There was no spotlight on Mark Lanegan and he barely moved throughout, one hand welded to the microphone stand, the other frozen on the mike. Yet you never took your eyes off him. Nor your ears, because this was the owner of one of the most raggedly formidable voices around, one that has spearheaded the Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age, dovetailed magically with Isobel Campbell’s and been compared to those of Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash. It sounded both sandblasted and supple, abrasive yet agile, like an 18-stone rugby player with a dancing sidestep.
That rather fits with the description of Lanegan by Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age as “the meanest nice guy I’ve ever met”. He is famously taciturn in interviews, and not big on stage patter. A cheer went up when he finally paused and said, “Thank you”. That was five songs in. Not that the audience was complaining, because Lanegan and his four-piece band had already treated them to the swirling blues-rock of Wedding Dress and the thrillingly saturnine Gravedigger’s Song. Even better was to come with Creeping Coastline of Lights, a reverb-heavy ballad, full of scarred glamour.
A lean and Clint Eastwood-like 47, Lanegan has had an itinerant career, riven by heroin addiction. He started out as a bit-part player in the Seattle grunge scene and was friends with Kurt Cobain. But since coming off heroin, he has enjoyed something of an electronic renaissance, collaborating with the production duo Soulsavers on two albums and, for his latest (excellent) record, Blues Funeral, writing songs on a keyboard and acquiring a fairly hefty Kraftwerk habit.
He’s not about to up sticks and move to Ibiza, but electronic textures work well with that beast of a voice, from the strange shrieks and bird calls that accompanied Resurrection Song to the stirring synth-pop drama of Ode to Sad Disco. There’s no one quite him.