Tag: Irvine Welsh

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Favourite Scots words, S – part 1

 

© Channel 4 Films / PolyGram Filmed Entertainment

 

Hot on the heels of my post about Robert Burns, here’s the latest in my series about favourite words in Scots, the language Burns wrote in.  Many Scots words begin with the letter ‘S’, so in this instalment I’m only going to list the first half of them.

 

Scaffy (n) – not, as you might expect, a scaffolder, but a streetcleaner or binman.

 

Scheme / Schemie (n) – a scheme is the Scottish word for a housing estate and schemie is the derogatory word for someone who lives on one.  One long-ago Saturday evening, while I was wandering around central Edinburgh, I went past a nightclub and was suddenly accosted by an upset young woman who demanded, “Dae I look like a schemie?”  Her supposed resemblance to a schemie was why the bouncer at the nightclub door had just turned her away.

 

Meanwhile, a much-quoted line from Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) comes from Mark Renton when he turns up for a job interview: “They’d rather gie a merchant school old boy with severe brain damage a job in nuclear engineering than gie a schemie wi a Ph. D. a post as a cleaner in an abattoir.”

 

Scooby (n), as in ‘I havenae a Scooby’ – rhyming slang for ‘clue’.  Scooby refers to Scooby Doo, the famous American TV cartoon dog who first appeared in 1969, accompanying some ‘meddling kids’, without whose investigations many, many, many criminals “would have gotten away with it.”  I’ve seen arguments online about whether this started as Scottish rhyming slang and then spread to England, or started as Cockney rhyming slang and spread to Scotland.  But I’m sure I heard it in Scotland back in the 1980s, and it was appearing in Scottish newspapers in the 1990s, so its Caledonian pedigree is pretty venerable.

 

Scrieve (v) – to write.  Accordingly, a scriever is a writer.  “Just been doin’ a wee bit scrievin’ you know,” says Matt Craig, the main character and aspiring scriever in Archie Hind’s Glasgow-set novel The Dear Green Place (1966), which is as good an account of the trials and tribulations facing a working-class person trying to make a name as a writer, and a living from it, as Jack London’s better-known Martin Eden (1909).

 

© Corgi Books

 

Scunnered (adj) – sickened or disgusted.  During the 1980s and 1990s, this word was commonly used in Scotland on the mornings following general elections, when it became clear that a majority of people in Scotland had voted for the Labour Party and a majority of people in the south of England had voted for Maggie Thatcher’s Conservatives.  Guess who ended up ruling Scotland each time?  For a 21st-century variation on this, see the Brexit vote.

 

Sharn (n) – dung.  Yes, Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts may know Sharn as a city that ‘towers atop a cliff above the mouth of the Dagger River in southern Breland’ in the fictional world of Eberron, but in Scots sharn refers to cow-shite.  That’s a warning to fantasy creators.  When you dream up names for your fantasy characters, creatures and places, be sure to check they don’t also mean something embarrassing in Scots.  Now please excuse me while I get back to writing my latest sword-and-sorcery epic wherein Glaikit the Barbarian rescues Princess Jobbie from the clutches of the Dark Lord Pishy-Breeks in the Kingdom of Boak.

 

Shauckle (v) – to shuffle along, barely raising your feet off the ground.

 

Sheuch (n) – a channel for removing wastewater, i.e., a gutter at the side of a street or a ditch at the side of a field. In William McIlvanney’s 1975 novel Docherty, the young hero Conn gets battered by his school’s headmaster for saying to him, “Ah fell an bumped ma heid in the sheuch.”  The fact that he doesn’t use the ‘correct’ word, gutter, is seen as ‘insolence’.  Early in the 20th century, when the events of Docherty take place, Scottish schoolkids would be punished for using Scots rather than the King’s English.  The only day in the year when Scots was acceptable in schools was January 25th, Robert Buns’ birthday, when they were made to recite the poetry of their national bard.

