The singer Mark Lanegan, who has died unexpectedly at his home in Killarney, Co Kerry aged 57, was the quintessential grunge-era icon. Renowned for his rumbling and ennui-filled voice, he was part of the generation of angst-shrouded frontmen that also included Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and Soundgarden's Chris Cornell.
A natural born outsider from America’s rainy Pacific northwest, Lanegan was blessed with rock star mystique but haunted by demons which would manifest as drug addiction and alcoholism.
Lanegan had moved to Kerry several years ago for reasons both practical and emotional. As a solo artist, his largest audience was in Europe. And so Killarney made for a more logical touring base than his previous home in Los Angeles.
However, the south west of Ireland reminded Lanegan, too, of his rural upbringing in Ellensberg, Washington State, where he described himself as coming from a long line " of bootleggers, dirt farmers, criminals, convicts and hillbillies".
He also had Irish heritage – and so relocating to Kerry, where he lived with his wife, Shelley Brien, felt like coming home, as he told Spin Magazine in 2020. "My great grandparents come from here. And I like it. These are my people ... In Co Kerry it's really beautiful, physically."
Several months after that interview Lanegan would wake to discover that he had gone temporarily deaf. He had contracted Covid-19 and rapidly took a turn for the worse, slipping into a three-week coma at University Hospital Kerry in Tralee.
He eventually made it through and wrote about his experiences in Devil in a Coma, the second of two volumes of memoir he has published. The first book, Sing Backwards and Weep, had unpacked his years of drug abuse with remarkable frankness (in addition to sparking an amusing feud with his former touring partner Liam Gallagher).
He described becoming an addict at age 12 and of pursuing a path of self-destruction through the early 1990s, even as his band, Screaming Trees, seemed destined for the sort of stratospheric success Kurt Cobain was enjoying with Nirvana.
Heroin, he wrote in that book, “kept me from dying from the horrors of my severe alcoholism”. On the road with Screaming Trees he once overdosed and had to be taken to hospital, where doctors considered amputating his arm – so severe was the damage from needle marks.
He was a friend of Kurt Cobain – and would later be haunted by his failure to answer the a phone call from Cobain shortly before the Nirvana singer took his own life.
“I will always carry great guilt about my actions on the day Kurt decided to do what he did, because I wilfully ignored him,” he told Rolling Stone. “[H]e would have picked up the phone anytime I called.
But though Lanegan spoke unflinchingly about his addiction issues and his guilt about Cobain, it would a terrible disservice, at the time of his passing, to focus on the dark side of his life. Because, in his music there was underdog vim and a sort of rhapsodic rawness.
Always brooding, perpetually shadowed by storm-clouds, his work with the Screaming Trees and as a solo artist would never be mistaken for a pick-me up.
It was nonetheless a remarkable body of work – far more varied that typical of other artists associated with grunge. Fronting Screaming Trees, with whom he recorded seven albums from 1986 to 1997, he was a menacing presence, his voice sweeping in over the caterwauling guitars like a bitter wind descending from a lonely mountaintop.
And yet, following the implosion of Screaming Trees, he was determined to grow as an artist, collaborating with Glasgow indie-folk singer Isobel Campbell on three LPs and later releasing a series remarkable stand-alone albums that expanded beyond the hard rock palette with which he was synonymous. If there is a song from that chapter of his career and life for which he should be remembered surely it is 2012's Ode To Sad Disco, a foundation-quaking piece of baroque electronica steeped in pain yet which brims with grace and even hope.
“Darkness denied/Here I have seen the light…,” he sings as the track hurtles towards its endpoint. It is a defiant fade-out from an artist who endured a lifetime of suffering but who, even in those darkest days, never stopped making compelling art.
