Standing On The Edge
THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO
Voice of unflinching catharsis, Mark Lanegan’s voyage reached its end on February 22. His friend Keith Cameron remembers him.
SO OFTEN HAD Mark Lanegan cheated death, it became easy to assume the man was indestructible. Unlike Kurt Cobain, Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Layne Staley, friends and musical peers, he survived years of brutal drug addiction, a horror show unflinchingly recounted in his 2020 memoir Sing Backwards And Weep – written at the behest of Anthony Bourdain, another friend lost to the demons.
Lanegan had also survived Covid, which in March 2021 saw him hospitalised in his new domain of south-west Ireland. For three weeks he lay in a coma. Only the intervention of his wife Shelley prevented doctors performing an emergency tracheotomy; she feared he might lose the ability to sing, and thus also the will to live. Yet months later, Lanegan was discharged, scans revealing healthily functional organs, his symptoms “normal, post-Covid”.