 

© Canongate Books Ltd

 

Incidentally, in Northern Ireland, where I spent my childhood, a sheuch seemed to be only a ditch.  My dad was a farmer and once or twice I heard him cry, “There’s a cow got stuck in the sheuch!”  And the North Channel – the strip of water above the Irish Sea that separates Scotland and Northern Ireland – was called ‘the Sheuch’ and the land-masses east and west of it termed ‘baith sides o’ the Sheuch.’

 

Shieling (n) – a hut or shelter for animals, usually out in the wilds and / or up in the hills.

 

Shilpit (adj) – thin, pale and weak-looking.

 

Shoogly (adj) – wobbly.  To hang on a shoogly peg means to be in dodgy, precarious or dire circumstances.  Since the arrival of the ineffectual and accident-prone Humza Yousaf as First Minister of Scotland, it’s fair to say the peg the electoral fortunes of the Scottish National Party hang on has been pretty shoogly.

 

Skean–dhu (n) – the Anglicised (or Scotticised) version of the Gaelic term sgian-duhb, meaning the ceremonial dagger that’s tucked behind the top of the hose in male Highland dress.  Considering the popularity of Highland dress at Scottish weddings, and the amount of alcohol consumed at them, it’s always surprised me that the country has avoided having a sky-high death-toll of wedding guests stabbed with skean-dhus in drunken altercations.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Stubborn Stag

 

Skelf (n) – a splinter.

 

Skelp (n / v) – to slap or a slap.  Skelps were often administered by parents and teachers to wayward kids back in the days, fondly remembered by the Daily Mail and Daily Express, when it was believed that assaulting children was good for them.

 

Skite (n / v) – also to strike someone or the blow thereof.  However, a skite is more likely to come from a sharp, stinging cane or stick than the open hand that delivers by a skelp.  Both are nicely onomatopoeic words, in their different ways.

 

Skoosh (n / v) – a squirt or spray of liquid.  A commonly heard exchange in Scottish pubs: “Dae ye want water in yer whisky?”  “Aye, but just a wee skoosh.”

 

Sleekit (adj) – according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, either ‘sleek’ and ‘smooth’ or ‘crafty’ and ‘deceitful’.  Presumably it was with the first meaning that this word got immortalised in a line of Robert Burns’ 1785 poem To a Mouse: “Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie…”  Nowadays, it’s used mainly with the ‘crafty’ and ‘deceitful’ application.  I can think of many politicians I’d describe as sleekit, but I won’t mention any names.

 

From members.parliament.uk

 

Smeddum (n) – in physical terms, a powder.  However, smeddum has also come to mean the kernel or essence of something, and presumably from that to mean its vigour, spirit, determination or grit too.  Robert Burns – him again – had the first meaning in mind when he wrote about ‘fell, red smeddum’, possibly referring to red precipitate of mercury, in his 1785 poem To a Louse.  Whereas Lewis Grassic Gibbon was thinking of smeddum’s spiritual denotation when he made it the title of his most famous short story, about a hard-working Scottish matriarch called Meg Menzies who takes no shit from anyone.  As Meg herself says: “It all depends if you’ve smeddum or not.”

 

Smirr (n) – a drizzly rain falling in small droplets.  This sad, ghostly word perfectly describes the sad, ghostly semi-rain that sometimes seems to envelop Scotland’s landscapes 365 days of the year.

 

Snaw (n) – snow.  Like snaw aff a dyke is a simile commonly used to describe something that disappears, or is disappearing, super-fast: for example, jobs for life, polar icecaps, cashiers in supermarkets, CD and DVD drives in laptops, Twitter’s credibility after Elon Musk took it over, and Liz Truss premierships.

 

© Canongate Books Ltd

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Favourite Scots words, P-R

 

From pixabay.com / © Dimitris Vetsikas

 

Today, November 30th, is Saint Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland.  Also, I’m in the middle of reading Douglas Stuart’s 2022 novel Young Mungo, which is set in Glasgow during the 1990s and is choc-a-bloc with cherishable Scots vocabulary: bevvy, chib, doo, midden, schemie, sook, smirr, tattie–bogle, wean, winchin’…  Thus, this seems an opportune time to post the latest instalment of my attempt to catalogue my favourite words from the Scots language.

