An interview with Little Annie
Also known as Annie Anxiety and Annie Bandez, the artist sometimes known as Little Annie is a self-described adventuress, chanteuse, ordained minister, high school drop out, juvenile delinquent, self taught painter, multi-media artist and post modern cabaret queen with a long, illustrious and eclectic recording career which has defied categorisation, limitation, restrictions and sometimes the law.
Outside of her work with the On-U Sound family (described at length in the interview below), she is a peripatetic collaborator who has worked with Coil, Swans, Marc Almond, Crass, Baby Dee, Current 93, Wolfgang Press, Kid Congo Powers, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and many, many more, and she continues to tour and record extensively with current musical spar Paul Wallfisch.
Prior to moving to the United Kingdom, her punk band Annie & The Asexuals were a fixture on the downtown New York City scene, where they made a lasting impression on Frank Zappa, amongst others. We spoke to Annie in November 2025 for these liner notes, where she picks up the story.
Interview by Matthew Jones.
(C) Coneyl Jay
On-U Sound
Little Annie
What led to you visiting the UK in the first place?
That's a story and a half. Without going into it all, I’d got into some legal trouble when I was a dancer, with this crooked cop. I got the charges dropped, I sued and got a silly payout. I’d met Steve Ignorant from Crass on my doorstop some time before, and I used some of the money to visit Crass in the UK. I was only around sixteen at the time. I was supposed to go there for a couple of weeks but ended up staying for fourteen years! I did my first single with Crass and toured with them, wrote some stuff for them as well.
How did you meet Adrian and Kishi?
I had that single out, Barbed Wire Halo, which me and Penny Rimbaud from Crass made together. We thought we were making a disco single at the time, I mean I couldn't even spell avant-garde! I liked my soul music, disco and everything, but I guess it turned into something else. When it came time for my album to be made Penn was like, "You’ve got to meet this guy, Adrian. It sounds like what you're doing." because I was doing tape loops and cut ups and recording train sounds and all kinds of things for rhythm tracks. So I went to Southern Studios and met Adrian and Kishi and started working with them.
We worked together for years and I kind of got my musical education from just sitting in on sessions writing for the people recording. We were literally in there all the time, usually at night. So I got to sit on all these amazing sessions, and work with people like Bonjo (African Head Charge), and then later on Keith, Doug, and Skip (Tackhead), Dr. Pablo, Bim Sherman. Then I moved into Adrian's garden! I was in his shed, like a gnome.
That was just great for me because I love them as people. They all became family but also it's where I learned music basically. I mean I couldn’t write music, I can't read it, I still don't know what key I'm in, but it was great. And from Kishi I learned a good work ethic, discipline. So it all worked out, and I love them all.
(C) Kishi Yamamoto
What were the circumstances that led you to end up living in Adrian and Kishi's back garden?
I was squatting at the time all over the place, before I moved to Adrian’s. I was in Vauxhall which was fine. I was a bit of a habitat squatter. We used to go to the markets and pick stuff out of the skip, they’d give us the food they couldn't sell, but also I had plants. I was always kind of like Susie Homemaker. And then Adrian just suggested I come and live with him, and at first I was living in the house, looking after it for them while they were away. But then they came back, and Pete Wright, the bass player in Crass, knew how to build and everything. There already was a garden shed, but he put electricity in it, and fixed it up which was really great.
That's how I met Lee Perry. I woke up one morning and there's this old guy moving the rocks in the garden - because I was living in the garden I was gardening too, and then one day there was this little guy moving my fucking rocks around. I go, “who the fuck is that? Who's this guy?” and it was Lee, because he had that thing with rocks and fire and water and stuff. I lived there for quite a bit, and it was fine. It became almost like a tourist thing for musicians visiting, “Oh this is Annie, she lives in a shed at the end of the garden”, which sounded like an African Head Charge title.
Adrian always keeps an open door which I love, I love that. We're kind of the same mindset, and it was such a great collection of people, the common thread between us all is we’re all doing something creative. It was family, it really was.
Is it true in those days you would do sixty hour sessions with Adrian?
I mean it would feel like that. We'd be in there all night. We'd be in there during any ‘dead time’ when they could hire the studios cheaper. We’d go from Southern to Matrix, wherever, and there was Berry Street, and I mean maybe they weren't sixty hour recording sessions, but I was doing sixty hours because after the session I’d then have to get on with the rest of whatever had to be done during the day. Youth… It's a wonderful thing!
