Sing Backwards and Weep: Mayhem, music and drugs

Sing Backwards and Weep

Author: Mark Lanegan

ISBN-13: 978-1474615488

Publisher: White Rabbit

Guideline Price: £20

I came to Mark Lanegan backwards. It was Isabel Campbell I’d wanted to listen to when I bought Ballad of the Broken Seas in 2006, and Lanegan just happened to be there singing with her. It’s a beautiful record and Lanegan’s voice is the first thing on it. It’s not something that can be missed. Google tells us Lanegan is a baritone but that’s like stating that Lionel Messi is a footballer; it doesn’t quite capture the man.

I started going back through his solo career, his bands and side projects, back to Seattle and Kurt Cobain, and further back to his first band, Screaming Trees. And as I went back, I had to go forward as Lanegan released more solo records, more bands and projects, more records with Isabel Campbell. It was impossible to keep up. Lanegan is like Mozart; there’s a lot of him.

I’ve seen Lanegan perform on stage six or seven times. He walks on, sings for an hour and a half, says “thank you”, and leaves. Outside of the lyrics, he’s been a man of exactly two words. The lyrics are great; the book’s title is a line from a Lanegan song. The variety and quantity of his work, and its excellence, suggest a hard-working, driven artist; the lyrics suggest hard-living, loneliness, constant flight – trains are a very regular feature – and a nightmare world within the everyday. The songs gave me what I wanted. Would the book illuminate or just get in the way?

There are things about Sing Backwards and Weep that are extraordinary, the first being the fact that Lanegan is alive to write it. He writes so vividly and precisely about his years-long heroin addiction, there were times as I read when I had to remind myself to breathe. There is a long chapter which should be about a band tour of Europe but is actually a superb, shocking depiction of an addict’s desperate – really, really desperate – chase to keep himself fed. I’ve never read anything like it.

‘The luckiest kid’

Lanegan was born in Ellensburg, in Washington state, in 1964. His family was “from a long line of coal miners, loggers, bootleggers, South Dakotan dirt farmers, criminals, convicts, and hill-billies of the roughest, most ignorant sort”. Readers familiar with his music might already conclude: he was born to be Mark Lanegan.

To give us a sense of his people, he lists the first names of his parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents; names like Marshall, Floyd, Ella, Emma, Roy, Marvin, Virgil, Margie, Donna, Laverne. His mother wanted to call him Lance – Lance Lanegan – but his father insisted on Mark, a name he didn’t like but could live with, although he preferred to be known by his surname.

It’s hugely entertaining. But it’s the contradictions that make the book much more than entertaining. Both of his parents “came from backgrounds of extreme poverty and cruel deprivation”, but they both went to college and were school teachers. “You’re not my son!” his mother shouted at him one time, as she slaps him on the face. He later reveals that she was a lecturer in early childhood learning. But she also “witnessed her father being murdered on the front lawn of their family home”. He was raised by his father. “I felt like the luckiest kid I knew, no rules, no curfew, no nothing. By age twelve, I was a compulsive gambler, a fledgling alcoholic, a thief, a porno fiend.” Again: he was born to be Mark Lanegan.

Graphic and physical

He met the Connor brothers, Van and Lee, with whom he formed his first band, Screaming Trees. “The band was sick, violent, depressing, destructive, and dangerous.” There’s energy in that sentence, but no joy. The touring is there, and the recording, and the move to Seattle and “grunge” – a word he hates. His friendship with Kurt Cobain is there, and his first solo albums. But, essentially, the book isn’t about what we could call his career, and that’s a disappointment; but it’s also the book’s great strength. Because it isn’t the book I expected it to be.

He describes a life of fighting and general mayhem. The fights are many, so graphic and physical they become cartoonish. But the same vivid, almost too vivid, language is used to describe his drug dependency and it’s bang-on. There’s a key sentence about a third of the way into the book, just as the world on the edge of music is becoming tedious: “Not for one minute did it cross my mind that I had done this to myself.”

I expected his life to change soon after that sentence; I wanted him to get over the heroin and get on with his real life. I wanted the Lanegan who sings I’m Not the Loving Kind so beautifully to emerge. But he doesn’t, and my impatience with the book and Lanegan gradually turned into admiration as I began to realise that this wasn’t going to happen. I was going to have to wait for the redemption.

His honesty is very brutal. His friendship with Cobain was a real thing, and there’s a wonderful, sad moment when they couldn’t record an album of Lead Belly songs together. Lanegan writes: “It was impossible for me to accept that someone else could find worth in what I did because I could not. How could Kurt be a fan when I saw in him a talent that was genuinely not of this place and time, like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, David Bowie, or Jimi Hendrix?” But Lanegan supplied Cobain with his heroin: “I had become a facilitator of his undoing.”

I didn’t know a lot of the names of the musicians who Lanegan encountered and befriended in those years. I Googled as I read. So many of the Wikipedia entries are written in the past tense, it’s shocking and desperately sad. Lanegan was heading into the past tense too. As he beat up a man who tried to rob him in King’s Cross, in London, where he’d gone to score heroin, he “had stopped feeling anything at all. No rage, sadness, fear, nothing. I had finally crossed the line and ceased giving a damn about life, death or any other meaningless thing in between.”

He had gone as low as he would go. It’s hard to read at times, but it’s brilliant.

His rescue, almost inevitably, is a bit of a disappointment. I’m glad it happened, but I knew it had. He wrote the book, after all, so I knew he was going to be grand. But the end is short and it left me wanting more. He came out of his hell a few years before I started listening to him.

I hope there’s another book in him. After reading Sing Backwards and Weep, I hope he can accept that he’s great – even now and again.

Roddy Doyle’s new novel Love will now be published in October.