Beauty And The Beast

When Isobel Campbell needed a shoulder to sob into a few months ago, her old friend and collaborator Mark Lanegan was there for her.

“I’d gotten to a place where everything at home was a bit funny,” recalls the ex Belle and Sebastian warbler.“There was personal relationship stuff going on. And I said to Mark, ‘when does this craziness stop?’ His answer was, it doesn’t stop – you just get old and then you can’t be bothered with the craziness any more.”
Lanegan should know. His grunge band Screaming Trees was ripped apart by heroin addiction. Ever since he has lived an outlaw existence on the fringes of the alt.rock scene, a taciturn enigma even to those who claim to know him the closest.
“I like being with Mark because he’s the one person I don’t feel I have to talk to all the time,” says Campbell, who has just released her third collection of duets with the Washington state singer, a storm tossed collection entitled Hawk. “We can sit on a tour bus together and not talk for hours. I know it sounds a bit antisocial. Actually, it’s quite nice. You know sometimes small talk is a pain in the bum. But we’re both fine with it.”
On their previous hook-ups, Lanegan and Campbell conducted a transatlantic relationship. She wrote the songs in Glasgow, he recorded his vocals in Los Angeles and never did the twain clap eyes on one another. On this occasion, Campbell was looking for a reason to leave Scotland. Going to America to record with Lanegan was the perfect excuse.
“I was kind of bored and I had come to the end of a relationship,” she remembers. “Really, I kind of ran away. I got on a plane at the start of 2009. I was supposed to go to Tucson Arizona for two weeks. I pretty much spent all of the year there. It was absolutely the right thing to do. It’s the opposite of Scotland in every way. The desert is beautiful. It’s like the surface of the moon.”
In Tucson she wrote the guts of the new record and tried to put her romantic difficulties behind her. Six months later, she made her way to Los Angeles and protracted in the studio. “I remember being on a plane from Tucson, passing over these amazing mountains. Then you get to LA and it’s grey and smoggy. I was wearing my little summer dress because it had been quite warm in Arizona. And it was a good deal colder in LA. I sort of hated it immediately.”
Holed up with Lanegan in a vintage recording facility bordering the city’s hip Silver Lake district, she was soon won over, however. So much so, in fact, she is seriously considering making the Southern California her long term home. “I don’t like the trashy fake stuff, “ she says. “But a lot of it isn’t like that at all. And it’s sunny. Of course, it’s possible I wasn’t having the complete LA experience. I’d just walk across the street from my apartment to the studio. I didn’t have to cope with traffic or anything like that.”
As for her relationship with Lanegan... she says that while they don’t exactly go bar-crawling together, theirs is a friendship based on a deep mutual empathy.
“I think Mark has my measure by now and I’ve definitely got his,” she says. “I’m deceptively quiet. I’m complex. I have a friendly side. I’m kind to people. But I need time alone too. I raise my game when people are around. Deep down, I’m pretty intoroverted. Mark gets that about me.”
An ethereal presence on early, never-bettered Belle and Sebastian albums If You’re Feeling Sinister and The Boy With The Arab Strap, Campbell departed in 2002, in the middle of a tour of the North America, after creative tensions with front-man Stuart Murdoch. Eight years on, fences seem to be mended and she speaks fondly of the her old chums.
“I don’t really hang out with them. When I do see them it’s always really nice. I suppose they’re really busy and I’m really busy. It must be good because there’s so many of them – it means they can share the press. Whereas with me, I have to do everything myself. I try not to complain too much.”

Hawk is out now on V2 Records.