Annie Anxiety – Cyanide Tears – Mix 1
Annie Anxiety – Cyanide Tears – Mix 2
Presenting two mixes of Annie Anxiety’s ‘Cyanide Tears’.
Both mixes are from the original Southern Studio recordings.
The song ‘Cyanide Tears’ is intense, and both mixes are altered enough to be worthy of inclusion on this YouTube post.
The first mix is stripped down and tribal, the second mix with added effects overdubbed.
I think the second mix was the mix that ended on the ‘Barbed Wire Halo’ 7″ record, released on Crass Records in 1981.
PLAY LOUD.
The message that is on the screen throughout the whole video:
THE VISUALS THAT ACCOMPANY THE AUDIO OF THESE ANNIE ANXIETY ALTERNATIVE MIXES FOR ‘CYANIDE TEARS’ FEATURES ANNIE ANXIETY HERSELF WITH STEVE IGNORANT AND PHIL FREE FROM CRASS
THE SCENE WAS SET UP AT DIAL HOUSE FOR A PHOTOGRAPHIC SHOOT CONCEIVED AND CARRIED OUT BY ANDY T AND PENNY RIMBAUD FOR THE COVER ARTWORK OF ‘WEARY OF THE FLESH’ 7″ SINGLE BY ANDY T RELEASED ON CRASS RECORDS IN 1982
NO PERSON WAS HARMED DURING THIS PHOTOGRAPH SESSION
I HOPE VIEWERS TO THIS YOUTUBE POST WILL NOT BE OFFENDED
If anyone reading this is genuinely offended by those visuals please direct messages to me rather than to YouTube (the company) as I do not particularly want a first strike on my YouTube account for ‘indecency’.
Words of Kurt B. Reighley:
As befits a lady who once joked that her autobiography should be titled ‘It Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time’, Little Annie always lives in the moment. As a result, her art feels both fresh and timeless, no matter where, when, or with whom she makes it.
Annie Anxiety born Ann Robie Bandes O’Connor, grew up in Yonkers, a New York City suburb two miles north and a world away from Manhattan. Movies and music—Sinatra and the Supremes, West Side Story and Song of Bernadette—stimulated her imagination and shaped her aesthetic.
At sixteen, Annie bid “adieu” to ‘the Sixth Borough’ and dived headfirst into downtown New York’s music scene.
She lived at the Chelsea Hotel and went to the opening of Studio 54. A late 1970s Suicide performance at CBGB’s blew her rapidly-expanding little mind and taught her to never settle for mediocrity.
After seeing her early outfit the Asexuals at Max’s Kansas City in the late ’70s, Frank Zappa raved about Annie to Songwriter magazine: “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!”
There’s a lot more to that Zappa quote. Google it, please.
That’s the great thing about Little Annie: every time you read about her, or see her one of her paintings, or listen to her sing, you discover something new.
Following a chance meeting with Crass vocalist Steve Ignorant, Annie accepted his invitation to visit England, where two weeks became a month and eventually thirteen years.
Whilst living at Crass’ commune in Epping Forest, she became the vocalist of an early line up of Rubella Ballet as well as cutting her first single as Annie Anxiety.
Created with Penny Rimbaud, ‘Barbed Wire Halo’ boasts a pair of claustrophobic tape-loop collages interlaced with Annie’s unnerving vocals.
From there she entered the orbit of UK dub innovator and On-U Sound label boss Adrian Sherwood. “I kept hearing about this madman who was doing sixty hour sessions,” Annie later recalled. “Adrian and I met, and within half an hour, I was doing sixty hour sessions with him, too.”
She soon moved in his converted garden shed becoming ‘Auntie’ Annie to his children.
Working with Sherwood, his wife Kishi Yamamoto, members of Tackhead, and the extended On-U Sound family, Annie crafted three remarkable albums, Soul Possession (1984), Jackamo (1987) and Short and Sweet (1992) that stir deep reggae grooves, leftfield electronics, and Annie’s acute lyrics into post-punk’s sonic sea of possibilities.
Her towering Rastafarian cohorts re-christened their diminutive colleague “Little Annie.”
