Mark Lanegan at The Sugar Club | Review

Mark Lanegan at the Sugar Club, 05 November, 2013

It isn’t that long since Mark Lanegan visited Dublin. He played the main stage of Longitude during the summer after all but, for real fans, the infinitely intimate surroundings of the Sugar Club offered a truly unmissable treat.

Lanegan’s deep, grainy vocals, and the laconic blues stylings of his backing band, were a good fit for the cabaret theatre style venue, drowned as it was on the night in a demonic red light. This must be what the dinner shows are like in hell.

Kicking off the show were a couple of members of Lanegan’s current touring band. UK multi-instrumentalist Duke Garwood give a subtle and stripped back performance on acoustic and steel guitars, including the instrumental Manchester Special form his recent collaboration with Lanegan ‘Black Pudding.’ But Garwood’s performance was just a little too quiet to rise above the noise of people finding the bar and finding their seats.

Only when Lanegan himself finally emerged did silence fall, and as thin figure in a dark suit and thin rimmed glasses stood at the mic you could have heard a pin drop. With his acoustic band featuring guitars, horns and a string section of violin and double bass, Lanegan’s performance wasn’t much louder than the opening acts. But its power lay in its understatement.

Lanegan’s grainy yet elegant voice breathed out words like silk on sandpaper. He delivered his set with an unwavering composure, never talking a break to interact with the audience. The spectral sweep of the music which wafted up through the blood red club did the talking.

The early part of the show drew heavily from ‘Black Pudding’, with the introspective laconic blues musings of Cold Molly, Pentecostal and War Memorial. A much needed punch of energy was then delivered with the more upbeat The Gravedigger’s Song and Phantasmagoria Blues from his 2012 album ‘Blues Funeral’.

While the show had all the seriousness of a funeral lament, proceedings were far from sombre. The string section took up maracas for lively belt of Mescalito, which was quickly followed up with a foray into Lanegan’s second album of 2013.

Inspired by his parent’s record collection, ‘Imitations’ is a collection of covers from the likes of Andy Williams, Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. It may seem like an odd choice for a man who made his name in the Seattle grunge and Palm Desert scenes, but when Lanegan poured his angsty heart in Sinatra’s Pretty Colours, it was difficult not to get swept along.

Lanegan followed this with the unlikely addition of the theme from You Only Live Twice (originally sung by Nancy Sinatra). It shouldn’t have worked, but the gloomy soulfulness of Lanegan’s voice added a kind of unsettling melancholia to the lyrics that would make you wonder why he hasn’t been asked to do a Bond theme of his own. If Chris Cornell can do it….

Lanegan has a voice that sounds good no matter what he does. He could probably off a dramatic reading of the phone book.

Lanegan also found time to pay tribute to the late Lou Reed with a cover of Satellite of Love, but it seemed somehow more obligatory and forced than when Lanegan was crooning Sinatra lines. But once Lanegan go back to his own material he found his way once more, closing out the show with a resounding encore of Bombed and Halo of Ashes from Lanegan’s Screaming Trees days.

Lanegan’s live performance is an impressive demonstration of a musician who has constantly reinvented himself through eclectic collaborations, side projects and solo experimentation, and in doing so has grown old gracefully. The persona of the grump of musician fits so seamlessly that that it’s hard not to wonder if, like Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits, Lanegan was simply born into this world gruff and weary with a glass of whiskey in his hand.