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Sing Backwards and Weep
On sale
30th April 2020
Price: £10.99
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
“Mark Lanegan-primitive, brutal, and apocalyptic. What’s not to love?” NICK CAVE
“A stoned cold classic” IAN RANKIN
‘Mark Lanegan writes like he sings, from the pained heart of a damaged soul with brutal honesty’ BOBBY GILLESPIE
“Powerfully written and brutally, frighteningly honest” LUCINDA WILLIAMS
A ROUGH TRADE AND MOJO BOOK OF THE YEAR
From the back of the van to the front of the bar, from the hotel room to the emergency room, Mark Lanegan takes us back to the sinister, needle-ridden streets of Seattle, to an alternative music scene that was simultaneously bursting with creativity and saturated with drugs. He tracks the tumultuous rise and fall of Screaming Trees, from a brawling, acid-rock bar band to world-famous festival favourites with an enduring legacy, and tells of his own personal struggles with addiction, culminating in homelessness, petty crime, and the tragic deaths of his closest friends.
Gritty, gripping and unflinchingly raw, SING BACKWARDS AND WEEP is about a man who learned how to drag himself from the wreckage, dust off the ashes, and keep living and creating.
‘The most brutally honest rock memoir imaginable’ DAILY TELEGRAPH
“Mark Lanegan-primitive, brutal, and apocalyptic. What’s not to love?” NICK CAVE
“A stoned cold classic” IAN RANKIN
‘Mark Lanegan writes like he sings, from the pained heart of a damaged soul with brutal honesty’ BOBBY GILLESPIE
“Powerfully written and brutally, frighteningly honest” LUCINDA WILLIAMS
A ROUGH TRADE AND MOJO BOOK OF THE YEAR
From the back of the van to the front of the bar, from the hotel room to the emergency room, Mark Lanegan takes us back to the sinister, needle-ridden streets of Seattle, to an alternative music scene that was simultaneously bursting with creativity and saturated with drugs. He tracks the tumultuous rise and fall of Screaming Trees, from a brawling, acid-rock bar band to world-famous festival favourites with an enduring legacy, and tells of his own personal struggles with addiction, culminating in homelessness, petty crime, and the tragic deaths of his closest friends.
Gritty, gripping and unflinchingly raw, SING BACKWARDS AND WEEP is about a man who learned how to drag himself from the wreckage, dust off the ashes, and keep living and creating.
‘The most brutally honest rock memoir imaginable’ DAILY TELEGRAPH
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Reviews
A harrowing but often hilarious chronicle of addiction and regret . . . packed full of surprises . . . [Lanegan's] eye-popping memoir explores hell's many sub-basements, and lived to produce good writing
gripping memoir
This is a frank, astonishing and often horrifying recollection from someone who has certainly lived a life, and who has now decided to share a part of it . . . far from your usual Rockstar Memoir
Sing Backwards and Weep is the only rock autobiography you need investigate. Like some nicotine-stained amalgam of Tom Waits and Kurt Cobain, Mark Lanegan gives another meaning to "warts and all" as he recounts his near obliteration during the Seattle grunge boom of the 1990s, of which he is one of the few survivors. A brazen and bleakly comic saga about the needle and the damage done.
It's a depiction of addiction and self-loathing so bleak that your fingernails come away its pages caked in dirt. In it Lanegan lays his track-marked past bare, cycling endlessly between his roles as powerless victim, talented screw up and toxic enabler from page to stinking page
A chronicle of depravity and drugs, laced with dark humour and crackling with - well, not exactly joie de vivre, but certainly the will to live. The story of the rock star who descends into substance-abuse hell but survives to tell the tale has been told a thousand times, but Lanegan relates his experiences with irresistible swagger and honesty
Dark yet borderline-hilarious cavalcade of horror and mayhem
The usual offering is that dreaded soufflé of bullshit known as the rock memoir - the airy embellishment of glory days that inevitably collapses under the weight of its own conceit. But Lanegan's Sing Backwards and Weep is a rock memoir only insofar as its author happens to have sung rock n' roll in seminal bands while developing close friendships with some of the genre's most dearly departed
This is a narrative packed with surprises [...] but there is room in this heavy, heavy book for quite astonishing turns of kismet.
