Let's Talk About SOUL POSSESSION...

 

Ann Robie Bandez was born in Yonkers in 1961, and came into her own during her early teen years, forming a no-wave noise band called The Asexuals in the late 1970s, even performing on stage at the legendary Max's Kansas City at age 16, which was quite the feat. Frank Zappa attended one of their shows and had this to say about the experience: “I don’t know if that band will ever get a record contract and I don’t think they care. I watched them for an hour, painful as it was. Their show was real personal and disorganized. This girl was wearing winter underwear with a black leather coat on top of that, and she had a paper bag with a bottle of vodka in it. She was screaming about Thorazine and being in a mental hospital and it was real! You don’t get that commitment to just spewing your guts out among LA groups.” 

In 1981, Annie was invited to visit the infamous anarcho-pacifist commune Dial House in Essex County over in the UK by its founders, Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher. What was meant to be a brief vacation became a decade-long stay for Annie, who hooked up with record producer Adrian Sherwood and recorded several solo albums for his On-U Sound record label. 

Annie Bandez's life story is an incredibly fascinating one, and I'm barely touching on it here because I could never do it justice. She wrote a fascinating autobiography titled You Can't Sing The Blues While Drinking Milk that was published in 2012, and everybody should just go ahead and read that, because it's well worth your time. 

Annie Bandez recorded a lot of different music throughout her life, jumping back and forth through numerous genres and sometimes creating entire genres just because the stuff she was making was otherwise unclassifiable. The funny thing about Annie's early work is that she never thought she was making anything outside of the mainstream. Annie loved disco and honestly had no idea what she was doing onstage in those early years, so she just did whatever felt right to her at the time. What she envisioned in her mind during those memorable early performances was not at all what the audiences watching The Asexuals onstage were actually seeing, and she only later realized just how bizarre those shows must have appeared to these unsuspecting people. By her own admission she was an awful performer in those days, just a crazy kid trying and failing in spectacular fashion to emulate the music on the radio that she loved so much. 

Her straight-laced parents even came to see her perform in some of these underground clubs in the Big Apple a time or two, and I'm sure they had a grand time watching their young daughter have some sort of small mental breakdown on stage while surrounded by junkies and burnouts. What a sight that must have been. Unfortunately none of Annie's material with the Asexuals from this period was ever recorded, at least as far as I know, because I would absolutely love to hear some of that stuff.

Luckily, Annie buckled down and honed her craft over at Dial House, educating herself on any number of subjects through voracious reading and in-depth conversations with other long-term guests at the commune. In 1981, she collaborated with Penny Rimbaud (also co-founder of seminal anarchic punk outfit Crass) to create her first single as Annie Anxiety, Barbed Wire Halo, which consisted of A-Side Hello Horror and B-Side Cyanide Tears. Hello Horror is... well... just listen for yourself:

Keep in mind that Annie thought she and Penny Rimbaud were making some radio-friendly dance music with this track. Just think about that. They believed this was Top 40 material. It's a searing, hypnotic musical collage, a fascinating descent into madness, a unique and haunting creation that refuses to be classified. And Annie Bandez thought this was going to be big on Top of the Pops. Hello Horror ends with a primal scream of defiant rage that raises the hair on your arms as it echoes angrily in the recesses of your mind, the startling climax to a harrowing five minute and forty-six second journey that sounds like the soundtrack to an un-filmed sequel to David Lynch's Eraserhead. In other words: it's a masterpiece. But it's most certainly not a mainstream dance hit. 

"I’m pretty mundane when it comes to listening, The Bee Gees come on and I go, ‘That sounds fucking great!’ I like soul music, I like gospel. I still can’t read music and I can’t notate music. I was just following my own drummer, as corny as that sounds."

Annie realized after Barbed Wire Halo's release that she simply had no idea how to make music that appealed to a wider audience, and she decided to stop caring about mainstream acceptance, which was probably for the best, because then she moved on to create what is widely regarded as her magnum opus, 1984's Soul Possession. 

Arnie Sherwood taught himself the art of audio engineering as a teenager and, inspired by his abiding love for reggae, he decided he wanted to help bring more of this music into the world, so he became a record producer (and sometimes musician) in the 1970s, bouncing around from one project to another before finally founding On-U Sound Records with his then-partner Kishi Yamamoto in late 1979. Yamamoto was a multi-talented artist in her own right, being a gifted photographer and keyboard virtuoso, as well as an occasional writer, producer and mixer. On-U Sound quickly established itself as a haven for many post-punk, reggae and dub acts that may not have otherwise found a home anywhere else in the music business.

In the summer of 1983, Arnie Sherwood invited Annie Anxiety over to his primary recording space, "Southern Studios", an ersatz studio/shed in his back garden (that's a yard for all you Americans), and along with collaborators Yamamoto, Rimbaud, and a handful of outsiders, they created what became 1984's Soul Possession, a collection of eight self-contained art installations comprised of elements of reggae, punk, industrial, rocksteady, musique concrète, new wave, and so much more. It's punk poetry, with Annie herself portraying an eclectic series of characters throughout. The music is as playful as it is challenging, and the simple act of listening to Soul Possession can be an immersive and often claustrophobic experience. The artists making Soul Possession were not bound by any creative limits, and they deliberately refused to play by the established rules. They believed anything was possible, and when you listen to the fruits of their labor, you might actually believe that, too. 

Maybe in the year 2022 the music doesn't have the same visceral impact that it would have had with listeners in 1984, but I didn't hear Soul Possession until 2003 and it knocked me flat on my ass, so that argument doesn't hold water to me. You can recognize elements in the music that will remind you of some of Annie Anxiety's contemporaries such as Nina Hagen and Laurie Anderson and Lydia Lunch, but you'll also notice connective tissue with modern artists like Björk and Kim Gordon (from her 2019 solo debut No Home Record) and even Kazu Makino when you listen as Soul Possession unfolds. 

Annie Bandez has continued to record and perform sporadically since the release of Soul Possession, and much of the music she's released is quite good, and some of it is amazing. But there's something about the way Soul Possession is put together that just can never be matched. It's a chaotic work of art that is damaged and made all the more alluring by acknowledging its flaws. It's the scars that make Soul Possession beautiful.

Keep It Weird! Max Power