Two years ago, odds were on that hellraisers the Screaming Trees wouldn't be around for long. Fuelled by copious amounts of drink, drugs and violence, they were tipped to follow the same route as their old pal Kurt Cobain. But amazingly they've cleaned up and they're back with an astonishing new album, 'Dust'. John Mulvey caught up with the 'Trees on the Lollapalooza trail.

Through the carnage of Lollapalooza, Mark Lanegan cuts a hunched, distinctive figure. Past the corpulent mullet-heads waiting patiently for Metallica, past the daintily-pierced punks basking in the rude afterglow of Rancid and The Ramones, he stands out, charismatic and almost manically determined as he lurches across the dusty field.

For - prodigiously freckled and with an entire constellation of stars crudely tattooed on his fist - Mark Lanegan is a man with a mission. To venture boldly out from the bureaucracy-ridden security of the Lollapalooza Festival's backstage area. To rum the gamut of every feckless autograph-hunter, well-wisher and wannabe-groupie staggering around this God-forsaken natural bowl somewhere in the serial-killing and cousin-shagging wilds outside of Columbus, Ohio. To visit every cruddy, half-arsed circus sideshow - See the bearded woman! Gasp as the unreconstructed Midwestern metalhead lives again! - on a mad, desperate and inspired quest.

See, Mark Lanegan has a *need*. Before his tour bus pulls out of Licking County, Ohio, en route to Stallionstackle, Arkansas, via Bumf-, Idaho, and every other one-horse Nowheresville in the States, Lanegan has a craving to fulfil. His drummer, Barrett Martin, has had it done earlier, and now the singer must have it done, too. Yep, Mark Lanegan *really* wants a monkey on his back.

And that's monkey as in *chimpanzee*, kids. For somewhere in the morass of rubbishness that is Lollapalooza '96, there's a guy with a chimp and a Polaroid camera, adding the requisite exploitative carnival touch to America's biggest and brashest touring rock festival. And a picture with a monkey, it appears, is what Mark Lanegan - legendarily stroppy, mightily f-ed up singer with the Screaming Trees - wants more than anything else today. Oh yes.

You may remember, from a time long before Britpop and Noelrock and all things Anglocentric, the Screaming Trees. You might recall them as Seattle-based progenitors of grunge, makers of six albums of the fiercest and most unambiguously *heavy* rock that culminated in 1992's bristlingly fine 'Sweet Oblivion'. You might have come across Lanegan's two blasted, dissolute solo albums, where our hero - wasted, tormented by his faith (or lack of it) - emerged as a kind of Nick Cave of the north-west frontier.

Alternatively, maybe you've heard of the Screaming Trees for their reputation as brawling, pharmaceutically-charged, permanently drunken rock behemoths. And perhaps you, too, heard the rumours, in the months that followed Kurt Cobain's tragic death, that his close friend Mark Lanegan would be the next to go...

Well, things, it seems, have changed. A *lot*. There is plenty of beer here in their dressing room backstage, but the only one drinking today is the fresh-faced new rhythm guitarist Josh Homme, formerly of prog-thrashers Kyuss.

Barrett Martin - old party trick: stubbing out cigarettes on his forehead - hasn't touched a drop for a year. He's outside teaching a gang of non-English-speaking Shaolin monks how to play baseball (their kung-fu display follows the Trees' set on the main stage; Lanegan loves the idea of being support act for a troupe of trained killers).

Gary Lee Conner still plays his guitar as if his huge frame is possessed by the raging, warring spirits of every departed, demented axe hero, still windmills and leaps and throws himself to the floor to hack at the instrument that seems so flimsy in his hands. But now he wears kneepads to protect him in his falls. He's straight today, too, quietly wandering round the backstage encampment with his wife - a chemistry teacher, no less.

Back in the caravan, there's Lees' brother, Van; smoking, taking prescription drugs, drinking soda. Lanegan's here too; brooding, electrifying, telling tales of fights and flare-ups and countless misdemeanours. About stealing boats in Florida, and being caught in a water-pistol drive-by. About stripping onstage in the stultifying afternoon heat (Screaming Trees are playing at around 3pm every day) and throwing his clothes into the audience before realising his dick was hanging out of his shorts and his wallet had ended up somewhere near the back of the moshpit. About nearly stamping on Lee's face in Indianapolis the day before...

Mostly, though, he's talking about the new Screaming Trees album, 'Dust'. It is, for sure, an astonishing record; one that compensates for much of the post-Nirvana bleeding-heart cackery that's dribbled out of America in the four years since 'Sweet Oblivion'. What we're dealing with here, ostensibly, is a passionate and resonant brand of psychedelic hard rock, possessing the punk dynamic of grunge but imbued with all the spirit that much older music can harbour.

