For Record Store Day this year On-U Sound have collected together all of Little Annie’s work with the label as an expanded double album edition of the 1992 long-player Short And Sweet. The original vinyl LP featured 10 tracks penned by Annie, Skip McDonald and Doug Wimbish. The Tackhead / Sugarhill chaps producing the backing tracks, to which Annie added her poetry. With David Harrow on programming and Nigerian maestro Sonny Akpan showing off his percussion chops, Adrian Sherwood was in charge of the mix. 

On the surface this is On-U at their most accessible, at their most pop. This is dance music, driven by Wimbish’s slapped and fretless bass. Bumping and grinding to bionic go-go beats. A muscular funk, but just shy of Tackhead’s industrial edge. Moving and grooving, sometimes constructing something close to house. The galloping Going For Gold bordering on the Grace Jones. 

However, once you begin listening to Annie’s lyrics you’ll realise why she never made it onto Top Of The Pops. Instead of sugary, she is sardonic and acerbic, soaked, dripping in sarcasm, with a real gift for wordplay. Casting her outsider’s eye over, cryptically critiquing, both corrupt politics and the hypocrisy of social “norms”. Watching The World Go Bye has Annie’s soul intertwined, but her mind somewhere else, as a relationship, in existential apathy, slowly slides off the rails. Conversely, the noisy, fiery, frankly insatiable, Give It To Me, a riot of sirens and distorted sources, turns the dictionary into the Kama Sutra. Prisoner Of Paradise describes the confines of consumerism and capitalism, surrounded by mad, mercurial EQing. Skip’s axe fuzzes and fizzes with feedback. Everything is fractured and fidgeting, filtered through Sherwood’s desk.

Many of the album’s tracks were big on the London Balearic Scene. You, The Night And The Music, for example, was an Andrew Weatherall favourite* – a paean to constant clubbing which includes the classic line, “Make mine a gin & panic.” Bless Those – Little Annie’s Prayer – is a Bukowski-esque list of the downtrodden and dispossessed set to a slow stomp – a “Monkey Drum Mooch” – and rolling piano that recalls an Ibiza / Amnesia anthem by The Thrashing Doves. I Think Of You was a staple of Phil Mison’s during his “Recession Session” residency at Nicky Holloway’s Milk Bar. A warm, woozy relative of Mark Stewart’s Satie-sampling Stranger Than Love, with hypnotic hushed backing vocals and crazy cowbell to keep the stoned / refreshed hooked. Annie, husky, breathless, detailing sexual obsession, daydreaming while watching daytime TV and doing household chores. 

The Richard Norris produced If Cain Were Able, previously only available on CD, starts solo piano-led, like Ze Records’s Christina doing Edith Piaf, before the drums come tumbling and the guitar gets to Johnny Marr jangling. Here Annie eschews the humour that’s preceded, and instead approaches the anger and darkness reached on 1984’s Crass-affiliated Soul Possession. Norris also co-produced 10 Killer Hurtz More, all sexy whispers, tabla and snake-charming melody, found on 1994’s 4-track EP, In Dread With Little Annie, the songs from which are now added to the new deluxe package.

Another of these bonuses is Miss The Light, a muted horned ballad, an ode to a nocturnal life, that has Annie collaborating with Dave Curtis from 4AD band Dif Juz. Keith Leblanc then lends a helping hand to the 2 final cuts. On Le Mangers Hereux machines bubble, bleep, chirrup and sorta wolf-whistle, while Annie sings of a perfect, impossible love.  This Town is a Lee Hazlewood cover, a very Little Annie-esque tally of contradictions that teases with the sleaze hidden beneath suburbia. Boulevards of broken dreams and broken promises where “the fun never stops”, block-rocked by the thump and crack of Leblanc’s controlled explosions. 

NOTES

(1) Weatherall also cited Annie’s On-U debut, As I Lie In Your Arms, as an influence while producing Primal Scream’s Screamadelica.

(2) Norris first worked with Little Annie in 1990, during the Ray Shulman sessions that resulted in the ATCO single Sugar Bowl.