MARK LANEGAN // Photo -Dan Turner

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The Factory Theatre, nestled away in an industrial neighbourhood in Marrickville, is a rambling old bandroom that’s easy to miss if you don’t know what you’re looking for. From the outside its easy to mistake for an old warehouse; neglected, abandoned and derelict. There is no mistaking its credentials in terms of the kinds of artists who’ve graced its stages though, the list is too long to reproduce here but if you dig around you’ll find a history that holds up against any venue in the country.

Tonight, veteran road dog Mark Lanegan brings his show to town. The show is a low-key affair featuring his partner on keys and a guitarist and nothing more. The focus of the show is Lanegan, his voice and the songs. Together, those three things make for a powerful couple of hours. Lanegan’s voice has a depth and a resonance that would bring gravitas to a fucking nursery rhyme should he choose to turn it that way.

The stripped back dynamic means that there is an intensity to everything that happens on stage and a focus unlike most performances the olderish audience would have seen here at the Factory. The tone for the show is set early on and it maintains a certain feel for the duration. Lanegan is in control of his voice and the stage and the room and the audience are enthralled by him and his songs.

His interactions with the crowd are sparse, if in some places terse. At one point a couple of veterans call for a Screaming Trees song. He politely but unapologetically conveys that he’s sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings but that there would be none of that tonight. At another point he stops the show and castigates a couple of young women talking through the songs. He tells them that he’s sorry to be rude but that some folks might like to hear his songs and could they please just shut the fuck up.

If you were hoping for a greatest hits stroll down the nostalgia that the 90s is experiencing you were destined to be bitterly disappointed. But if you wanted to hear one of grunge’s last remaining torchbearers bring years of struggle and survival to bear on a few hours worth of heartfelt expression crafted into insightfully dark melodies, you might have walked away pretty satisfied.

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Check out Dan Turner’s gallery of the show here:

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AMNPLIFY – DB