So think the tragic, traumatised grace of the blues and the downhomiest country allied with the uncompromising crunch of, say, Jimi Hendrix. Think of a record that understands the power of history without being in thrall to it. That confronts mortality with a dignity that's not really been bestowed on the subject by musicians since, well, 'Automatic For The People'. That's 'Dust'. It's remarkable.

And it very nearly didn't get made. After two-and-a-half years touring 'Sweet Oblivion', Screaming Trees arrived back in Seattle...

"We'd been living in each other's pockets," drawls Lanegan, lighting the first of many, many Lucky Strikes (their logo is tattooed on his arm), "and we went directly into the studio with no time in between. We were tired, there was, like, tons of distractions and frankly I'd rather be at home with my girlfriend."

It showed. The recordings virtually finished, the band decided to scrap everything, spend some time apart, chill out and, eventually, write dozens more songs before starting again over a year later, this time with a new producer, Black Crowes alumnus George Drakoulias. But first...

"Suddenly a bunch of shit happened in our personal life," remembers Mark. "For me, personally, six months after the scrapped attempt I didn't wanna make music at all. My friends were dying and a lot of shit was happening that I don't really wanna get into, but at one point I thought the music I was making personally was having an adverse effect on people, that it was a negative thing. I was also getting all this weird fan mail, a lot of religious stuff, and I started thinking, 'What effect does this music have? I always find it uplifting - for me it's real positive - but is this music so depressing?' But then I realised, y'know, it was music that got me through all the hard times."

Contributory to all this, of course, was the death of Kurt Cobain - and, later, during 'Dust's recording, the death of another musician friend, Jeffrey Lee Pierce of The Gun Club. It was writing songs with Pierce (songs slated to appear on Lanegan's next solo album) that inspired him to continue.

"There I was," he recalls, "writing songs with this brilliant guy who had caused me to even want to make music, and I realised - you've gotta go on. Jeffrey lived what he was writing and that's all there was. And the music that personally touches me is the music that comes from *experience*, that's been *lived*. That's why we love stuff like the blues or George Jones: there's a world of experience in that voice that touches you in a way that nothing else will, and, if anything, that's what we try to do."

So what has happened to the song Kurt bequeathed to you?

"It just wasn't an appropriate time to release it right now. To me, it seemed like a crass commercial move. And he woulda thought it was the most bullshit thing in the world to turn round right after someone died and put out the song to try and make some money off of them.

"So I'm gonna release it on a small label, for my solo project, in a way that's respectful to him."

Did you feel it was inevitable that Kurt would end up committing suicide?

"No I didn't. Though I know there's been people who've said that I might end up the same way. But to be honest, though I've certainly had my share of self-destructive episodes - long stretches of them - I've never had a suicidal thought in my life. I would never pick up a gun and shoot myself.

"But then I didn't think he was gonna kill himself either, or I'd have returned the last phone call that he gave me much quicker that I did."

When was that?

"Oh, like the day before or something, but by that time he was missing. Y'know, I would've been there in a second and I know, had I been there, it wouldn't have happened. But, y'know, I wasn't there, so I'm not gonna feel guilty about it for the rest of my life. Some shit, y'know, happens.

"But you know what? Kurt was in so much pain that at times I wonder - do I care more in a selfish way because it was such a profound loss to me personally? I think that if he's happier now, wherever he is, then I say, f-ing right on! But since I have no idea what's coming after this, I'd prefer to stay here as long as I can."

Outside the caravan that's acting as the Screaming Trees' dressing room, two of the more neanderthal members of the Lollapalooza entourage - The Ramones' latest hapless drummer and Ug from Rancid - are letting off great barrages of firecrackers. Inside, Mark Lanegan has stopped smoking and moved on to slowly and purposefully working a dusty clump of chewing tobacco round his mouth. He and Van Conner are considering the air of mortality that hangs over 'Dust' and the relative calmness that pervades the Trees these days.

"Certainly," says the singer, "you can't live as hard and as long as we have, without it having an effect. You reach a certain age, and that's what this record's about. Obviously, I went through some very, very hard times."

It's a sign, perhaps, of a kind of maturity and a new sense of perspective when Lanegan talks about the incident onstage in Indianapolis the previous day. At the climax of the set, Lee Conner, playing his guitar in a frenzy on the floor, knocked his mike stand over and sent the microphone hurling through the air to smack the singer hard in the small of the back.

