Book review: Sing Backwards and Weep, by Mark Lanegan

In 30 years as a music journalist, I have never encountered an interviewee quite as uncommunicative as Mark Lanegan. The former frontman of Seattle grunge band Screaming Trees, now successful solo chanteur and favoured collaborator among his Pacific coast rock peers, seemed to take a demonic pleasure in his monosyllabic responses to my mostly unprobing questions.

Detail from the cover of Sing Backwards and Weep, by Mark Lanegan

This, as it now transpires, was back in the bad old days of self-loathing addiction, knee-jerk violence and squalid touring. Turns out this almost pathologically taciturn interviewee was saving it all up for this unsparing autobiography, which is more addiction chronicle than music memoir.

We first encounter Lanegan avoiding a drugs bust because the police officer remembers he “used to be a singer”. For many, this would be their reliable rock’n’roll war story; for Lanegan, it was everyday life in the 1990s. He can go so much deeper and darker, and he does with this candid catalogue of his drink and drug misadventures.

For a man who has spent so much of his life chasing oblivion, he has an almost forensic recall of the situations and sensations which typified this grim period of his life, escalating from teenage alcoholism and petty crime in smalltown Washington State to full-blown heroin addiction and some heavy escapades on tour (including nearly losing his arm from infection), even as he and his band were lauded internationally. Whether suffering the nihilistic turmoil of inebriation or the misery and anger of sobriety, Lanegan exhibited a Shane MacGowanesque capacity for survival through no fault of his own.

Sing Backwards And Weep is an unflinching trawl – or would be, were it not marginally leavened by straight-shooting yet eloquent language, gallows humour and his sweet, boyish excitement at the briefest of encounters with musical heroes such as Waylon Jennings and Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh.

Lanegan’s outlook is black, white and brown all over. He makes no attempt to varnish his ignoble behaviour, neither excusing himself nor wringing his hands over a chaotic carousel of theft, neglect, hustling and vengeance.Meanwhile, he communicates unwavering respect and affection for the friends who didn’t make it – Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley, The Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce and, especially, Kurt Cobain, tracing his first Damascene encounter with Nirvana right through to what he sees as his gut-wrenching part in Cobain’s demise.

Conversely, he doesn’t hold back with his deadpan disdain for “low-rent tyrant” Liam Gallagher in a highly entertaining chapter on the Trees’ North American tour with Oasis.

But there is one area of his life which does appear to be reserved. There is little on his turbulent background until later in the book, as if he has to steal himself to talk about his cold, abusive mother and the alcoholic drifter father whose legacy he inherited – and thankfully overcame.

Sing Backwards and Weep, by Mark Lanegan, White Rabbit, £20

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