REM man is 'gentle and kind'

Rock star Peter Buck blamed a sleeping pill for causing him to "black out" before an alleged drunken rampage aboard a British Airways plane, his fellow band members said today.

REM singer Michael Stipe, who described the guitarist as "like a big brother", said the allegations against his friend did not make sense.

"He's just not a person who is rude to anyone," he told West London's Isleworth Crown Court.

He was "gentle and kind", not someone you would expect to assault cabin staff, up-end a hostess trolley and try to leave a plane 35,000ft above the Atlantic.

"I asked him what prompted his arrest, and he said he had taken a pill and blacked out."

The group's bass player, Michael Mills, also recalled the conversation and said Buck told him he was "not really sure what happened" after downing the medication with a glass of red wine at the start of a Seattle to London flight last April.

Certainly, he recalled, the guitarist was far from his normal self when he first saw him in his hotel suite hours after his release from police custody. "He was very shaken, he was very depressed."

Buck, 45, denies one count of being drunk aboard the plane, two counts of common assault involving an air stewardess and the cabin services director, and one of damaging British Airways property.