 

Patter (n) – A long time ago, I remember Iain Jenkins, my English teacher at Peebles High School, trying to explain to my class why William Shakespeare placed Mercutio’s monologue about Queen Mab in the middle of Act 1, Scene 4 of Romeo and Juliet.  After all, the monologue didn’t have any bearing on the plot that came before or after it.  It was merely Shakespeare showing off his own verbal flamboyance and inventiveness.  Eventually, Jenkins exclaimed, “Patter!  It’s just patter!  It’s Mercutio indulging in a bit of patter!”

 

Patter, then, is smooth talk, smart talk or funny talk – often delivered by someone, like a politician or a salesman, who’s trying to sell you something.  The word crops in phrases like, “I gave her the auld patter,” or “Enough ay yer patter!”   And a person who comes out with it a lot is called a patter–merchant.  The city of Glasgow seems full of patter–merchants, surprisingly enough.

 

Pawkie (adj) – used to describe a person possessed of a dry and quietly mocking sense of humour.

 

Pech (v) – to gasp or wheeze breathlessly.  In Robert Louis Stevenson’s short supernatural story Thrawn Janet, you get the line: “Even the auld folk cuist the covers frae their beds an’ lay pechin’ for their breath.”

 

© Kypros Press

 

Peely-wally (adj) – looking pale and sick-looking.  That’s why in Solo (2013), the James Bond ‘continuity’ novel written by William Boyd, there’s a bit where an injured Bond is scolded by May, his formidable old Scottish housekeeper, for looking ‘awfy peely-wally’.

 

I’d assumed this was derived from ‘peeling wall’, something that obviously doesn’t look healthy.  But I’ve recently learnt that peely comes from an early 19th century word peelie, meaning ‘a gaunt, pale person’.  And wally is a Scots word meaning ‘made of china’.  Even now, people refer to an ornamental china dog as a wally dug and to false teeth (once made of porcelain) as wallies.  So peely–wally really means ‘as pale as china’.

 

Peep (n) – the lowest level at which you can set a gas flame before it goes out.  To ‘put someone’s gas at a peep’ is to seriously knock them out of their stride or deprive them of their vigour.

 

Peewit (n) – a lapwing.

 

Pieces (n) – sandwiches.  Years ago, while I was living with my Dad, I got a job at a local warehouse.  I needed to make myself a packed lunch every morning, to eat during the short break I got in the middle of the day.  My Dad would always inquire before I left the house if I’d remembered to get my pieces together.

 

Pisht (adj) – drunk.  Just as the Eskimos are said to have a hundred words for snow, there must be at least a hundred words in Scots for being inebriated.  See also arsed, bevied, bleezin’, blootered, buckled, fou’, gubbered, hingin’, minced, mingin’, miraculous, miracked, mortal, reekin’, reelin’, steamboats, steamin’, stocious, wellied, etc.  This, of course, is a tragic reflection on the state of the Scottish psyche…  I wrote, whilst sipping a large whisky.

 

From pixabay.com / © rebcenter-moscow

 

Plook (n) – the curse of many a Scottish person’s adolescence,  plooks are pus-filled pimples.  It was rumoured at my school that every time you ate a Mars Bar, you got a plook.  The adjective is plooky and, predictably, this figured in countless playground insults: “Ye plooky bastart, ye!”

 

Plump (n) – as in ‘a plump ay rain’, i.e., a sudden downpour.

 

Poke (n) – a small paper bag.  I suspect this word is most commonly heard in Scotland’s chippies, where people request ‘a poke ay chips’.

 

Poultice (n) – an arsehole.  For example, “Thon Boris Johnson is a right poultice, so he is.”

 

Puddock (n) – a frog.

