The year was 1999, and it looked like the writing was on the wall for Screaming Trees.
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Formed 14 years earlier, the Trees were born in Ellensburgh, a ranching town in Washington State some 100 miles from Seattle.
Notionally, they were a punk-rock group - as was any band that put out an album on the Black Flag frontman Greg Ginn's SST Records, as the Trees did three times in the late 1980s. But really, Screaming Trees' music came from somewhere else. Theirs was a lumbering, hard-rock sound with a psychedelic, mystical edge - steeped in Led Zeppelin and Cream, but, more than anything else, reflecting the nature of their surroundings: drugs, blue-collar poverty and the dense forests and craggy mountains of the American north-west.
Screaming Trees, who days ago released the last recordings before their split 11 years ago in the form of Last Words: The Final Sessions, were ahead of their time. Their music predated the wave of grunge bands that emerged from the Seattle region in the early 1990s, and when that wave appeared, they rode it: spurred by MTV hits such as Nearly Lost You - a notable addition to the soundtrack from the film Singles - their 1992 album Sweet Oblivion sold 300,000 copies in the US. But Screaming Trees never quite made the leap to being superstars. Their George Drakoulias-produced 1996 album Dust included 10 grandly orchestrated, quasi-religious songs of deliverance set to the vocalist Mark Lanegan's sublime, world-weary baritone. It won glowing reviews but sales were modest, and by the time the Trees came off tour a couple of years later, they had no record label and no industry interest.
"There were no smart rock people at any of the major labels by 1999," says the Trees' drummer Barrett Martin. "It was all going the way of the boy bands."
Screaming Trees might not have had options, but they did have songs. So, between the winter of 1998 and the summer of 1999, the band dropped into three studios - Stone Gossard's Studio Litho and Jupiter Studios in Seattle, and a stint at Ocean Way in Los Angeles - to commit those songs to tape. "We recorded for posterity's sake, and I don't think we thought beyond that," says Martin. "The Trees never really had any grand strategy."
The previous decade or so had been a difficult one for Screaming Trees. A decade spent in each other's pockets had taken a toll on inter-band relations, and Lanegan's drug habit, a problem since his teens, made him a volatile character. Around the time of Dust, the guitarist Van Connor told the UK rock magazine Kerrang! that "this band is like being in a dysfunctional family - you're used to the abuse so you keep on taking it".
Yet, says Martin, for Screaming Trees' final sessions, none of this entered the frame. "Everyone was clean and sober, and it was the summer and fall in Seattle, the most beautiful time of the year."
Friends Peter Buck of REM and the Trees' touring guitarist Josh Homme, then readying his own band Queens of the Stone Age, came by the studio to offer guest parts, and everything was harmonious.
"There was a lot of laughing between the takes, and you can hear it on the multi-tracks. Lanegan was in rare form," adds Martin.
Following a final gig at the opening of Seattle's Experience Music Project in 2000, the band announced their split. The final sessions, recorded to two-inch tape, were sealed and left to gather dust in Gossard's studio basement. And that, for Screaming Trees, was that.
Until now. Last year, Martin and the Seattle producer Jack Endino cracked open the tapes to discover they were still intact. With the band's consent, the pair cleaned and restored the recordings, and the result is the Screaming Trees album that never was.
Songs such as Ash Grey Sunday and Crawlspace are a reminder of what a great band the Trees were at their peak, lean and urgent, shorn of the mellotron, sitar and harmonium that were a hallmark of Dust.
"I like that production, but I wanted to produce the band to sound the way we really sounded - live, spontaneous, explosive," says Martin. "These are elementally great songs, and too much overproduction would have ruined them. The Trees don't need an orchestra to sound like the Screaming Trees."
Following the Trees' split, all have remained in music. Lanegan joined Josh Homme in Queens of the Stone Age, and has pursued a busy solo career, as well as recording with Isobel Campbell and with Greg Dulli in The Gutter Twins. The guitarist Gary Lee Connor and his brother Van play in their own bands, Microdot Gnome and Valis. Martin has toured with REM and Stone Temple Pilots, and currently fronts his own world-jazz outfit.
As for Screaming Trees, well, who's to say?
"I'm not trying to be cryptic about it, but I truly don't know," says Martin. "We're all on good terms, we're friends - family, in a strange way. That's mostly due to getting older, having families, gaining a little bit of hard-earned wisdom after all those years. The important thing is that we made some albums that have stood the test of time. I think Last Words stands up there with Sweet Oblivion and Dust. More importantly, we all survived as people. No small feat in itself."