A number of collaborations around this time showcased her versatile talent, including spots with Coil, the Wolfgang Press, Bim Sherman, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Missing Brazilians, and Current 93.
Alas, the rumoured track she cut with Paul Oakenfold and Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie still remains unreleased.
Reba Maybury asks:
One of my favourite records of yours is when you were under the name Annie Anxiety and you were living with Crass at Dial House in Essex. What was it like being there as a young woman from New York and making such progressive music?
Annie replies:
It was exhilarating and it felt like a honest place to be. It aligned with everything I already knew I believed in. You know what? When me and Penny Rimbaud were making Barbed Wire Halo, we thought that we were making a disco record! Honestly, I know it might not sound like that but we loved listening to disco together!
Indebted to Penny and Gordon.
I love a nice surprise and today (18th April 2014) I get home to find Defiant Pose fanzine volume 8 on my doorstep out of the blue.
Included within the package are two copies of ‘International Scale’, an incredible 7″ single by Rema Rema, and a 7″ record pressed up on the heaviest vinyl I have had the pleasure of holding!
Along with the normal version of the record, I was also sent (of which I am greatly indebted to Mike) the limited edition sleeve version of the record.
The record is exactly the same but the artwork for the limited edition is a different design and colour.
The quantity of the limited sleeve edition is 30 copies.
I was sent number 6 / 30.
The record been on the record player over and over since the opening of the package.
Inside the Defiant Pose fanzine there is an informative ten pages on Rema Rema, three pages on The Stench (from 1976), eight pages on The Heretics and three pages on Blood And Roses.
Thanks to Mike Clarke (Defiant Pose head honcho and also the guitarist from Decadent Few) for sending me this wonderful fanzine and record…
Every like minded soul should get a copy of this fanzine and record package.
*** FAST FORWARD ***
For the second time in just over a year (19th July 2015) I get a totally unexpected box of goodies from Mike Clarke, Defiant Pose fanzine editor and owner of Inflammable Material records.
This time the box contained two Rema Rema 12″ singles.
Two different sleeve versions of the track ‘Entry / Exit’, a track that Charisma Records rejected during the bands lifetime for “Blasphemous Content”.
The track itself is a six minute slow bass led plodder with some great feedback guitar work from Marco, and a call and response vocal style.
And yes, the lyrics might be labelled blasphemous.
The B – side of ‘Entry / Exit’ is a stripped down instrumental version.
I was also sent (of which I am greatly indebted to Mike) the limited edition sleeve version of ‘Entry / Exit’.
The record is the same but the artwork for the limited edition is a different design which is screen printed.
The quantity of the limited sleeve edition is 50 copies.
I was sent number 50 / 50.
*** Text below by Mike Defiant Pose fanzine and Inflammable Material Records ***
I started a fanzine in 1978 called Love And Romance, we planned to interview the Slits, Subway Sect and Siouxsie, but it fell apart in the planning stage.
The singer of They Must Be Russians found out Siouxsie’s real surname and rang her mum’s phone number in Chislehurst, Kent and kept ringing it. I think Siouxsie herself was having her Sunday dinner there one day and gave him a mouthful when he called for the umpteenth time.
I managed to almost interview Tessa from the Slits down the Portobello Road but we drank too much and smoked too many of the joints piled inside her handbag and both gradually lost the ability to form sentences.
The other guy helping me met the Subway Sect at their rehearsal place, but they just stared at him catatonically whilst picking at their Oxfam jumpers and he forgot to turn the cassette recorder on, so that was that.
I got Defiant Pose going in 1980, did three scrappy issues by 1981, nothing important; a mate used to print them at his work after everyone went home.
We would sell them to people in the street, deliberately not always to punks. The only positive thing was I moaned how nothing was happening locally and a month later two new fanzines started in Slough and sent me copies so it does work sometimes!
The fanzine came back in 2001 because I’d written a lot of stuff in the intervening years so had some friends, and suddenly we had the time to do it again.
We thought most fanzines were stuck in the same dull blueprint they’d followed since the mid-80’s and lost that attitude.
It’s also a conscious alternative to the interminable array of UK fanzines that simply follow the US format of columns/reviews.
