Duff to join band with Pearl Jam and Screaming Trees members

Former Guns N’ Roses bass player Duff McKagan, Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready and Screaming Trees drummer (and former touring drummer for R.E.M.) Barrett Martin have teamed up to form a band. The three came together while working on a re-issue of ’90s supergroup Mad Season’s Above and say they plan to work with a variety of singers on songs that grew out of demos for the never-released second Mad Season album Disinformation. Jaz Coleman of English post-punk act Killing Joke is already on board to join the currently unnamed band for at least one of those songs.

Mad Season consisted of Mike McCready, Barrett Martin and bass player John Baker Saunders (later of The Walkabouts), and were fronted by Layne Staley of Alice In Chains. They were also joined on several occasions by Mark Lanegan, frontman of the Screaming Trees and later a frequent guest of the Queens of the Stone Age (and an obvious choice to appear in the unnamed new project at some point).

Mad Season began when Saunders and McCready met in rehab, with McCready then reaching out to Staley to join the band in the hope that the troubled singer would also join them in their new-found sobriety. After releasing their only album Above in 1995, the members went their separate ways, returning to other bands. Plans to work together again were stifled by conflicts in their schedules and Staley’s worsening addiction, leading to the abandonment of their partially recorded second album. They briefly re-formed with Lanegan replacing Staley as permanent singer until Saunders died of a heroin overdose in 1999, permanently ending the band. Staley died in 2002, also of a drug overdose.