 

Pure (adv) – popularised by the actress Elaine C. Smith, whose character in the Glasgow-set comedy TV show City Lights (1984-1991) used the catchphrase, “Pure deid brilliant!”  Placed before adjectives to amplify their meaning to the nth degree, it crops up in phrases like ‘pure mental’, ‘pure radge’ and ‘pure sleekit’.

 

Puggled (adj) – exhausted.

 

Quaich (n) – in the words of the Meriam-Webster dictionary, ‘a small shallow drinking vessel with ears for use as handles.’  These days, ornate quaichs are often used as pint-sized trophies at Scottish sports events.

 

Quine (n) – a girl or young woman.  This is commonly used in Scotland’s North-East, where boys and young men are also described as loons, so you hear a lot about quines an’ loons.  In the early 1990s, a group of Scottish feminists, including the journalist Lesley Riddich, started up a magazine called Harpies and Quines – harpy being a word commonly used in Scotland to describe a grumpy, ill-tempered and mean-minded woman.  The famous high-society magazine Harpers and Queen failed to see the joke and attempted to sue them.

 

© Channel Four Films / Polygram Filmed Entertainment

 

Radge (adj) – violently wild and crazy.  Used as a noun, it refers to a mad hooligan.  It had humble beginnings in Eastern Scotland, where it may have come from a Romany word with a similar meaning, ‘raj’, but radge was for a while a trendy term used the length and breadth of Britain.  This was because of its copious use in Danny Boyle’s hit movie Trainspotting (1996), where it was associated with Robert Carlyle’s ultra-violent character Frank Begbie.  I seem to remember the author Irvine Welsh, on whose novel the film was based, remarking disgustedly that he’d heard Hooray Henrys using the word radge in London wine bars.  And I also remember Q magazine running an interview with Robert Carlyle under the memorable headline RADGE AGAINST THE MACHINE.

 

Rammy (n) – a fight or brawl.  A stairheid rammy is a brawl that breaks out among the womenfolk in the staircases and on the landings of Scotland’s urban tenement buildings.  During the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, a heated television debate between then-SNP deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon and then-Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont was described afterwards by journalist Ruth Wishart as “a right good stairheid rammy” that “made strong men avert their eyes”.

 

Randan (n) – a drunken knees-up, as in “He’s away oot on the randan!”

 

Rector (n) – the Scottish term for headmaster.

 

Redd (v) – to tidy up.  I’ve rarely heard this verb used in Scotland, or at least in the parts of it I’ve inhabited.  But I frequently heard it during my childhood in Northern Ireland, where a good number of the people are descended from Scots.  My Mum would frequently explain, “Get this room redd up!” or “Give that place a wee redd!”

 

Riddy (n) – an embarrassment.  As in: “Liz Truss!  What an absolute riddy!”

 

Right (adj) – uttered with the appropriate intonation, right becomes a contemptuous response, dismissing something that another person has just said.  Though for maximum impact, use the phrase Aye, right.  “Maggie Thatcher wis the best prime minister since Churchill?  Aye, right.”  And indeed, Glasgow’s annual book festival is called Aye Write.

 

© Glasgow Life

 

Rone (n) – the length of guttering along the edge of a roof for collecting and removing rainwater.

 

That’s all for now.  More Scots words, and more example-sentences that insult famous Conservative Party politicians, will come shortly…

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Look backwards and wince

 

© White Rabbit

 

Sing Backwards and Weep, the autobiography of singer, songwriter, musician and poet Mark Lanegan, was published in 2020, two years before Lanegan’s untimely death.  It’s not a book to read if you want to know about the creative processes that went into Lanegan’s impressive body of work.  This included being vocalist with the grunge band the Screaming Trees for 16 years, contributing to alternative / stoner rock band Queens of the Stone Age during their glory years of the early noughties, being one half of the Gutter Twins with the Afghan Whigs’ Greg Dulli, and producing a dozen solo albums – of which, in my opinion, Whiskey for the Holy Ghost (1994), Bubblegum (2004) and Blues Funeral (2012) are particularly excellent.  Lanegan also seemed to be the world’s most prolific collaborator, working with an array of musicians and bands that included Moby, the Breeders, Melissa Auf der Maur, the Eagles of Death Metal, Tinariwen, Hey Colossus, Cult of Luna, the Manic Street Preachers and Belle and Sebastian’s Isobel Campbell.

