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…