(Credits: Far Out / V2)
Wed 6 August 2025 12:00, UK
If you were listening to a late-night college radio station in 1996, it’s not entirely impossible that you might have heard a track from Belle and Sebastian’s debut album, Tigermilk, within the same hour as a new song from what would be Screaming Trees’ last proper album, Dust.
Apart from that loose connection, though, any idea of Trees frontman Mark Lanegan collaborating with a member of Belle and Sebastian would have seemed slightly comical—a grunge-twee collision akin to Oscar the Grouch palling around with Elmo.
However, another song from 1996 might have given us a clue of things to come. Nick Cave’s ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, a duet with Kylie Minogue that blew everyone’s minds, was a helpful reminder of an old tradition in popular music: a grizzled baritone cowboy pairs well with a classy soprano from the city.
Former Belle & Sebastian cellist and singer Isobel Campbell was already a fan of the classic version of this dynamic—the 1960s crooner duo of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra—but it was only after venturing out on her solo career in the early 2000s that she realised she might benefit from a Hazlewood or Cave of her own. Unlike most of the beauty-and-the-beast pairings of the past, though, this wouldn’t be a case of a male songwriter casting a complementary role for a female muse. Instead, Campbell needed a world-weary male voice to better capture the spirit of some of the new songs she was writing, ones that didn’t sound quite right in her own soft and whispery Glaswegian lilt.
This led her to Lanegan, who was a free agent of sorts after the demise of Screaming Trees, having already joined forces with the likes of Greg Dulli (as the Gutter Twins) and Josh Homme (with Queens of the Stone Age).
(Credits: Far Out / V2)
“Mark’s voice inspires me to the point of obsession,” Campbell told The Guardian in 2010, following the release of Hawk, her third and final album with Lanegan, “The first time I saw him perform, I was shocked by how much pain there was in his voice; it was so moving.”
The collaboration, which also included 2006’s Ballad of the Broken Seas (which was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize) and 2008’s Sunday at Devil Dirt, produced a brand of shadowy, wind-whipped folk-rock that felt closer to Lanegan’s past work than anything Belle & Sebastian did. And yet, it was the only project in Lanegan’s career, who died in 2022, in which he didn’t play a role in the songwriting.
“It’s unique in my body of work,” Lanegan told The Guardian, “Here, my only job is to inhabit these songs, relate to them, to express them. It’s a learning process, a journey of discovery.”
“He’s the eye-candy,” Campbell joked. “My songs are drawn from my life, but his voice is perfect at narrating them… Sometimes, we’ll be onstage, and he’s singing ‘The Circus is Leaving Town’, and it sounds so sad, so true, I want to cry.”
Campbell admitted being “a little scared” of Lanegan in the beginning, which would make sense considering his well-documented history as one of grunge rock’s wilder, more self-destructive characters. Over time, though, the classically trained Scot and the rough-and-tumble American found even ground.
“It’s not like I don’t still think he’s the bee’s knees,” Campbell said, using a phrase Lanegan probably never used in his life, “but I know what I can do now. I know I can go head-to-head with him.”
Sadly, the perfectly mismatched duo never got a chance to record together again. Campbell’s latest solo album, Bow to Love, was released in 2024.
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