 

No, you get little insight into that in Sing Backwards and Weep.  What you get is a lot, at times a non-stop barrage, of despair and degradation that’s often of a drug-fuelled nature. This is mingled with much bile directed at other people, including many working in the music industry, and much loathing directed at himself.  But while there were passages of Sing Backwards and Weep that I read wincing, the equivalent of how I’d watch a gruelling horror film through my fingers, I did end up feeling this was one of the best rock-music bios I’d ever come across.

 

In terms of grimness, the book hits the ground running. Lanegan introduces himself as being “from a long line of coal miners, loggers, bootleggers, South Dakotan dirt farmers, criminals, convicts and hillbillies of the roughest, most ignorant sort”, and says of his hometown Ellensburg in Washington state: “I hated this dead-end redneck town, hated the ignorant right-wing, white-trash hay farmers and cattlemen talking constantly about the weather, hated the constant battering wind that blew the putrid smell of cow shit everywhere.”  He detested his mother, a feeling that she reciprocated.  While he was much fonder of his father, the man had an alcohol problem and was distant, ineffectual and incapable of controlling his son.

 

The young Lanegan predictably became a delinquent.  At the age of eighteen he narrowly avoided spending a year-and-a-half in prison, the rap-sheet he’d accrued by then including “vandalism, car prowling, multiple counts of illegal dumping of garbage, trespassing, 26 tickets for underage drinking, shoplifting alcohol, possession of marijuana, bicycle theft, tool theft, theft of car parts, theft of motorcycle parts, urinating in public, theft of beer keg and taps, insurance fraud, theft of car stereos, public drunkenness, breaking and entering, possession of stolen property, and… a disorderly conduct charge.”

 

In 1984 Lanegan joined local band the Screaming Trees. This was hardly a moment of epiphany, where he forgot the misery of existence and instead discovered the transcendental joys of creativity and art.  Far from it.  A long time passed before Lanegan became happy with the Trees’ music.  Until then, he felt, “Our records were a shitty mishmash of half-baked ideas and catchy tunes derailed by the stupidest of lyrics.”  Also, his relationship with the band’s guitarist / songwriter Lee Conner was adversarial to say the least.  “Lee was completely inept socially and expected the world to come to him, something that was never going to happen.”  An incident on tour where Conner received a severe electric shock from a broken light-bulb on the frame of a dressing-room mirror is both darkly hilarious and indicative of the scorn Lanegan felt for him: “He flopped like a fish on a line and I saw blue light coming out of the wall as he electrocuted himself on the broken filament…  I howled with maniacal glee.”

 

From wikipedia.org / Copyright unknown

 

Yet the Trees were, as the adage goes, ‘in the right place at the right time’.  Elsewhere in Washington state, in its capital Seattle, the world-conquering musical movement that’d become known as ‘grunge’ was gathering momentum and the Trees would find themselves one of its leading bands – though grunge was a label Lanegan despised.  He got a glimpse of what was on the way when an up-and-coming band called Nirvana performed in his hometown: “Perhaps one of the best bands I’d ever seen, in the f**king Ellensburg Public Library no less.”  This was the start of a close friendship with the gifted and charismatic but troubled Kurt Cobain.  When Nirvana later became the biggest rock band on the planet, Lanegan observes how Cobain “was disgusted by the pedestal he’d been set atop and the ass-kissing sycophants he encountered at every turn.”  After Cobain’s suicide in 1994, he writes: “I was lost in the darkest, most depressing regret and self-loathing I’d ever experienced.”

