Queens of the Stone Age rocker Mark Lanegan had a terrifying battle with Covid in the months before he died.
The 57-year-old pioneer of grunge music passed away yesterday at his home in Ireland.
A cause of death has yet to be revealed, but last year Mark survived a nasty battle with Covid which left him in a coma and made him hallucinate.
He even wrote a memoir about it called Devil in a Coma, which was published in December.
Detailing his near-death experience, he said he had been feeling weak and sick for a few days “then woke up one morning completely deaf”.
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He fell down the stairs at his home knocking himself out on the windowsill and “came to hours later still unable to hear a thing, unable to move”.
The fall left him with cracked ribs, a bruised spine and “my already chronically messed-up knee gone again”.
In an extract from his book, published in The Guardian, Mark said: “Every attempted breath was a battle.
“Though I refused to go to hospital my wife finally called an ambulance behind my back... I was put into a medically induced coma, none of which I remembered.
“Apparently my light had almost gone out permanently more than once, according to the doctors and nurses.”
One of the strangest side effects Mark had was “bizarre dreams, strange visions...and recurring hallucinations”.
Describing some of the things he saw, the musician recounted: “Sometimes I’d be driving miles to deliver drugs to someone in another city, or dismantling a stolen car after midnight for parts to sell.
“Sometimes I’d be boxing potatoes on pallets in the spud factory... or drunkenly cooking pancake and egg breakfasts in a busy restaurant after drinking and carousing all night.
“One night I dreamt I was living in a large, windowless basement apartment off a rainy-wet drag of Seattle with several of my ex-girlfriends and ex-wives, many of whom detested me in real life, all in harmony with each other, and I felt peace come over me.”
Mark – who has been open about his past drug abuse – also detailed being given “woefully inadequate” amounts of medication.
He lamented: “Probably since I’d been self-administering elephant-sized doses of the same s*** on and off for years.
“To me it was second nature to eat tablets like candy... it never occurred to me that there might come a time when I would legitimately need some.
“Whatever was in this s***wagon I’d caught a ride on, it was no f***ing joke. I’d taken my share of well-deserved ass-kickings over the years, but this thing was trying to dismantle me, body and mind, and I could see no end to it in sight.”
The coma blew his kidneys out which left him needing dialysis. Doctors were sure he would die, but somehow he pulled through.
“They told my wife I held the record for the longest stay in this condition to survive at this institution,” he wrote.
During his career Mark was also the frontman for band Screaming Trees and collaborated with musicians such as Kurt Cobain, Moby and PJ Harvey.
Most recently he had worked with the Manic Street Preachers on their latest album The Ultra Vivid Lament.
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