After X amount of years of doing a label we rarely got an order based on a good `zine review, especially compared to the impact of seeing a band live.
People have called Defiant Pose nostalgic, but we wrote so much stuff that it’ll take a few issues to get up to date with it all!
For details of how to get in touch with Defiant Pose fanzine or Inflammable Material Records please check the flyers toward the end of this YouTube video.
The Snipers, who I know next to nothing about except that they were on ‘Bullshit Detector’, and had this one 7″ single entitled ‘Three Piece Suite’, both released on Crass Records, which I liked and all my mates hated!
One of my gripes about the Crass record label, or perhaps more specifically some peoples views on the Crass record label, is that lazy remark; “All those records on that record label are just noisy thrash” or varying versions of those words, perhaps with an added: “All sound the same” remark for good measure. .
The Crass record label released a heap of records of many differing styles.
I reckon Annie Anxiety would have a hard time (on any record label not just Crass Records) sounding anything like any other artist or band. Lack Of Knowledge, M.D.C, Poison Girls, Zounds, D & V, Andy T or The Mob, neither Rudimentary Peni or K.U.K.L and many others on that label.
This record by The Snipers, is one of my favourite 7″ singles on the Crass record label and is often overlooked. Criminally overlooked in my opinion!
Starting off with ‘Parents Of God’, a slow tom tom drum v bass guitar drone workout, followed by a guitar sound so sharp that Keith Levine from P.I.L should have sued Crass Records AND The Snipers, just as ‘Flowers Of Romance’ was being recorded. Wolfgang Press were also recording music similar to this ‘Parents Of God’ track around this time. Certainly The Snipers finding themselves in good company. This is a startling track.
The other side starts with ‘3 Piece Bores’ and the drummer finds a snare drum from somewhere and batters that about, while blissfully unaware that when the record would finally be released, hundreds of Crasstafarians would jump up and down in their parents homes for a little over two minutes while praising the Lord (Penny Rimbaud) that at least one track on this bloody record sounds a’ bit like’ Crass / D.I.R.T / Conflict / ENTER NAME OF BAND HERE. *** It doesn’t by the way ***
The third track ‘Nothing New’ concludes this 7″ single on a high. A ‘call and response’ battle between the bass and guitar, well written lyrics with the words ‘sung’ in such a ‘bored matter of fact way’, for the casual listener to think that perhaps he was reading the lyrics from a school notebook in a dark studio in Wood Green squinting at the words. But it all works. Wonderfully. For the last few seconds as the final bar chords make a pleasantly loud crescendo, it makes you wonder where the hell were all those bar chords hiding before that moment!
This record is classic, and it never sold!!!
Perhaps the band should have just sounded like Crass after all huh?
For the record my favourite 7″ single on the Crass record label is ‘Bloody Revolutions / Persons Unknown’ a split Crass and Poison Girls record, closely followed by ‘No Doves Fly Here’ by The Mob.
The text below ripped from Listen And Understand blog.
The Snipers formed in late 1979 in Oxfordshire. The band compromised of Russell Bowers on vocals, Dave ‘Bungi’ Hounslow on guitar, Steve ‘Wacker’ Harris on bass and Mark Taplin on drums.
They were inspired by Crass to start a band, even though none of them could play and none of them had any equipment (what they did find was crap, such as a Colombus bass, homemade guitar, half a drum set and a 15 watt practice amp).
They were going to originally be called The Sinyx, but changed it to The Snipers upon finding out that it had already been taken.
Early practices were done at Russell’s parents garage.
It took at least ten months of writing songs and practicing before they played their first gig at a Christmas party in the Victory Hut, a community centre from Brize Norton (a leftover hut from World War II).
The Snipers then recorded their first demo in Bourten, Gloucestershire possible around 1980.
They shared it with their friends and sent one to Crass.
Crass pulled their track ‘War Song’ for Bullshit Detector 1.
A second Demo was recorded, three of those tracks ended up on their 1981 7″ single ‘Three Piece Suite’ for Crass Records, and the other three tracks on a compilation, ‘Spirit of an Old Age Anthem’ cassette tape was released in 1982, and was the last thing the band released.