 

After relocating to Seattle, Lanegan also bonded with Layne Staley, the singer of fellow grunge outfit Alice in Chains: “one of the most naturally hilarious, magical, mischievous, and intelligent people I’d ever met.”  Staley would die in 2002, another victim of the apparent ‘curse of grunge-band singers’ that’d struck down Cobain and would later claim Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots in 2015, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden in 2017 and Lanegan himself in 2022.

 

Thus, things get pretty awful during the course of Sing Backwards and Weep, for Lanegan’s friends and associates and for Lanegan himself, but it’s a remarkably funny book too.  Funny in a macabre way, obviously.  Many of Lanegan’s most amusing anecdotes involve famous people.  There’s James Garner, star of television’s The Rockford Files (1974-80), who’s a guest on an episode of Jay Leno’s The Tonight Show in 1993 where the Screaming Trees give a disastrous live performance.  Afterwards, when Lanegan is persuaded to sit down with Leno and his guests, Garner grasps his hand and says, “How you doing, young fella?  I’m Jim.  That wasn’t bad, young fella.  It coulda been a lot worse!”

 

There’s the film star Matt Dillon, victim of an arson attack by Lanegan: “…while drinking together post-gig in a NYC bar, I stuck my lit cigarette into the pocket of Matt Dillon’s suit jacket when his back was turned and set it on fire as I walked away.”  The reason for this?  Dillon had appeared in the 1992 movie Singles, Hollywood’s attempt to cash in on the grunge phenomenon, which Lanegan considered “a lame and sap-filled farce of a movie… To me, it may as well have been the Spice Girls film.”

 

© Warner Bros

 

There’s a funny anecdote about Nick Cave, who’s in Seattle and arrives at Lanegan’s door to make a drugs transaction – by this point Lanegan was selling drugs from his apartment, to everyone from ‘street people, mostly Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants’ to ‘traveling rock bands’, and spending the profits on heroin.  He’d attracted the ire of his neighbours and was ‘especially despised by a young goth couple whose door was directly opposite mine.’  After the sale, “the couple just happened to be unlocking their door and entering their apartment. As we stepped out, they caught a glimpse of Cave standing there in his three-piece suit, his iconic jet-black pompadour perfectly in place, and almost broke their necks doing a double take.”

 

However, the laugh-out-loud highlight of the book is the chapter where Lanegan recounts what happened in September 1996 when the Screaming Trees took part in a North American tour as support to then Britpop superstars Oasis.  It would be an understatement to say that Lanegan and the Oasis singer and notorious gobshite Liam Gallagher didn’t hit it off.  At the tour’s start, Gallagher accosted Lanegan with a mocking cry of “Howling Branches!”, which prompted the response, “F**k off, you stupid f**king idiot” – ‘spoken as if to a bothersome mosquito.’  Predictably, Gallagher took this badly.  Lanegan’s disdain for the lippy Mancunian increased when he heard that Gallagher had insulted one of his idols, Neil Young.  “It was one thing to be a prick to me, but how dare that son of a bitch be rude to Neil?”

 

Lanegan fills the chapter with hilarious anti-Gallagher invective: “He had probably been a low-life c**ksucker his entire life.  Maybe he’d been a bedwetter, shit his pants at school, or been cut from the football squad as a youngster and never gotten over it.  I couldn’t believe someone hadn’t beaten, knifed, or shot him to death by now, such was the reckless, witless, and despotic nature of his insufferable façade.”  After Gallagher seemingly promised that there’d be a physical reckoning between the two of them in Miami, the final gig of the tour, Lanegan got so wound-up in his hatred that, one day in a taxi, he poured his heart out about it to the driver.  The taxi driver had him swap a ten-dollar bill for a roll of quarters and advised him: “Keep these in your fist and the next time you see him, break his f**king jaw.”

 

Alas, the Miami showdown never happened, for Oasis curtailed the tour and flew back to England early.  While it’s more likely that internal tensions within Oasis at the time were responsible for this, Lanegan believed it was because of Gallagher’s fear of the drubbing he was going to get: “That phony motherf**ker had pissed his pants and gone home to mama before I had a chance to blow this whole thing up myself.”

