Mark Lanegan's singular body of work encompasses dozens of albums both solo and collaborative and his memoir Sing Backwards and Weep was a Sunday Times bestseller and Rough Trade Book of the Year. He died aged 56 in 2022.
Raw, ravaged and personal - a stoned cold classic
*Ian Rankin*
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
*Lucinda Williams*
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
*Kevin Barry*
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
*Bobby Gillespie*
One of the rawest and most honest music autobiographies I've ever
read
*Stuart Braithwaite*
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
*Kirkus*
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 Guardian, 10 of the Best Music Biographies*
The most brutally honest rock memoir imaginable
*Daily Telegraph*
Not for the faint-hearted
*9/10, Classic Rock*
An astonishingly frank, heartbreaking and tremendously brave
book
*Record Collector*
Dark yet borderline-hilarious cavalcade of horror and mayhem
*Big Issue*
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
*Rolling Stone*
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
*Echoes and Dust*
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
*Kerrang*
[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
*Bookanista*
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
*Guardian*
Rare in its rawness and candour, the book is a brutal chronicle of
addiction
*Guardian*
[A] deeply sensitive book
*Guardian*
A brutally honest, harrowing yet utterly compulsive read
*The Quietus*
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
*NME*
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
*Clash*
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
*Spin*
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
*Financial Times*
A bejewelled document of excess and redemption
*Mirror*
The book is a triumph.
*New Statesman*
This is a narrative packed with surprises [...] but there is room
in this heavy, heavy book for quite astonishing turns of
kismet.
*The Observer*
A visceral, unforgettable memoir.
*The New European*
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
*Scotland on Sunday*
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
*Vice*
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
*The Guardian*
gripping memoir
*Sunday Express*
This is a narrative packed with surprises [...] but there is room
in this heavy, heavy book for quite astonishing turns of
kismet.
*The Observer*
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
*The i*
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
*The Australian*
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.
*Irish Independent*
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
*TLS*
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.
*Irish Indepdendent Summer Reads*
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