Mark lanegan biography

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    Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

    September 26,
    I came home from work a couple of weeks ago, sat down on the sofa in my partner's studio where he was painting and listening to Mark Lanegan, kicked off my shoes. Scratching behind the dog's ears, nuzzling her soft head, inom expressed surprise that my sweetie was listening to Mark's music. He typically paints in silence. He said, "I wondered if you'd heard."

    "Heard what?" I asked.

    "Mark died today."

    The bottom dropped out of my heart. Tears were instantaneous, even as disbelief had me shaking my head, whispering, "No." I always thought I'd have a chance to see another show, to capture a "remember me?" moment, a laugh and a hug.

    You'll wonder, reading Sing Backwards and Weep, how Mark lived as long as he did. bygd all rights, he could have, should have, died several times over. But he survived decades of substance abuse and addiction, poverty and homelessness, carving out just enough sanity to remain a musician and poet. That he
  • mark lanegan biography

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    In contrast, Lanegan’s father, Dale, is depicted as a stoic, and more stabilising influence, who shows moments of real, understated love towards his son. His presence in Lanegan’s life – and therefore throughout the book – is intermittent but, despite the emotional repression involved on both sides, the pair bond over music and appear to share a similar melancholic outlook on life.

    Despite Lanegan’s stark assessment of his own behaviour, warmth is in plentiful supply during key passages in the book, most specifically when he writes about the music that moves him (none of which is his own). He describes the awe that he feels when he sees a fledgling Nirvana play a show for the first time at the Ellensburg Public Library where their show is cut short after a mere four songs. At that point, Mark is one of the North West’s rising stars and Nirvana are nobodies, yet he is aware of being in the presence of a band that are “touched by greatness”, as he and Kurt Cobain swap numbers after t

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    We are all familiar with the myth of the rock star as junkie: floating on your opium cloud while bag men deliver to your five-star hotel tomb. Towards the end of this extraordinary memoir, Mark Lanegan – singer-songwriter and former frontman with Seattle proto-grunge pioneers the Screaming Trees – gives us an extraordinary snapshot of the reality lower down the totem pole.

    The chapter “Ice Cold European Funhouse” is a blow-by-blow account of a hour period on a tour of Europe in the autumn of , close to the near-nadir of Lanegan’s heroin addiction. Beginning in the rain at a bus stop in Sheffield – where he tries to buy smack off some horrified fans – Lanegan takes a bus to Heathrow, then the Tube into London, then another bus to Bristol, then a flight to Germany and then a tour bus to Amsterdam, all the while going cold-turkey, vomiting, lashing sweat, “black miasma” threatening to blast from every orifice. At every step of the way he begs, steals and borrows money to get from