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Artist News Releases
Mark Lanegan set to publish grunge memoir
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 17 January 2020
Mark Lanegan has announced that he will publish a memoir, titled ‘Sing Backwards And Weep’, later this year. It’s being published by White Rabbit, the new music-focussed imprint of publishing house Orion, set up by Lee Brackstone, formerly of Faber Social.
According to the publisher, the book concentrates on the 90s, a time when Lanegan found fame with his band The Screaming Trees, and also ended up selling crack and addicted to heroin once that began to wane. Although he has since recovered and found new creative fulfilment, others in the Seattle grunge scene, such as Lanegan’s friends Kurt Cobain and Layne Stayley, were not so lucky. Lanegan was the last person to speak to Cobain before his death in 1994.
Brackstone says: “Two days before I started at White Rabbit, this manuscript arrived, and I acquired it a few days later. It is a monumental book. I can’t compare it to any other memoir that has emerged from the music world. It’s a story of trauma, suffering, dysfunction, survival – and making great art out of all of that”.
“It is staggeringly brave, honest and terrifying”, he goes on. “I’ve no doubt it will become the classic account of the Seattle scene and its aftershocks into the 90s. It’s an heroic act to have committed these stories to the page and it shows Lanegan’s great courage and integrity that he has gone back and revisited these experiences. It’s a book full of horror and degradation, the pain of addiction and the depravity it encourages”.
“I think it will be a helpful book for many people because it shows an artist laid bare, all the vulnerabilities and failings”, he concludes. “It makes 90% of other music memoirs look like fakes and I learned from publishing [books by] Viv Albertine [at Faber], that readers respond to the bare truth more than anything else”.
‘Sing Backwards And Weep’ is set to be published on 30 Apr.
