Do you remember the film Manhunter - the first and best of the Thomas Harris Red Dragon adaptations? The detective Will Peterson is wracking his brains to work out how the killer, known as the Tooth Fairy, could have known the precise layout of his victims' home, to the extent that he even brought bolt cutters to remove the recent addition of a padlock on the patio doors. To a molten fanfare of Jan Hammer's DX7s, the penny finally drops. "You've seen them my man, you've seen them."
He phones the evidence room to ask if there are tins of home movie footage from the victims' homes. There are some but the lab labels don't match. "They're local labs. They send them out. Peel them off and tell me what's underneath," he says. Bingo, all films developed by at the same place, and the killer is banged to rights.
I am having a Will Peterson moment. I would gamble my taxidermy collection that somewhere, somehow, Amy Winehouse has listened to Little Annie. If it is true, rather than charter a CIA jet to shoot her down, I'd rather give her a hug and compliment her on immaculate taste. At the very least, she has completely understood it, and produced something equally fine ... and had the good fortune to invest in a bull market.
Some of you will know Little Annie. She lived in England throughout the eighties, recorded for On U Sound with Adrian Sherwood and had one of the greatest bands available to mankind - Doug Wimbush, Skip Macdonald, Bim Sherman, and even once - when they were unavailable, and out of charity I suspect, yours truly.
Annie Anxiety Bandez was born and raised in New York, which to Winehouse dissenters, could makes her properly authentic. She appeared at the tail end of the Warhol superstar era and is photographed in various books with many of today's dead icons, enjoying a refreshing cocktail at that shrine to healthy living, the Chelsea Hotel. Her first band Annie and the Asexuals - she was about sixteen at the time, were such stalwarts of Max's Kansas City that in 1980, Frank Zappa cited them as his reason for coming to New York.
In 1981, she came to England and became involved with the wonderful, truly subversive, national irritants, Crass, which was when I first saw her play Reading Town Hall. Amongst the black flag-wavers and skinheads looking for a fight, a four foot ten silver lame clad diva with enormous hair, singing Weimar jazz and Motown over electronic loops was quite a surprise. I am slightly hazy as to how we became friends several years later - a drug squat in Stockwell at four in the morning rings some bells ... anyway.
Like her spiritual daughter, she enjoyed herself to Olympian levels, sported tattoos - mostly done by herself - and was not averse ... no, loved a bit of fighting. But what she wrote and recorded through the mid-eighties and early nineties for On U Sounds is truly magnificent. Check out Short and Sweet.
A word of comfort to certain none-too-media savvy, furrowed-browed, hand-wringing in-laws, is that Little Annie is still very much with us. She returned to New York at the end of the nineties, rehabbed, continued recording, did cabaret, acted, and after 9/11 spent months as a volunteer tea-lady for the emergency workers at Ground Zero. She has recently recorded a new album, produced by Antony of ... and the Johnsons.
If by chance, the similarity really is just a coincidence of good genes and superb instincts, Miss Winehouse herself might like to have a listen ... and do a cover or two. Little Annie deserves ...
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