Lanegan also regularly turns on the dry humour like gas on the stove to talk about his post-booze up blackouts. The bewilderment and grief of Cobain's suicide was felt alone, in Ohio, strangely detached from the plaid, the boots, the rain and drear of the Pacific Northwest. Mark Lanegan went from idolizing to The Gun Club's Jeffrey Lee Pierce to receiving the friendship of the man himself.

Sing Backwards and Weep: Mayhem, music and drugs Sing Backwards and Weep: Mayhem, music and drugs

Over the years, Mark has collaborated with an extensive list of artists: Isobel Campbell, Duke Garwood, Cult of Luna, etc. It might be a spoiler to reveal how Lanegan’s salvation eventually comes and who, unexpectedly, foots the bill for his rehab. And the Screaming Trees do have a legacy; far from “terrible”, their earlier albums are treats of rough-hewn backwoods psych — even their debut Clairvoyance, which has that kind of we-made-a-record spirited naivety. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian ‘All his bad luck, self-sabotage and radical candour is delivered in an eloquent, matter-of-fact tone’ .In addition to leading the The Gutter Twins, Lanegan has also been involved in other musical projects, including hard rock band Queens of the Stone Age, longterm collaborations with Isobel Campbell; and undertaken some surprisingly eclectic collaborations, such as co-writing and providing vocals for "Black River" by the electronic outfit, Bomb the Bass. Friends die along the way, among them Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, the Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff, and Demri Parrott, partner of the Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley, who himself died of an overdose in 2002.

Sing Backwards and Weep: The Sunday Times Bestseller

But Lanegan not only despised the early music they made- he felt they were finally getting somewhere with Sweet Oblivion- he makes being on the road with this group sound fairly awful. Mark and I drank endless cups of coffee at the Valley Cafe and went for long drives into the arid hills surrounding the Kittitas Valley, talking books and poetry (well, he talked, I nodded sagely). Lanegan je toga svestan i prihvata to ali na nihilističan način, kao lutriju sudbine, ni po čemu bolju ili lošiju od anonimne smrti u jarku. Both of his parents “came from backgrounds of extreme poverty and cruel deprivation”, but they both went to college and were school teachers.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.