I was late to the party with R.E.M. I didn’t really discover them until they put out their sixth album Green in 1988 and this song was a minor hit.

The first time I saw them was when they made their Top of the Pops debut with this song the following summer, as it gave them their first hit single (peaking at a lowly No.28).

It would be years before I delved into the meaning and realised the whole song (signified by Bill Berry’s machine-gun drum tattoo) was about the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam War. 

The message was also missed by TOTP presenter Mark Goodier too, inanely commenting in his introduction: “Especially nice on a hot day, Orange Crush.”

Stipe was a spellbinding front man, flailing around, in shades and shirtless beneath a grey suit, singing through a megaphone; supposedly because he was averse to lip-syncing. There was something of Morrissey about him.

The song contrasts the deceptively jaunty jangle of Peter Buck’s guitar with the machine-gun fusillades of Bill Berry’s drums, Mike Mills’s burbling bass, and Stipe’s typically cryptic lyric. “I’ve got my spine, I’ve got my orange crush,” was such a strange line for a chorus. 

I would later learn that the “spine” reference alluded to spina bifida, one of the terrible side effects seen in the children of US soldiers exposed to the Agent Orange defoliant. 

Another line sums up the song’s wider message: “I’ve had my fun now it’s time to serve your conscience overseas.”

Matt Mahurin’s stark black-and-white video for the song – in which the band do not appear at all – won the band the inaugural VHS award for Best Post-Modern Video.