THE BOSTON GLOBE

Carrying a torch
The eclectic Little Annie's latest calling: cabaret singer

By James Reed

Globe Staff / November 21, 2008

NEW YORK -- When Little Annie steps onstage, saucer eyes wide open, she scans the room like she's looking for something the audience might have stolen from her. As a pianist plays behind her, she dances a little two-step with a cane, which, she later explains, is a prop — mostly.

- When Little Annie steps onstage, saucer eyes wide open, she scans the room like she's looking for something the audience might have stolen from her. As a pianist plays behind her, she dances a little two-step with a cane, which, she later explains, is a prop - mostly.
Little Annie is a torch singer from the Kurt Weill mold who blurs the line between her songs and her life. When Annie - wearing her black hair shaved on the sides, slicked down on top - sputters her final notes recently at the club Santos Party House, it's not clear if she'll launch into the next verse or collapse on the floor, dropping the glass of brandy in her hand.
"My performances aren't in a vacuum, and that's the difference between cabaret and cabaret," she says later. "There's Vegas cabaret where you become a caricature of your former self, and then there's being a news reporter, being a journalist. I like to say I'm a journalist, and the only way to be a good journalist is to be honest. And that changes constantly. My music changes constantly."
That's putting it modestly. Annie, who performs tomorrow night at the Regent Theatre in Arlington as part of the Brainwaves Festival, has spent her whole career refusing to pin herself down. At 48, she has sung it all: reggae, electronica, dub, lounge, art rock, and lately, cabaret songs.
Born Annie Bandez just outside the Bronx, she's gone by various aliases, making her hard to keep track of. She led Annie and the Asexuals briefly in the late '70s and then became Annie Anxiety Bandez in the '80s. These days she simply calls herself Little Annie, an affectionate moniker her Jamaican friends gave her.
"Changing my name like that was an attempt to free myself from my past," she says over drinks at Reade Street Pub, a working-class bar where Annie greets everyone with "Hello, darling!" and a kiss on the cheek.
Her discography is hard to navigate; only her two most recent albums are easy to find. She's known more as a collaborator with underground artists (Current 93, Coil, Crass, the Legally Jammin') than for her own solo work.
"People who are into Little Annie are really into her, and they usually find her by proxy, through other bands," says Jon Whitney, who curated the Brainwaves Festival and maintains Little Annie's website. "Her albums and recordings are great, but you really miss something by not seeing her live. She's got all these great stories to tell."
Annie's storytelling is almost as compelling as her music. She's a true character, as are the friends she's collected in her travels (she lived and worked in England for 14 years) and on her beloved streets of New York, where she has done outreach for sex workers and the homeless. She's a painter whose vibrant folk art contains a fair amount of biblical imagery; she's an ordained minister who claims no denomination.
Through it all, the one thing that has eluded Little Annie is mainstream success. She came close last year, when her song "Strange Love" was picked up for a Levi's TV commercial. The track was from 2006's "Songs From the Coal Mine Canary," a quirky, cabaret-pop album co-produced by her longtime friend Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons.


Annie followed it up with last year's "When Good Things Happen to Bad Pianos," a collection of classics and modern pop songs (Tina Turner's "Private Dancer," U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For") reimagined as ballads for smoky piano bars. She recorded it with Paul Wallfisch, who also fronts the band Botanica.
"The greatest thing about collaborating with Annie is that it's always a surprise," Wallfisch says. "Annie, even though she embodies a lot of different genres, is fundamentally oblivious to that."
Annie's career path isn't exactly what she had imagined it would be, but then, she never really knew what she wanted to do. She certainly was clueless when she dropped out of school at 16 and spent her days riding the New York subway in a silver wig and blue boa, looking like Jodie Foster in "Taxi Driver." She ended up onstage at the punk club Max's Kansas City by accident in 1977 when someone mistook her for a singer and asked her to be the opening act.
"I was running around, I looked fabulous, and I didn't do anything," she says of her tenuous talent back then. "I was hugely ambitious in the sense that I was trying to save my life. I wasn't ambitious because I wanted to be a huge star. It was for survival."
Little Annie talks a lot about battling her own demons and how they shaped her into the performer she is today. She owes her life, she says, to what the streets taught her about survival. "I had to face everything that a little girl who shouldn't be outside after dark has to face," she says. "It's a dangerous world out there, and I got hurt more than once."
But she learned from those experiences and became a voice for the disenfranchised, winning over a legion of cult fans and high-profile admirers, including Frank Zappa, Marc Almond, and Dr. John.
"My motto is: Keep your edges sharp, be ready for anything, and expect nothing," she says, laughing quietly. "When I heard Billie Holiday records as a kid, I always wanted to sing like that. Maybe I'm finally getting what I prayed for."
James Reed can be reached at jreed@globe.com.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.