 

But the laughs in Sing Backwards and Weep come amid much darkness. Lanegan’s self-loathing is a recurring motif.  When he was with Cobain, he felt he was an “actively negative presence in the life of this beautiful and talented man, who instead of showing him any positive guidance, consistently chose to take the low road so that I could continue to stay high…”  Reflecting on his knack for sabotaging any opportunities to find success and happiness, he muses, “…I was an expert on trading gold for garbage.”

 

© Sub Pop

 

This isn’t just melodramatic, self-obsessed whining.  Events described throughout the book give ample justification for Lanegan’s low opinion of himself.  Particularly bleak are the final pages, which see him reduced to homelessness – sleeping ‘under a dingy blue tarp I had pulled out of a dumpster’ – and dependent on selling drugs and robbing shops to survive.  This comes to an end only through interventions by Cobain’s widow Courtney Love and Guns ‘N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, which get Lanegan into a Californian drug-treatment programme and then into accommodation and employment.

 

However, it’s a chapter before that, entitled Ice Cold European Funhouse and detailing part of a Screaming Trees tour in the late 1990s that incorporated Sheffield, Bristol, Essen, Amsterdam and London, that really illustrates the depths Lanegan had sunk to.  By this point, he was so blighted by his addictions that his bandmates “had begun to refer to me behind my back as ‘Mr Burns’, the old, bitter, bent-over, and creepy boss in The Simpsons cartoon television programme.”  The descriptions of his increasing desperate attempts to procure heroin across England, Germany and Holland, with his body wracked by withdrawal symptoms and his behaviour becoming more and more unhinged, are nightmarish.

 

Fate seems to conspire against him.  His efforts are continually thwarted by him not having any money to buy the drugs, by him not having tickets for the night-buses or fares for the taxis he needs to get to and from the dealers, by criminals selling him fake heroin, by other criminals mugging and robbing him…  It’s like watching Wile E. Coyote constantly failing to catch the Roadrunner, with Lanegan as the Coyote and the drugs as the Roadrunner.  All this takes place against the intense, miserable cold of a north European winter.

 

At one point, trying to make it to a dealer’s place on a street in King’s Cross, he “began to projectile vomit so hard that it took me to my knees, then flat out on the ground.  Despite the fact that I’d not eaten any food in two days, up came copious quantities of pure-black liquid.”  At another point, in Amsterdam, penniless but determined to obtain funds to score, he goes after the man responsible for selling the tour’s merchandising and demands that he gives him money.  Terrified, the ‘merch guy’ hides in his hotel room.  “I began trying to actually kick the door in, trying my damnedest to gain entry to actually murder this recalcitrant son of a bitch.”  Back in London, when someone tries to mug and rob him a second time, he beats the shit out of his would-be attacker: “…all the repressed anger, pain, and extreme anxiety I’d held on to throughout this entire, trying ordeal… came pouring out.”  In the midst of these horrors, the Screaming Trees have to perform on the venerable TV music show Later with Jools Holland (1992-present).  You can imagine the now utterly raddled Lanegan in the presence of the famously chirpy Holland, “…enduring the half-baked witticisms of the scripted banter between host and guests.”

 

The Ice Cold European Funhouse chapter could almost be a self-contained short story about the damage that drugs can do to a person.  It’d be a great short story too, something that wouldn’t be out of place in, say, the Irvine Welsh collection The Acid House (1994).  Incidentally, on my copy of Sing Backwards and Weep, Welsh contributes the blurb on the front cover.

 

The book ends in 2002.  This calls to mind the Chinese saying, “May you live in interesting times,” which initially sounds like a blessing but is actually a curse.  Lanegan’s life until then was fascinating to read about, but often hellish for Lanegan himself.  After 2002, presumably, he found stability, success and fulfilment, which was great for him but would probably make much less interesting reading material.  However, by the time you reach the end of Sing Backwards and Weep, you won’t begrudge the old bugger for having earned the right to live a more boring life afterwards.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Steven Friederich