SING BACKWARDS AND WEEP by Mark Lanegan (White Rabbit, 2020)

‘Men Should Weep’ was the title of a 1947 play by Ena Lamont Stewart I saw performed in London in 1982 by Glasgow’s 7:84 theatre company (named from the statistical information that 7% of the people own 84% of the wealth).

I liked the title of this play because it conjured up the image of men weeping en masse . I imagined this as a universal shedding of tears for the patriarchal pain men have inflicted on humankind. Some hope!

Sadly, the macho stereotype is still alive, kicking and oppressing as Mark Lanegan’s relentlessly bleak memoir confirms. Despite the title (a line from his song ‘Fix’ from the solo album ‘Field Songs’) , Lanegan is not much given to weeping or displaying his feelings. It’s therefore a surreal moment when he relates how one huge tear formed after hearing of the death of his friend and mentor Jeffrey Lee Pierce of Gun Club. He writes about this with amazement as if it’s going to be submerged in a pool of tears like Alice In Wonderland.

This is a momentary dent in the emotional shield for a man who is the epitome of the strong, silent and menacing type. This bad boy image (and being a singer in a rock and roll band – Screaming Trees) undoubtedly accounts for his success with women drawn to the sense of danger like moths to a flame.

This warts and all autobiography reveals that Lanegan was born tough and got tougher. His mother never showed any love; his father was too screwed up or drunk to be much of a role model. Not being shown any other path that made sense,  the wayward son writes that “violence became another way of communicating.”

With a sad inevitability Lanegan took a loner’s  route to petty (and not so petty) theft, weed and booze at an early age then moved on to hard drugs when reaching adulthood. He subsequently claims that getting hooked on heroine saved him from dying of alcoholism.

Music was a solace and stumbling into a band meant he never had to do a straight job. Being a frontman with an attitude was the perfect fit. It also meant he had access to ready cash to feed a habit that quickly dominated his life. He sums up his daily routine as “a stolen moment of desperate pleasure, an assful of tiny daggers, then an eternity of agony.”

The funniest section of the book is when his band find themselves on the same bill as Oasis. Liam Gallagher is dismissed as a poser and “a would-be playground bully” but, however accurate this assessment is,  Lanegan is surely not much higher up the food chain when he refers to himself as  “a fucking shitbag liar [and] junkie loser.” 

This is not a book for the squeamish. The graphic details of searching for a clean vein to hit make you shudder and squirm. He has to resort to his feet or armpits and even thinks about his cock (thankfully he thinks again).

The constant quest for the next hit makes it hard to imagine how he found the time or energy for anything else. Though his self-obsessed memoir is depressing in the extreme,  it should lay to rest any misguided notion that a junky lifestyle is a glamorous walk on the wild side.   

The early drugs and depression related deaths of other high profile singers he befriended – Kurt Cobain, and Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley –  failed to sound any warning bells. Their passing cause grief but he seemed resigned to the notion that he was destined to meet the same fate. He praises Neil Young’s ‘The Needle And The Damage Done’ without heeding that song’s message.

Similarly, even the most desperate and/or squalid episodes down countless blind alleys led to no real insights. Any sane person would have looked for a way out but such is the tunnel vision of addiction that this never seemed to occur to him. The absence of any meaningful self-reflection is often baffling and it’s nothing short of a miracle that he lived to tell tales of his journey to hell and back again.

He eventually only made it to rehab to escape getting killed by another junky he had robbed.  The story highlights the classic addict’s curse which is that no matter how low you get, it’s still all about seeking out the next high.

In Lanegan’s case you have to follow him to the very end of a long, dark tunnel to come to a glimmer of light. Even then, it turns out that the long delayed epiphany in the book’s closing chapter is not actually the end of the nightmare. The memoir ends in the late 1990s but Isobel Campbell, an artist he later collaborated with, confirms that in 2006, Lanegan was back in rehab. Once an addict, always an addict I guess. It’s good to know that, as at 2022, Lanegan has been clean for the best part of a decade but in a bizarre follow up, after all the shit he’s pumped into his wasted body,  his reluctance to get a simple vaccine meant he nearly died from Covid. That is the story of his latest book, Devil In A Coma  which I shall not be reading.