time album, and it became their defining hit. They extended their touring holiday for the sombre Automatic for the People - Stipe wouldn’t even do interviews - and they grew bigger still. In subsequent years, they have had a bumpier ride (1996’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi was one of the decade’s most underrated albums) but they have maintained their integrity.

“Peter and Mike are encyclopaedic in their knowledge of music history: this is what breaks up bands and this is what makes bands start sucking. Here’s how we can avoid these obvious pitfalls. Preserve your sanity and enable yourself to do it for a while and not suck or sell out.” He sighs as another wave of jet lag hits him. “Even with that hindsight, it’s easy to fuck up the most obvious aspects of what you do, which in our case is communicate or not communicate.”

During the 90s, Stipe matured from a prickly outsider into a kind of alt-rock sage, offering advice and friendship to the likes of Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love and Thom Yorke, who credits Stipe with saving his sanity when Radiohead went supernova. When did he transform from the man trying to work things out to the man that other musicians came to for answers?

“That’s just so stupid to talk about,” he says evenly. “I’m sorry, there’s no way for me to talk about my personal relationships with people who are also famous without sounding like I’m: 1), dropping names, and 2), trying to elevate my influence and power. It’s just gross. It’s just that what we do is a very specific thing, and I’ve done it longer than most of those people. So you figure out: how do you come off tour and not want to strangle or murder everyone in your real life who hasn’t been on tour? How do you finish a record and not fall into an incredible, black depression? Come off a year-long tour and you’re sitting at the table with your friends and family and they’re completely uninteresting. And you have to figure out that they’re not uninteresting, but they’re not in this fight-or-flight mode that touring puts you in. That’s a really basic, simple thing. It’s like a builder asking someone older, ‘How do I get this shit off my hands? It’s not coming off with soap.’”

Another thing one imagines Stipe discusses with the famous friends he doesn’t like to mention is the thorny issue of how to be a politically engaged rock star without getting on everyone’s nerves.

In the 80s, Stipe waved the flag for pretty much every liberal cause going, including Aids awareness, gun control, the environment and the doomed presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis, and his influence was noted. In one of those remarks that must have seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, Al Gore claimed during the 92 campaign that “George Bush is out of time. Bill Clinton and Al Gore will be automatic for the people.”

“It’s a very rocky and dangerous path,” says Stipe, “because you’re easily shot down if you come out too strong, or if you’re too scattershot, or if you don’t know what you’re talking about. I think I’ve gone too far in the past. In the 1980s, I was made to be something that I wasn’t and I became dangerously close to being the poster boy of a generation for various social and political ideologies, and I pulled away from that. You figure out the best possible way to present yourself because there is the idea that a pop star has no right to voice their opinion. I just always blandly announce that I was a person before I was a pop star and I’m due my opinion as much as anyone.”

During the last election, REM joined the pro-Kerry Vote for Change tour of swing states, playing freshly minted protest songs Final Straw and I Wanted to Be Wrong. Many musicians these days take relish in decrying the Bush administration, but the subject dismays Stipe so much that he buries his head in his hands. “I’m like a cynical optimist and the angriest pacifist in the world,” says the head. “I feel like we will rise above this but sometimes it seems very bleak. I love my country so much and I love what it represents. But I don’t love where it is right now.”

Can he at least savour the schadenfreude of Bush’s rapidly evaporating authority? He gives a wan grin. “It’s a day late and a dollar short if you ask me - or several billion dollars short.”

Unlike the president, REM do not seem to be on the way out. They debuted songs for their 14th album at five Dublin shows over the summer and recorded them “in less time than we’d recorded a record in 20 years,” which bodes well. It would be good to hear REM regain their form - not to relive the past, but to matter again.

Does Stipe ever toy with doing a Bill Berry and jacking it all in? He replies before I’ve even finished the question. “I would go crazy. I love being in the mix and flow of popular culture, and I really enjoy being a public figure. But all that is ancillary to creating something that challenges me. Without getting super weird or religious about it, it just feels like what I’m supposed to do. I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

&183; REM Live is out now on Warner Bros

Joe Cole’s controversial goal against his old club West Ham enabled Chelsea to take full advantage of an early kick-off to move into second place in the Premiership.

As has often been the case in their 70 game unbeaten home run in the league, the victory was more effective than thrilling. But discussion of this contest will centre around officials rather than aesthetics.

Carlo Cudicini’s long goal kick down the centre in the 75th minute was headed on by Didier Drogba and then again by Salomon Kalou, setting free Cole, who took the ball round the West Ham keeper Robert Green and, despite making an acute angle for himself, comfortably drove the ball into the roof of the net.

Replays suggested Cole may have been a fraction off-side as he burst through West Ham’s centre halves. The goal enabled Chelsea to leap-frog Manchester United and Manchester City into second place in the table, two points behind leaders Arsenal having played two games more.

This victory came more through persistence than brilliance, and more fluent performances will be needed if Chelsea are to mount a sustained challenge for the title.

They had started the first half brightly, dominating possession in the opening exchanges. But as the half wore on, the visitors’ harrying bore fruit as the break-up of Chelsea moves gave West Ham the opportunity to show some of their own.

Scott Parker and Haydn Mullins in the centre of West Ham’s midfield closed down everything, depriving the Chelsea players of even a moment to pick out passes. The result was a first period dominated by tough exchanges in the centre of the park.