They played their last gig at the Wapping Anarchy Centre with Failing Parachutes in support, a band that is included in their compilation tape.
Mark eventually moved to Telford, and this led to the band becoming less active, and ultimately, their demise.
They had no interest in replacing Mark, since the band was made out of friendship.
All The Madmen Records had laid out a stall in the foyer at this gig, along with many other small companies and direct action folks.
Sean ‘Gummidge’, Rob C and myself pretty much took it in turns to go up the stairs to the balcony (it was easier than squeezing through the ground floor crowds) to watch bits of the bands. I caught bits of Benjamin Zephaniah, Thatcher On Acid, and quite a bit of Conflict.
I did not see the final twenty or so minutes, so I missed the aggro on the stage, but I did get word of trouble, and I did see hordes of people exiting, some with the help of a bouncer’s boot. I witnessed the trouble outside through the relative safety of the foyer, packing up the All The Madmen Records stall.
Myself and Sean walked through the riot, burdened with unsold records and cassette tapes, and after a while of general aggravation, made it up Brixton Hill to the Elm Park squat, to sleep and a chance to dream!
Woke up, and wandered around Brixton. Sean’s favourite shop, Spud U Like, had been trashed, as well as Dr Barnardos on the corner. Not the highest ranking organisations to have been pulled apart that’s for sure!
Part of an interview with Colin Conflict below courtesy of Art Of The State blog.
So, what happened to all the money at Brixton?
“We didn’t get a penny. We got a £1000 bill for damages and we’d really like people to ring up the Academy and give them hassle as they ripped everyone off. They tried telling us there was only two thousand people there but before that they’d told us that downstairs held four thousand and then they’d open upstairs and as far as I was concerned downstairs looked pretty packed. London Greenpeace rang up today and said where’s all our money and I had to say there wasn’t any, just what you took on the stall. I don’t think the Academy made a lot of money as these damages might have occurred. I’ve got a big list, a complete toilet, two toilet seats, a sink, a mirror, marble upstairs and graffiti removal was £150. At the end there was about £1000 profit and they just happened to hit us for that”.
Are they trying to get money off you now?
“No, they won’t be able to there was no contract or anything”.
What was all that stuff in Sounds about Brixton Police?
“We went for a meeting with them last week because first of all they wanted to do us for incitement to riot charges because although we didn’t know at the time they had uniformed officers on the balcony watching the gig who the Academy had let in so they saw everything. We’ve got the CRASS lawyers who look at lyrics to make sure we can’t get done for sedition etc. and they reckon we’ll get off it. There were a few handouts going round at the gig inciting the trouble which we knew nothing about”.
What happened with the security?
“They all got tooled up to beat the band up afterwards because during ‘Mighty and Superior’ they dragged some bloke up on stage and were beating the shit out of him so Paco (drummer) just stopped and had a go at them. They were heavy, they had dogs at the back of the stage. They were really over the top, the Academy hired seventy five extra security as the police tried to call the gig off on the Monday because a traffic warden found a hand out in the street which was one we done, the map. The police took it to the Academy and they wanted the gig off but by then the Academy had already spent money and we’d paid for the press adverts so they decided to go through with it but they did tell us it would be a strict security operation which is why we asked them if we could have our own security at the front of the stage and when we started playing people clambered over and the said take ’em out now or don’t play. Despite this I think the whole thing was good”.
Do you think it achieved anything?
“I’m not sure if it actually achieved anything, it was good to pull so many people together. We all felt that but at the same time we felt it was too vast to cope with. Just the sheer size of the stage meant I couldn’t control it whereas normally I can persuade people to get off. Steve got shook up because in the second song he did, someone got up and flattened him. A lot of people have said when we have done big gigs before that they’re good as they see people they haven’t seen for ages or meet people they write to. It worked well in that way. We did an interview with some bloke from the News of the World and what we’re doing is winding everybody up and one idea we’ve had is to announce a tour of the country in all the trouble spots like Broadwater Farm estate etc. We found out through the National Council For Civil Liberties they can only ban us from playing for six months anyway. We were going to play under a different name like the “Ungovernable Force” but that would have been too obvious. Like, when we went down Brixton police Station they had all our records out on the table as we walked in”.
