Devil in a Coma: a memoir

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Lanegan’s worsening drug use (it was on a 1992 tour that an infection from heroin abuse had doctors considering amputating his arm, and in the wake of Cobain’s death in 1994 he admitted diving deeper into drugs) didn’t seem to hinder his productivity. His 1994 solo album ‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’ was considered amongst his finest. 1995 saw him collaborate with Alice In Chains singer Layne Staley and Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready in the supergroup Mad Season. My favorite part (if it’s appropriate to have a “favorite” part of such a brutal retelling of an illness) was the style of his writing- the combination of old memories combined with the re-telling of his hospitalization, and then poems that relate to the specific part of the story in between.

The Devil was fairly profligate with the best songs, but rare was the singer blessed with His very own voice. Grunge pioneer Mark Lanegan – who died yesterday (February 22) aged 57 – sang like a southern swamp, a canyon catacomb, a gallows tree.Devil in a Coma is self-lacerating (at one point, Lanegan calls himself “a cauldron of negative energy”) but I wondered if he was too hard on himself. His music has brought joy to fans while his writing is exhilarating and unexpectedly funny. In the memoir, he comes across as a comically difficult patient and I laughed out loud at his account of getting busted by a nurse for smoking. This is a journal not of the Pandemiad but of the plague raging through one man's body and his brutal struggle to survive. If you're a Lanegan fan it feels like a natural extension of SBAW and his recent albums. If you have no idea about Lanegan but want to read about what it was like to have a bad bout of covid this may also interest you. It was definitely in my top five worst experiences,” the 57-year-old deadpans down the line from his home in County Kerry. He speaks slowly, with traces of the “scratchy whisper” he describes in Devil in a Coma, his memoir of his harrowing illness. “But I finally turned a corner recently and I’m feeling pretty normal, so it looks like it’s behind me.” By 2003 he was collaborating with Greg Dulli of Afghan Whigs as The Gutter Twins, who released one album (‘Saturnalia’, 2008), and in 2004 he began a celebrated collaboration with Isobel Campbell which would stretch for seven years and produce three albums.

No sooner had the accolades dried on that memoir than Lanegan, relocated to Ireland, land of his great-great-great-grandfather, to escape Covid, contracted Covid. In denial at first, he falls downstairs. Unable to breathe, deafened, with deep welts on his scalp and a useless leg, he is committed to hospital and put in an induced coma on kidney dialysis. His wife learns that Lanegan holds the hospital record for surviving longest in this parlous state. At one point, she refuses to allow the doctors to perform a tracheotomy that would have ended his singing career. I ask Lanegan if he feels the seasons in his songs, and I tell him that so much of what he sings conjures autumn for me, darker days with warm and fading light. “I grew up in a place where we had really hot summers and really icy, snowy wintertimes. But the fall and the spring are my favourite seasons when you’re in a place that has four seasons, fall being the best. I find it an inspiring time, something about the crisp air, the smell of woodsmoke, the changing of the colours of the leaves.” There’s a little bit of autumn left before the solstice, and it feels like the perfect time to read Lanegan’s new memoir while listening to his records. One morning in March 2021 with the second wave of infections ripping through Ireland where he was newly resident, Mark Lanegan woke up breathless, fatigued beyond belief, his body burdened with a gigantic dose of Covid-19. Admitted to Kerry Hospital and initially given little hope of survival, Lanegan's illness has him slipping in and out of a coma, unable to walk or function for several months and fearing for his life.It's an interesting read. Especially given some of Lanegan's previously released work that swings into the conspiracy view of ~covid~ which effectively kneecapped him regardless of his thoughts on the matter. And for all it's dark and twisty there's the signature Lanegan humour. I could just imagine the doctors and nurses clapping with glee at the chance to find a vein when he was hospitalised for a second time unconscious. One morning in the spring of 2020, as the pandemic swept the world, the American singer Mark Lanegan woke to find he’d lost his hearing. He got up and fell down the stairs at the house he and his wife Shelley were renting in rural Ireland. Lanegan refused to go to hospital but, eventually, Shelley overruled him and called an ambulance. Lanegan had a nasty case of coronavirus and was put into a medically-induced coma. This story of the band The Fat White Family is incredible – the best book I’ve read in a long time.” What I’ll read next… Compelling . . . When he eventually does sing again, Mark Lanegan has the record of a lifetime to make