The home side’s best chance before the break came in the ninth when Drogba - who complained to officials about a member of the crowd picking him out with a laser - almost curled a shot from the edge of the area inside the right hand post of Green’s goal. Earlier, both Frank Lampard and Alex had fired promising free-kicks into the wall.

West Ham’s most promising moves of the first period mainly centred around Noberto Solano. His closest effort came just past the half-hour mark when, sensing Cudicini creeping off his line, he attempted to chip the keeper with the outside of his right foot. Cudicini, scrambling back, got the slightest touch on it as the ball just passed over the crossbar.

Avram Grant had made four changes from the side that beat Rosenborg 4-0 in the midweek Champions League game. The suspended Michael Essien, along with Claude Makalele, Shaun Wright-Phillips and Ashley Cole all sat out, with Steve Sidwell, Wayne Bridge, Mikel John Obi and Kalou replacing them. The latter two were both booked for hacking challenges in the course of a niggly match that saw eight players cautioned by referee Howard Webb.

Though the underlying fractiousness continued, the Chelsea of the second half was an improved team to that of the first. Where before the break there had confusion and misplaced passing, after it there were hints of urgency and attacking menace.

Wright-Phillips, brought on after 66 minutes in place of Sidwell, gave Chelsea greater spark and after Cole’s goal the home side had some better chances.

Two minutes after the goal, Drogba powerfully headed just wide from a beautifully placed cross from substitute Wright-Phillips as West Ham were caught on the break. And with 10 minutes to go Kalou failed to get onto the end of a clever over-the-top pass from Mikel, as Chelsea began to look more threatening.

But the measure of Chelsea’s performance was the manner of their goal - a classic route one effort.

“Im going to try to give shorter answers,” William Ackman said, with an awkward smile. It was Wednesday, and Ackman, a 41-year-old hedge fund manager, had just finished an hour-long presentation at an investment conference in New York. But if the presentation and ensuing press conference proved anything, it was that Ackman was incapable of giving short answers. Obsessives rarely are.

Ackman is an emerging star in the “shareholder activist” division of the hedge fund big leagues. In the past few years, he has targeted McDonalds, Wendys and, most recently, Target, usually emerging with profits for his hedge fund. His firm, Pershing Square Capital, which he founded in 2004, now bulges with over $6 billion in assets. “If I think Im right, I can be the most persistent and most relentless person in America,” he said.

But for sheer, obsessive doggedness, nothing compares to his pursuit of MBIA, a once-obscure company that is the largest U.S. bond insurer.

Ackman has been short-selling MBIAs stock since 2002, when he first became aware of it while running an earlier hedge fund. He began his assault with a highly unusual move for a short: he posted a 66-page report on the Internet, laying out his case against MBIA. He purchased credit default swaps as a way to profit in the event of an MBIA bankruptcy. He talked to regulators and held hours of meetings with analysts at Moodys and Standard Poors, the two big bond rating agencies, trying to persuade them to lower MBIAs triple-A credit rating. He once buttonholed the chief executive of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, MBIAs accountant, at a charity dinner, and sent him his report.

Yet despite the fact that MBIA, at one point, had to restate five years of earnings - after being tripped up on an accounting problem that Ackman brought to light - its stock continued to do well. The analysts and ratings agencies continued to side with the company.

And then came the subprime crisis, which has wreaked havoc on MBIAs stock price and raised questions about its business model. Sean Egan, the co-founder of Egan-Jones, an independent bond rater, believes that MBIA and the other big bond insurers will be saddled with billions of dollars in losses as the collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, stuffed with subprime debt they have insured continue to go south.

Ackman now stands to make hundreds of millions dollars on his bet against MBIA - so much money that he is now saying he will donate his share of his winnings to a charitable foundation he recently established. If you sense some defensiveness in that gesture, youve sensed correctly. The question - and its the one that always seems to crop up often when short-sellers are involved - is whether Ackmans single-minded pursuit of MBIA is something he should feel defensive about.

Theres no doubt about what drives Ackman crazy about MBIA: its triple-A credit rating, the highest any company can get - indeed, a rating more normally associated with Treasury bills, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the government. As Gary Denton, the companys chief executive, told me recently, “Our triple-A rating is the fundamental driver of our business model.” No triple-A, no business.

This fact has been widely accepted on Wall Street and in the marketplace. “The model is the model,” shrugged one person who keeps close tabs on the company (and who declined to be quoted by name because he isnt supposed to talk to the press.) Ackman, however, thinks it is lunacy - and hes right.

Think about it. If a company needs a triple-A rating just to stay in business, it probably doesnt deserve the rating. If General Electric or Exxon Mobil, two of the handful of companies with triple-A ratings, got a downgrade, would it really affect their business? Companies that merit triple-A ratings are those that are impervious to small or even medium-sized bumps in the road. Besides, MBIA takes on a lot of risk for a company with a triple-A rating.

It wasnt always thus, which explains how MBIA got its triple-A in the first place. MBIA began life in the early 1970s guaranteeing nice, safe municipal bonds; its initials originally stood for Municipal Bond Insurance Association. But while municipal bonds rarely default, most dont get triple-A ratings - and the lower the rating, the more a municipality had to pay in interest. By “wrapping,” or packaging, such bonds, MBIA could envelop them in its triple-A rating, and in so doing save money for towns and cities all over the United States.