Prior to the album we’re talking about today, Short And Sweet, you worked with Adrian and Kishi on your first two albums, Soul Possession and Jackamo right?
That's right. Because I can't really play anything, I was making loops of things. Back in the day Adrian had the AMS sampler, so I'd take things like Marilyn Monroe and all kinds of sounds and try to splice them together the best I could. I think I had one of the early little Casio things. So, I would bring in these pieces I’d found and then we would build up from there.
There's an interesting parallel between you and Adrian. Adrian's obviously produced hundreds of records, but he's also a non-musician, he doesn't really play anything, and his approach is similar to yours where he'll find things that interest him and hum baselines to people and stuff. Kishi on the other hand is very musical. Would she be the musical glue between you and Adrian?
Absolutely. She's amazing. With Jackamo that was basically all mine and Kishi’s co-compositions and Adrian mixing. Kishi had that musicality and also played things like the Chinese harp, all that stuff gave everything such a hybrid feeling, including the other musicians that were involved. You would have people like Mikey Dread in the studio with you one night and Mark Stewart another night, and it was such a great mixture of oddballs, and it worked because we bounce off of each other in every which way, which was really rare to have that kind of eclecticism without it being forced.
I can make melodies, but I can't notate them. When I found out that my phone was able to record audio, I was like, " my god, who knew?" I had it for years and I didn't know that I could use it to record melodies and things without notating them. I'll wake up in the middle of the night with a hookline and record it on my phone.
But yeah, between Adrian and I not being musicians, I would sing one melody that he had hummed for me, and then he would go, "no, I said this” and it'd be totally different from what he originally wanted, but it'd be totally great. I also learned to work hard and fast during those sessions because there were seven other great fucking artists in the studio.
There was a particular show around the mid 1980s with Flux of Pink Indians, A.R Kane, Tackhead, and you, that seems like a crazy and fantastic bill, and a great example of how eclectic the scene was back then.
That's what was so great about that time, because we didn't really fit into one particular genre. It was dub and reggae and funk but we were able to fit into everything in a weird way. I'm still like that now when people ask, "What kind of music do you do?" Like, oh fuck me, really? I still get that and it keeps changing because obviously I've been at it a long time. I wouldn't want to be doing exactly the same thing I was doing back then.
Just before you made Short & Sweet, you signed to major label ATCO, can you tell us a bit about that experience?
Well, they probably spent more on a single than I probably still have on my whole recording career. I had a manager at the time and I had gotten a publishing deal with a track in a film, all at once. I went from doing every kind of below minimum wage job on the planet, living in England as an immigrant, and then all of a sudden I felt like Frank Sinatra. I had a place that looked like Sinatra lived there, at least it did to me. In reality it was just an apartment, but it had these royal blue carpets. I remember the carpet.
This manager managed to really alienate ATCO, especially about a music video because back then you had to have a video, they spent all this money on the single, and also I got married for a minute while that happened which I don't know they were best pleased about. The label wasn’t in the best place anyway, the only people on ATCO back then were NWA, Michel'le, and myself. It turned out that the president of the company was leaving, and I got signed by the president, and when the person that signed you leaves, it doesn’t tend to end well. So I slept with the fishes.
The track itself “Sugar Bowl” was good, I mean Adrian did a remix for it, but again lyrically it was maybe a little heavy duty for that time, but it was really danceable. It was a great single but the whole process of doing it was so different to what I’d done previously with On-U, because they do a thousand takes of every track and then compile them, which is all really wonderful, until it wasn't.
The only difference with being on a major is they got better stationary, and these motherfuckers would spend more on lunch than I spent six months on groceries. At the time I didn't know about label stuff or that people get dropped from labels, so when it happened to me I was mortified. I thought I was the only person on earth that happened to, and then the label just fell apart, basically. I was so excited to be on ATCO, “I'm a soul queen!”, but in a way it did me a lot of favors because, if you're going to take a bruising in the business, it's good to do it while you're young enough. So, it was good. It was just like those Crass gigs where punk rockers hated me. That toughened me up, and so did ATCO. If the whole thing with ATCO hadn’t fallen apart, then I might not have made Short And Sweet.
