Boogie rites

It’s sun-slathered afternoon in Los Angeles but little sweetness and light is in evidence as Mark Lanegan sits down to discuss his new album.

Glowering, growling and heavily tattooed, Lanegan is the apotheosis of media-friendly. He speaks in gruff, halting sentences, as if he has spent the past five years alone on a South Pacific atoll and forgotten how to converse with non-coconut based lifeforms. Journalists have walked away from interviews with the ex-Screaming Trees man wondering how they're going to parlay five minutes of monosyllabic dialogue into an article. On a bad day – there aren’t many good ones, you suspect – he can be the interviewee from the fifth circle of hell.
Our own history goes back some years. The first time I called Lanegan for a chat, he was suspicious to the point of paranoid. “Who is this?” he asked, as if I’d rang in the middle of the night and yelled something rude about his mother.
A second tete-a-tete was approximately as successful. He muttered and meandered and managed to take up 15 minutes of both our time without saying anything that could be interpreted as even faintly revealing. So while his new album is excellent – the best thing he’s done since Dust with Screaming Trees in 1996 as a matter of fact – the prospect of shooting the breeze with the 47 year-old does not fill your correspondent with enthusiasm. We’re rather dreading, truth be told. Over the course of our interview, however, it becomes clear there’s something different about Lanegan today. Once we get into the swing, he proves surprisingly considered, reflective – verbose even. The thought briefly occurs that he might actually be enjoying this.
“I never intended to take so many years off," he says of the eight-year gap between solo LPs. “I got busy doing other things. I enjoyed them all. Time passed without my really noticing.”
‘Other things’ have included a stint in Queens Of The Stone Age, several Gutter Twins collaborations with Greg Dulli and an ongoing project with ex-Belle & Sebastian vocalist Isobel Campbell. All of those have their merits, but Blues Funeral trumps anything else in his catalogue.
“I started writing it in January of last year,” he resumes. “Just sat down and wrote ‘em all and recorded them straight away. We did a couple, put ‘em down, recorded a few more.”
Though they never enjoyed the profile of Nirvana or Pearl Jam, among grunge connoisseurs The Screaming Trees rank as one of the greatest bands of the era. They were loud and angsty, but soulful with it – and in Lanegan, possessed arguably the scene’s outstanding vocalist this side of Kurt Cobain.
“I don’t really care about the past,” he ventures. “I prefer to stay in the here and now. Grunge became a handle for that period of time, even though what I was doing predated it and outlived it. It is what it is. You have to take it.”
He’s lived in Los Angeles for most of the past decade. Lanegan won’t go so far as to say he likes the city – but better to be here than perpetually over-clouded Washington State.
“The weather is one of the reasons I got out of there,” he admits. “I don’t miss it. I’m not away long enough to miss it. I still go back two or three times a year to see my family. It isn’t as if it’s a very far away place.”
Besides, he can’t really call anywhere home given that he spends most of each year on tour. Some artists find the lifestyle madness-inducing. A wandering spirit, it suits Lanegan to the ground.
“I could see how it could drive you crazy. I like it just fine. It’s a way of life that agrees with me. Lots of people do it. I don’t think I’m very unusual in that respect.”
Long-term Lanegan fans may have been surprised when the least verbose man in rock took to Twitter recently. Actually, this is news to him too. For reasons that are difficult to elucidate, it seems there are people out there seeking to pass themselves off as the singer.
“There’s an official one, and some fake ones,” he says. ‘The label does the official one. Personally I haven’t got anything to do with the whole thing. If it’s just information about gigs and what have you, then it’s probably official. If it’s someone spouting opinions... well, I can tell you, it isn’t me.”
Blues Funeral is very different from his last LP, Bubblegum. Sonically it’s a lighter, surprisingly diverse album. Lanegan and collaboraters such as Greg Dulli and Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme step between gothic disco, Tom Waits-esque blues and vintage rock, seldom staying in one place long enough to be pinned down.
“The inspirations haven’t really changed,” the singer concludes. “I suppose the drums and the synths on the last one were a little noisier. With this one I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do something beautiful.”

Blues Funeral is out now. Mark Lanegan plays the Academy, Dublin on March 7.