Discovering Mark Lanegan

To prevent becoming fixed and fossilized in middle age, I regularly look to my buddies Red, Torn, Pattern and hubby Muddy to supplement my shrinking pop culture diet. In the last year I have inhaled Geoffrey Miller's witty and informative tracts on mammalian mating behaviour, clutched my sides guffawing over shows like Archer, Louie and Portlandia and Rob Delaney's tweets, and been led on a journey through decades of comic book history by Art Speigelman.

Great, but am I growing lazy by having new pop-culture experiences pre-chewed for easier digestion?

Have I left no room for the delightful, serendipitous discovery that worked in my teens and twenties?

Until recently, I might have said 'no', but then I had the pleasure of radio station hopping in the car one Sunday morning, eventually landing on 3RRR in the middle of an amazing song - haunting, elegiac - sung by what sounded suspiciously like Tom Waits with an extra spoonful of hot gravel rolling around in his throat. I knew for certain I hadn't heard the song before, but it was curiously familiar too.

I pulled over to the side of the road in order to listen more closely, muttering "I know this song, I know it, it's a remake" and just when I was thinking, "It sounds like a [James] Bond song", I heard the line "...you…only live twice…or so they say…”

Eureka! It WAS a Bond song. Specifically, the theme song from 1967's You Only Live Twice starring Sean Connery and featuring the BEST BOND CAR EVER - the Toyota 2000GT convertible.

The singer here is Mark Lanegan, and the song is from Imitations, a recently-released collection of covers of some crooner-classics (Autumn Leaves, Solitaire), the Kurt Weill cabaret-standard Mack the Knife and some more recent Indie fare (with a special nod to Nick Cave).

I had never heard of Mark Lanegan until I stumbled across this extraordinary re-working of an otherwise ordinary song. Trawling the interweb like an obsessive stalker reveals a talented singer-songwriter with a career spanning three decades and roots in Seattle’s grunge scene. He has collaborated with Kurt Cobain, Queens of the Stone Age, Belle and Sebastian and Moby and a whole bunch of other artists I’ve never heard of.

The implication from some reviews is that this is not his best, that it is a bit of self-indulgent fun from a talented musician who is capable of much more.

I wouldn’t know, and frankly don’t care.

His version of The Twilight Singers’ (Who?) Deepest Shade, Weill’s Mack the Knife and You Only Live Twice are worth so much more than the $19.95 I paid for the CD. It has not left my car stereo since I bought it and the goose-bumps on my arms have still not gone down. What an extraordinary discovery.

I can’t wait to listen to his other stuff. In the meantime, I will keep listening to Imitations and rubbing my arms while idling at traffic lights.

When I eventually tire of it, I’ll just have to start station-hopping again – who knows what I will discover…

Rainer "Ray" Johannes Edvard Hanson, dear friend and brother-in-law, died on 3rd October aged 63.

The very first time I met Ray was in my then - best friend's kitchen in late 1988. He was giving us a nifty demonstration of how to make the perfect custard for a berry trifle. His trick: whip the leftover egg-whites with a sprinkle of caster sugar until they form a glossy meringue and then fold this mixture through the still-warm custard before pouring it over the sponge and fruit. It's a recipe I have used for my never-fail trifle ever since, and for which my friends and family will remain forever grateful.

Ray was always full of cool, practical advice. He had an engineer's brain, a gift for problem-solving and generations of ingrained Teutonic efficiency that he applied to all kinds of indoor and outdoor projects - he could knock up a kitchen from a few stray bits of wood and a couple of nails and then cook you a three-course meal in it. He could skin a deer and smoke a salmon effortlessly. With that name and those gifts, he should have been an Arctic explorer, traversing the ice on a pair of wooden skis with just a couple of huskies for company, and he might well have been had he been born two centuries ago. Ray had a long and varied career as a soldier, chef, engineer and military instructor instead.

He arrived in Australia as a child migrant from Germany in 1956, accompanied by his parents Karl and Luise. His father Karl took great pains to emphasise the family arrived by plane, not boat and that they were not 'assisted migrants'. The family settled in Wangaratta in regional Victoria. This was where Ray grew up, and it would fuel his passion for self-sufficiency and all things outdoors - hunting, fishing, camping and cooking - before he moved to the city in his late teens. He joined the Australian Air Force in the 1960s and served in the Air Defence Guard during the Vietnam war. His stories of American cluelessness (Hot pizzas delivered to military bases by helicopter? Like, WTF?) versus Australian inventiveness were hysterical.

After leaving the military in the early 1970s, Ray travelled extensively throughout Africa and Australia, and over the next few years worked in mining exploration and then for Victoria's State Electricity Commission.

In 1996, he and my sister (the Other Venetian Girl) moved to the Huon Valley in southern Tasmania and they married in December 2000. They lived the kind of rural life that truly suited them, surrounded by lots of land and water, with their beloved Akitas - Konna, Bear, Ruffy and Koda - for company. They loved each other deeply, passionately and remained inseparable until his death.

Although Ray had been sick in recent years, he approached diabetes and heart failure with the same rugged and indomitable attitude he applied to everything else in his life. The heart attack that killed him was sudden, swift and shocking. But like the man himself, was unforgiving and made no apologies.

I miss him.

Vale Ray.