Towards the end of this extraordinary memoir, Mark Lanegan – singer-songwriter and former frontman with Seattle proto-grunge pioneers the Screaming Trees – gives us an extraordinary snapshot of the reality lower down the totem pole.

...fearsome and brutal.

The annals of rock are littered with used needles and the damage they have done. Few drug enthusiasts can have sunk so low, however, as singer Mark Lanegan, whose eye-popping memoir explores hell’s many sub-basements, and lived to produce good writing.

Rock memoirs are traditionally full of myth-building and depravity, but Lanegan’s account of his tenure in the proto-grunge quartet Screaming Trees sidesteps the myth-building and rushes headlong into grand guignol scenes of degradation and self-abuse. Rare in its rawness and candour, the book is a brutal chronicle of addiction.

The frontman of the Screaming Trees gives a bloody, brawling, dope-fueled tour of his personal battlefields.

This overwrought debut memoir from the frontman of the proto-grunge band Screaming Trees is packed with rage, guilt, and the seamy details of a life nearly flushed down the drain.