Many rock memoirs come with a third act in which the artist achieves sobriety and disavows their former life. Not so Lanegan, who delivers grand guignol scenes of heroin-fuelled violence, degradation and self-abuse while recalling his Screaming Tree days, with little in the way of regrets. Rare in its rawness and bracing honesty.
The book is a triumph.
The most brutally honest rock memoir imaginable
Sing Backwards and Weep is the only rock autobiography you need investigate. Like some nicotine-stained amalgam of Tom Waits and Kurt Cobain, Mark Lanegan gives another meaning to "warts and all" as he recounts his near obliteration during the Seattle grunge boom of the 1990s, of which he is one of the few survivors. A brazen and bleakly comic saga about the needle and the damage done.
A mesmerising trip to the dark side that in places is so gloriously bleak it achieves a kind of Grand Guignol comedy. Written in blood, with true intensity, it becomes an instant classic of the genre
[Sing Backwards and Weep] makes for a harrowing epic, a thriller if I ever read one . . . the lyricist's flair he applies to its best passages elevates the book from the level of hachneyed retreads . . . he's able to dial himself up in moments of rage, sink us chin-deep into his sorrow at the loss of good friends . . . and crank the tension into a tightly wound ball when the dope-sickness sets in and the chase for a fix is on
One of the rawest and most honest music autobiographies I've ever read
The frontman of the Screaming Trees gives a bloody, brawling, dope-fueled tour of his personal battlefields By any reckoning, Lanegan should be long dead alongside beloved friends like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Kristen Pfaff of Hole, and Layne Stanley of Alice in Chains. By either miracle or stamina, the author is still alive to offer a blisteringly raw self-portrait of life not just as an excessively self-indulgent rock star, but also a victim of his own hubris . . . This isn't just a warts-and-all admission; it's a blackout- and overdose-rich confessional marked by guilt and shame. It's also not a redemption song, but like any other train wreck, it's impossible to look away. A stunning tally of the sacrifices that sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll demand of its mortal instruments
A dark tale of dysfunctional normality and diseased reality. At war with the world and himself, Mark Lanegan writes like he sings, from the pained heart of a damaged soul with brutal honesty
A rock autobiography as raw as it gets. Come for the magnificent rant about Liam Gallagher, stay for the bleak and gripping account of addiction and loss
This is a narrative packed with surprises [...] but there is room in this heavy, heavy book for quite astonishing turns of kismet.
Rare in its rawness and candour, the book is a brutal chronicle of addiction
An astonishingly frank, heartbreaking and tremendously brave book
Raw, ravaged and personal - a stoned cold classic
One of the most unflinching memoirs in the history of music writing . . . it is a survivor's tale, and a brilliantly written one at that
frank about his youthful search for "decadence, depravity, anything, everything" and refuses to flinch from the guilt he still carries around the death of his friend Kurt Cobain
The book reads like a debauched Bukowski novel, as Lanegan drifts from sin to sin, cursing those who held him back from music, drugs, and hookups, and recounting grisly tales about his famous friends
unflinchingly tells the musician's hardscrabble story from his early days in backwater Ellensburg, Washington as he drifts from a teen gambler and porn fiend to petty criminal
Sing Backwards and Weep - by turns mordant, entertaining and bleak - is both a portrait of a damaged man and a chronicle of a now legendary music scene
Sing Backwards and Weep is a painstakingly unflinching account of a troubled life further troubled by the excesses of rock 'n' roll. It is among the very best memoirs I have read, by a musician or anyone else
A brutally honest, harrowing yet utterly compulsive read
A visceral, unforgettable memoir.
Rare in its rawness and candour, the book is a brutal chronicle of addiction [...] despite the tragedies, an arch humour characterises a lot of the writing
Sing Backwards and Weep is powerfully written and brutally, frighteningly honest. First thought that came to my mind was, 'Mark Lanegan gives the term 'bad boy' a whole new meaning.' These are gritty, wild tales of hardcore drugs, sex, and grunge. But this is also the story of a soulful artist who refused the darkness when it tried to swallow him whole. And who found redemption through grace and the power of his unique and brilliant music. Finally, the song becomes truth. And the truth becomes song
[A] deeply sensitive book
A bejewelled document of excess and redemption
Sing Backwards and Weep is an unflinching trawl - or would be, were it not marginally leavened by straight-shooting yet eloquent language, gallows humour and his sweet, boyish excitement at the breifest of encounters with musical heroes such as Waylon Jennings and Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh
Not for the faint-hearted