97. Mark Lanegan
ELECTRIC BALLROOM
4 August 2015
I once encountered Mark Lanegan in a Greenwich poster shop, where he materialised like a storm front and proceeded to strike quiet terror into the soul of a poor gallery intern whose job description had not included handling sentient grizzly bears in human form. Lanegan stood there, all scowls and sinew, hawking limited-edition prints while radiating the sort of simmering menace usually reserved for Balkan warlords.
We caught the tail end of his performance (an abrupt, bruising affair that ended as suddenly as it had begun), after which he signed a handful of posters in something approximating human interaction and disappeared once more into the bleak mist of whatever sodden bog he now called home. Having relocated from Seattle to rural Ireland, it seems he had found somewhere equally damp, underpopulated, and with a tendency for the darkly poetic, that suited his general disposition.
Despite the taciturn, vaguely apocalyptic air that surrounds him, it’s worth remembering Lanegan was there at the start, one of the foundational figures of Seattle’s grunge movement with Screaming Trees, and later the gravel-voiced ghost imprinting his trademark roots-blues on some of Queens of the Stone Age’s best moments. Now, out of nowhere, he’d released Phantom Radio, a startlingly good and critically acclaimed record that reminded the music world, much to its collective surprise, that this was actually his ninth solo album.
But perhaps such a reaction is not that surprising. His isn’t music for the masses. It’s music for the insomniac, the loner, the whisky-stained and world-weary. Songs that rumble in the gut and scrape across the heart like gravel under boots, whether whispered over skeletal piano or growled out atop fuzzed-out guitars and the lurching heartbeat of doom-laden drums.
On stage, Lanegan is minimalist to the point of asceticism. No pleasantries. No stage banter. No attempt to endear himself to the audience whatsoever. He regards the crowd with all the warmth of a North Korean border guard. His band are introduced in what could generously be described as a low, resentful mutter. They’re dressed in regulation black and appear equally uninterested in anything that might resemble joy.
But as he opens proceedings with “The Gravedigger’s Song”, all menace and bruised romance, and there it is, that strange alchemy. A sense that buried beneath the gravel and the glare is something painfully human. “You’ve been torturing me,” he croaks like a man who's lived it, and we believe him. Despite all the darkness, there is heart in these songs, albeit a black one and it is worn on his sleeve. As he nears to close with one of this latest album’s highlights, Torn Red Heart, rasping, “You don’t love me. What’s to love, anyway?” it’s not self-pity. It’s resignation. It’s confession.
Lanegan was never one for rose-tinted nostalgia, but in that voice, ravaged, ruined, utterly honest, there’s a strange comfort. A man who has been to the edge, and you are not quite sure if he has ever truly returned from it.