You’ve taken the story very nicely onto Short And Sweet. There's a lot of songs written with Doug Wimbish and Skip McDonald from Tackhead on that album. What was it like working with those guys?
I adore them, how could you not? When they were in London they and Keith used to stay at my place which was a trip, it was like having three really talented big brothers, it was amazing. I remember when Adrian brought them back from a new music seminar in New York, it was terrific. They gave me the beats and a lot of times I wouldn’t have written the lyrics in advance, I would just go into almost like a trance, automatic writing, and write to the music instinctively.
I particularly love that album. It felt like having another opportunity after the whole ATCO thing. After that I thought I was done, but Short And Sweet was like a whole new opportunity. I mean, things like “I Think Of You”. That was so exciting because I just wrote what I did - vacuuming my royal blue carpets with Kishi's red vacuum cleaner!
There’s a real playfulness to some of the lyrics on the album and a real sense of fun. “I Think Of You” is a deconstruction of a love song, and “Give It To Me” has great lines like “give it to me phonetically”!
Yeah, it was good. A lot of those songs were more playful, again because of the beats I was given, but also I do tend to lean into humour when it comes to lyrics.
Sometimes writing is really hard for me because I feel like I have to answer the existentials of the world. Everything has to mean something, and some of those songs are really heavily crafted too, but often they were spontaneous and instinctive. Sometimes when lyrics come to me too easily I'm like, “did I plagiarise this?”
I'm always writing little oneliners or something, I’ve got notebooks and notebooks and notebooks of writing. I just wait to use things sometimes, because songs tend to tell you what they want to be, and they mean something at different times. They might feel meaningless at one point and then all of a sudden that's exactly what I'm trying to say.
I do work hard on lyrics, on my last album I used the word asynchronously, which is a bitch to sing, but if I can make it work, that's the fun part.
“I Think Of You” was single of the week in the Melody Maker at the time, and it was on Pay It All Back Volume Three. That song really resonated with people and it still does today.
That's great to hear, and there's a lot like that on this album, like “Prisoner Of Paradise”, lyrically that was about how you could get trapped in your own cravings, or what you think should be your cravings, especially because that was written at a time when everybody was jumping into mass consumerism. Sometimes it's fun and sometimes it's torturous lyrics.
Musically, there’s some continuity between “Sugar Bowl” (the ATCO single), and Short And Sweet, they both have a real dance music feel to it. Were you going out clubbing at the time? Were you into rave?
No, I mean I went out to bars and everything, but not really clubbing. Some of it I appreciate now. For one thing, I would do ecstasy and just get horrendously sick on it. So, I tried, and it just never really resonated with me. Also, as far as clubbing and gigs in general, I've been working in them since I was sixteen years old, so when people go, "You want to go to a club?" I'm like, "No, no, no." I mean, I've always been too busy working, and it'd be like a busman's holiday, so no.
And also just the volume. My ears, like everybody's, are shot, but I'll go to gigs. I go to gigs, but mainly I’m too busy working. I'm also cautious about, when I'm working on something myself, about exposing myself to too much other music in general, because I find myself singing like Jim Morrison if I listen to the Doors, it's easily done.
(C) Coneyl Jay
Is there anything you remember about working on the imagery and artwork for the album with Coneyl Jay and Kishi Yamamoto?
We had so much fun with that, but the photoshoot was also scary because somebody had to hold the mirror up while I ran towards it and away from it, in heels, in the middle of the road, we tried to pick a quiet time but had to get the light right, so that was an experience. We also did a photoshoot at Crystal Palace where I guess there was some kind of fair going on and I've got a prop gun. Coneyl came up with all those ideas, a wonderful guy too. There were so many fun, game people around at that time, which made the whole experience more enjoyable. Again compared to ATCO where they had me in hair and makeup for seventeen hours and all this stuff, I mean it wasn't bad, it was just different, but with Coneyl and Kishi we did some great sick photos. I mean, really we were surrounded by so many talented gorgeous folk.
Are you still friends with Adrian and Kishi?
Oh yes, and I’d work with both of them again in a hot minute. They're my family, and sadly I don’t get to London much anymore, but I miss them and I'd love to do more with them, which is a wonderful thing to be able to say, after all these years. That’s my kin.
Short And Sweet (Expanded Edition) is available on limited edition 2LP clear vinyl now directly from On-U Sound, and can be downloaded and streamed on all platforms.