Prozac and Whimsy

I bought the magnificent Queens Of The Stone Age 2002 album Songs For The Deaf because Dave Grohl was on drums. I firmly believe that he should be banned from doing anything other than drumming. Buying things because of Dave drumming is a practice I have followed for some time and it has never gone wrong for me… yet. Probot, Killing Joke, Them Crooked Vultures are all brilliant, not just because Dave is drumming admittedly but it certainly fucking helps matters.

What I wasn’t prepared for back then was the introduction to the six foot plus mardy, moody, genius of Mark Lanegan. Screaming Trees were a band that you were always just kind of aware of in the background and his solo work was never exactly raved about by the music press so I missed out on a lot until hearing him rumble his way through A Song For The Dead. But I soon got myself up to speed and devoted myself to him and anything he appeared on… and he appeared on a fucking lot of stuff over the years.

It’s hard to pinpoint what I’d consider his best work but the three albums he did with Isobel Campbell are excellent. The 2012 Mark Lanegan Band album Blues Funeral saw him start down a new path with more electronic beats and bits and bobs and a heavy almost gothic feel to his music. The opening track The Gravedigger’s Song is a perfect song, there isn’t a second wasted or a single word you could or would change. That he then followed that up with a mostly acoustic album with Duke Garwood AND an album of covers in 2013 is frankly startling.

Then there was The Gutter Twins, The Twilight Singers, Soulsavers, Moby,  Unkle, Mad Season,  Masters Of Reality, Earth, Manic Street Preachers and Chrissie Hynde to name but a few! And then there is his books and works of art to consider as well.

We lost Mr Lanegan on 22/02/2022 ( which is beautifully palindromic but that’s not important.) No cause of death has ever been released but he had been gravely ill with covid a few years prior and never seemed to fully recover. He lived a work hard play harder life with various addictions and time spent in rehab over the years and the stories told in his memoir Sing Backwards And Weep don’t make for easy reading at times. He was one of those people that was never destined for old age but there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t mourn him.

I have a Death’s-Head moth tattooed on my arm in honour of him (and Silence Of The Lambs but that’s a different story) As the opening track to the 2017 album Gargoyle is called Death’s Head Tattoo and I was a little drunk when I walked past the tattoo parlour and saw the flash for one in the window.

Parasocial relationships are rarely healthy but, and there’s always a but, his music has really helped me over the years. I did meet him a couple of times as after a gig where he would barely acknowledge the audience from the stage he’d sit at the merch stand and sign anything you put in front of him and stay there until everyone was happy and had left. The first time I met him I stood there with my ticket stub ( who remembers ticket stubs‽) and handed it to him in star struck silence, he looked at me and growled ” what’s your name kid?” Before signing it and me bumbling off not quite believing it had actually happened.

That he died in 2022 and Chrissie Hynde released an album in 2025 featuring him says a lot about the volume of work he has left behind and his legacy (or maybe she’s really fucking slow at making things?) I get to thinking about my death and legacy quite a bit. I waver between wanting to vanish without a trace apart from the stories told about me by friends and loved ones to wanting a bench or a tree in the park with my name on.

I want to be cremated and my ashes scattered somewhere beautiful, or yeeted into the lake in the arboretum. I don’t  want a grave or a headstone that anyone has to feel obliged to tend or visit. Life is more than just the dates you came and went on, it’s what you did in the middle that counts. I walk the dog round a graveyard and have borrowed the names of some of the deceased to use in bits and pieces over the years but I don’t know these people and their grand headstones falling into disrepair makes me a little sad.

I miss and think about Mark more than any of the numerous school and work friends I have buried over the years. Apart from Emma who is never far from my thoughts, especially of late. I don’t mark the day of her death anymore and the guilt of missing it has been replaced by a sense of shock that another year has gone by.

I’m 47 this summer and I never expected to make it this far. I’ve found an uneasy peace with my past and no longer think of my death as any sort of reasonable or sensible answer to anything that comes my way.  I don’t believe in heaven or hell or any type of God, but I do believe in fate.

Everything that has happened has brought me here. Everything that is happening is taking me some place new. Where that is and how that looks is something I’ll figure and find out as we go on. But I want a life between the dates. I want to live. I want to live on in the smiles of my friends and loved ones as they remember me and the things we did when I’ve gone. Because that’s how we can live forever and while Mark may be gone I’ll always have his music and that is beautiful.