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THE BIO:
Sabri Razouk, 74
Athlete and fitness trainer
Married, father of six
Favourite exercise: Bench press
Must-eat weekly meal: Steak with beans, carrots, broccoli, crust and corn
Power drink: A glass of yoghurt
Role model: Any good man
About Tenderd
Started: May 2018
Founder: Arjun Mohan
Based: Dubai
Size: 23 employees
Funding: Raised $5.8m in a seed fund round in December 2018. Backers include Y Combinator, Beco Capital, Venturesouq, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Paul Buchheit, Justin Mateen, Matt Mickiewicz, SOMA, Dynamo and Global Founders Capital
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Australia tour of Pakistan
March 4-8: First Test, Rawalpindi
March 12-16: Second Test, Karachi
March 21-25: Third Test, Lahore
March 29: First ODI, Rawalpindi
March 31: Second ODI, Rawalpindi
April 2: Third ODI, Rawalpindi
April 5: T20I, Rawalpindi
Three ways to boost your credit score
Marwan Lutfi says the core fundamentals that drive better payment behaviour and can improve your credit score are:
1. Make sure you make your payments on time;
2. Limit the number of products you borrow on: the more loans and credit cards you have, the more it will affect your credit score;
3. Don't max out all your debts: how much you maximise those credit facilities will have an impact. If you have five credit cards and utilise 90 per cent of that credit, it will negatively affect your score.
Fire and Fury
By Michael Wolff,
Henry Holt
TRAP
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Saleka Shyamalan, Ariel Donaghue
Director: M Night Shyamalan
Rating: 3/5
The specs
Engine: 2.0-litre 4cyl turbo
Power: 261hp at 5,500rpm
Torque: 405Nm at 1,750-3,500rpm
Transmission: 9-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 6.9L/100km
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh117,059
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Company profile
Name: One Good Thing
Founders: Bridgett Lau and Micheal Cooke
Based in: Dubai
Sector: e-commerce
Size: 5 employees
Stage: Looking for seed funding
Investors: Self-funded and seeking external investors
Our legal columnist
Name: Yousef Al Bahar
Advocate at Al Bahar & Associate Advocates and Legal Consultants, established in 1994
Education: Mr Al Bahar was born in 1979 and graduated in 2008 from the Judicial Institute. He took after his father, who was one of the first Emirati lawyers
Libya's Gold
UN Panel of Experts found regime secretly sold a fifth of the country's gold reserves.
The panel’s 2017 report followed a trail to West Africa where large sums of cash and gold were hidden by Abdullah Al Senussi, Qaddafi’s former intelligence chief, in 2011.
Cases filled with cash that was said to amount to $560m in 100 dollar notes, that was kept by a group of Libyans in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
A second stash was said to have been held in Accra, Ghana, inside boxes at the local offices of an international human rights organisation based in France.
The Bloomberg Billionaire Index in full
1 Jeff Bezos $140 billion
2 Bill Gates $98.3 billion
3 Bernard Arnault $83.1 billion
4 Warren Buffett $83 billion
5 Amancio Ortega $67.9 billion
6 Mark Zuckerberg $67.3 billion
7 Larry Page $56.8 billion
8 Larry Ellison $56.1 billion
9 Sergey Brin $55.2 billion
10 Carlos Slim $55.2 billion
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The Vile
Starring: Bdoor Mohammad, Jasem Alkharraz, Iman Tarik, Sarah Taibah
Director: Majid Al Ansari
Rating: 4/5
MATCH INFO
Uefa Champions League, last-16 second leg
Paris Saint-Germain (1) v Borussia Dortmund (2)
Kick-off: Midnight, Thursday, March 12
Stadium: Parc des Princes
Live: On beIN Sports HD
Red Sparrow
Dir: Francis Lawrence
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Egerton, Charlotte Rampling, Jeremy Irons
Three stars
Jawan
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Turkish Ladies
Various artists, Sony Music Turkey
How to avoid crypto fraud
- Use unique usernames and passwords while enabling multi-factor authentication.
- Use an offline private key, a physical device that requires manual activation, whenever you access your wallet.
- Avoid suspicious social media ads promoting fraudulent schemes.
- Only invest in crypto projects that you fully understand.
- Critically assess whether a project’s promises or returns seem too good to be true.
- Only use reputable platforms that have a track record of strong regulatory compliance.
- Store funds in hardware wallets as opposed to online exchanges.
What can victims do?
Always use only regulated platforms
Stop all transactions and communication on suspicion
Save all evidence (screenshots, chat logs, transaction IDs)
Report to local authorities
Warn others to prevent further harm
Courtesy: Crystal Intelligence
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How to help
Donate towards food and a flight by transferring money to this registered charity's account.
Account name: Dar Al Ber Society
Account Number: 11 530 734
IBAN: AE 9805 000 000 000 11 530 734
Bank Name: Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank
To ensure that your contribution reaches these people, please send the copy of deposit/transfer receipt to: juhi.khan@daralber.ae
COMPANY PROFILE
Founders: Alhaan Ahmed, Alyina Ahmed and Maximo Tettamanzi
Total funding: Self funded
Sugary teas and iced coffees
The tax authority is yet to release a list of the taxed products, but it appears likely that sugary iced teas and cold coffees will be hit.
For instance, the non-fizzy drink AriZona Iced Tea contains 65 grams of sugar – about 16 teaspoons – per 680ml can. The average can costs about Dh6, which would rise to Dh9.
Cold coffee brands are likely to be hit too. Drinks such as Starbucks Bottled Mocha Frappuccino contain 31g of sugar in 270ml, while Nescafe Mocha in a can contains 15.6g of sugar in a 240ml can.
SPECS
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The view from The National