"Years ago," Lanegan explains, "we used to just go apeshit onstage and knock each other over until we finally had to make a rule that if you touch one of the other guys onstage then you'd better expect a f-ing severe ass-kicking. So when that happened yesterday, plus it *really f-ing hurt*, I *so* wanted to kick him right in the face and I almost did. Then I realised, *no*, that's not how we react to things with each other, so I stepped on his guitar and walked away."

That seems radically different from the band's reputation as completely f-ed-up hellraisers. A lot of drink, a lot of drugs, a lot of violence...

"Well, maybe we tend to attract that sometimes," concedes Van, toying distractedly with a tiny mirror, "but what we're saying is..."

"We don't take it out on each other any more," adds Mark.

Van: "And I don't think we've ever taken it out on people that've come to see us..."

Mark: "...That didn't deserve it."

Van: " 'I've never killed anybody that didn't deserve it' - 'King Of New York'."

Mark: "Exactly. I think we've gone easy on some people. I definitely went easy on your brother yesterday. We've raised out share of hell, probably, enough for most people ten times over. I've taken so many hits from people I don't know because people don't like a person that does what they want and who knows who they are."

Does it feel strange being relatively straight on the road?

Van Conner lopes out of the dressing room to pick up a percription, Lanegan, meanwhile, shrugs. "I toured seven years without so much as a f-ing hit of pot. We go through phases. I was drinking and using when we started for a time, and then I stopped for quite a while, and then began again."

Did you realise that, because of your hedonistic reputation, the rumours suggested that, after Kurt, you would be the next closest to death?

He smiles. "I hear shit all the time. People'll believe what they want. I mean, I'm obviously still here... But who knows? We're all just a f-ing inch from death, but I'm no more than usual."

From the main stage, the rattling sound of The Violent Femmes - today's special guests - drifts across. Van reappears.

"I was just thinking when I got my prescription," he says, "everything we've told you is a goddamn lie. In fact, I'm gonna go up there right now for no reason, pull The Violent Femmes' singer off and just pummel the hell out of him."

"And rape him in front of the crowd?" wonders Mark.

"Well, that's a given."

At times, it seems like violence is the only rational response to Lollapalooza '96. When Perry Farrell envisioned the festival as a kind of mobile, multicultural Utopia, he could never - in his most paranoid and lysergically fraught nightmares - have imagined *this*. For where once there was at least an illusion of rampant cultural collisions, here there isn't even a hip-hop band. Rather, it's as if grunge - represented by the Screaming Trees and the increasingly turgid and staid Soundgarden - has been usurped as America's most popular alternative music by two older and much naffer genres; punk and metal.

Hence the presence of the execrable Rancid, and the pitful sight of The Ramones exhuming themselves for one more dumb, stumbling 'farewell'. And hence the newly made-over Metallica, hedging for bizarre credibility, beginning with The Anti-Nowhere League's 'So What'.

Where all this leaves the Screaming Trees is, really, anyone's guess. Perhaps, in the amped-up classicism of 'Dust', there's a strange sense of affiliation with Britain's infinitely less talented legion of Noelrockers; Lanegan even ingenuously refers to the soaring, anthemic 'All I Know' - set to be the first single - as their 'I Am The Walrus'. He has a point, too.

At heart, though, and while there is undoubtedly a maverick glint in his eyes from time to time, you get the impression that Mark Lanegan really has calmed down. You can hear it in the placid, accepting way he talks of death, of the inevitable, in the way the wracked and vivid religious imagery he has always used in song can now be interpreted positively as often as negatively. The blues tradition's behind this to some degree, predictably, but there's also the band's past - Van's a born-again Christian who spoke in tongues, while Mark's grandmother belonged to a severe, Amish-like cult called the No-Name Church.

"My God is my God," he says. "I do believe that I have a God or some entity watching out for me, covering my ass, and I do believe that there will be an afterlife. If there isn't an afterlife for the people who are f-ing dying by the millions here and there, then what is the point? That's where my faith comes from, because I just can't imagine that this rock sitting in space wasn't created by something so infinite and huge that I can't even begin to understand it. So I'm not gonna try, I'm just gonna talk to my God. My God cares about me."

And what do you hope that afterlife will be like, then?

He thinks for a moment, the tobacco resting pouched in his lower lip.

"I'd like it to be very peaceful, I'd like to do very little. Who knows? I might end up being to my f-ing nose in shit. It could just be blackness, and I guess that would be peace in a way.

"That used to scare me, the thought that there would be nothing, but I've come to terms with that, so I just try and enjoy myself and live life here on earth."

And with that he's off hunting for that damned elusive monkey. Today, at least, he never finds it. But perhaps tomorrow... He's got to have faith, after all.

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