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‘Heroin stopped me dying of alcoholism’: Mark Lanegan, rock's great survivor

His guilt over Kurt Cobain’s death, his scrap with Liam Gallagher, his year getting clean ... the former Screaming Trees frontman reveals why writing his memoirs hurt

Mark Lanegan was born to an abusive mother and a hard-drinking father, his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. Things went downhill from there. By 12, as he recounts in his new memoir, Sing Backwards and Weep, he was a “compulsive gambler, a fledgling alcoholic, a thief, a porno fiend”. By 18, his criminal record included breaking and entering, shoplifting, drug possession, vandalism, insurance fraud and 26 counts of underage drinking.

By 21, he was in proto-grungers Screaming Trees. Not that he wanted to be: it was his only route out of the “dusty cow town” of Ellensburg, Washington, which he left on the trail of “decadence, depravity, anything, everything”. At 29, eight albums later, he was living in Seattle, chain-smoking in dirty boxers and a stained bathrobe, and watching soap operas when one of his best friends kept phoning.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2yVDgwp
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