Indebted to Penny and Gordon.
This unedited audio of the interview between Honey Bane and Gary Bushell recorded in either a café or a pub is a complete and utter train-wreck.
This train-wreck is not Garry Bushell’s fault, far from it, as he only has a very small part to play, and is mainly silent throughout the one and a quarter hours of raw audio.
On the face of it there seems to be ‘issues’ between Honey Bane and her EMI publicist.
‘Issues’ that last for the entire period of this interview.
Remember… One and a quarter hours of raw audio!
The same anti-EMI (her record label) gripes are thrown by Honey Bane towards the EMI publicist, who is consistently placed on the defensive trying to defend the company he works for, while also trying to salvage a music paper interview, gripes seemingly on a loop.
A certain deja vu is experienced as issues of money, image, EMI involvement in weapons and commercialisation, EMI making her a pop commodity etc etc, come up again and again.
The listener will perhaps sympathise with the EMI publicist as he is put upon, after all, later on in the interview he reveals that he has only been looking after Honey Banes affairs for ‘three weeks’.
This interview is quite hard listening, Bushell asking a question when he can during this complete verbal breakdown between two people sitting on the same table, much of which, presumably, making Gary Bushell scratch his balding head!
BUT, and there is always a BUT.
The EMI publicist was FAKE.
Honey Bane was real.
Garry Bushell was real.
There are no doubt many reasons why Crass thought that they would find it worthy to scam Garry Bushell, and some reasons perhaps justified.
But in this example, the scam seems to be totally unnecessary, and with no end point, relevant to Bushell, Crass, Honey Bane or the Sounds weekly music paper.
Why Honey Bane decided to act her part of the ‘good cop bad cop’ performance with a member of Crass is a mystery to me.
From what I understand the Sounds interview was not published perhaps partly as barely a question could be fitted in by Bushell during the prolonged bickering!
Gary Bushell was never told about the scam wherever it was recorded at the time, which might have seemed a likely end point
(although I doubt he would have cared if all was revealed after the drinks bill was paid, nor I doubt he would been that impressed with wasting over an hour of his own time).
Crass never really pushed the media on this ‘high jacked Sounds interview’, as they had done with the covert ‘Our Wedding’ flexi, the ‘Falklands’ flexi or the ‘Thatchergate Tapes’, perhaps in part due to the pointlessness of the scam, and perhaps due to a little bit of embarrassment in putting Honey Bane into that situation, for reasons that elude me at least.
The scam certainly never ignited her music career in any case!
Perhaps, paradoxically, it was good ‘acting’ experience for her film role in ‘Scrubbers’, a ‘Scum’ style film set in a female borstal, or her theatre work involvement with Richard Jobson of Skids!
For the visuals I have scanned in a REAL Honey Bane interview that was published in the October 1980 issue of the Zig Zag magazine!
Very much indebted to Penny and Gordon…
Nox Mortis were a band from Southampton, starting life as Suicide Pact around 1985. The line up consisted of Simon on the vocals and bass guitar, Paul on guitar, and Andy on the drums.
The band did not gig often although I saw them maybe two or three times, the band only had one appearance on vinyl, the ‘Shall We Dance’ album on Meantime Records.
This record was meant to be a split album with Crow People, but ended up as a four band compilation featuring Nox Mortis, Joyce McKinney Experience, Decadence Within and the Incest Brothers.
The sound of Nox Mortis, could be compared (and everyone loves comparisons) to Thatcher On Acid, a band that were on All The Madmen Records but soon to have a record released on Meantime Records in their own right…
Nox Mortis arranged several World War 1 poems to their music, the results of those arrangements feature on this cassette demo.
Along with the strong anti-war sentiments, Nox Mortis were also sincere animal rights activists.
The band were very pleasant to talk to, and I did talk to them on several occasions at gigs (not just their own) but with great sadness Simon, the vocalist and bassist, tall, blonde and beautiful who’s health was frail enough already, passed away very young, a few years after this cassette tape was released.
Simon needed regular blood transfusions, and was injected at the hospital with blood contaminated with H.I.V and became ill very quickly.
R.I.P. Simon
