Relatively little is known about Diane Luckey, AKA Q Lazzarus – although maybe that is about to change. Up until now her elusiveness has been reflected in the ethereal, hard to pin down nature of her most well-known track ‘Goodbye Horses’. In fact, to the majority of people, ‘Goodbye Horses’ is her only track. But she recorded over 40 demo cassettes packed full of music under this name during the 80s and 90s and a selection of ten tracks, culled from these tapes, is being released on Sacred Bones. This vinyl-only compilation, Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives Of Q Lazzarus, is a revelation; it presents the listener with an unpredictably eclectic mix of styles, radically altering perceptions of who she was, as these tracks alone include pounding gothic rock and (what sounds like) Britpop/ baggy-leaning indie. Across this release is a fusion of old styles with new, and a soulful exploration of shadowier artistic impulses, which drag a 60s sensibility into the digital age.
Diane Luckey was born in the Neptune Township, New Jersey, on 12 December 1962. The daughter of James and Willa-Mae Luckey, she was raised in a large, musical family and grew up singing in youth choirs and her local Baptist church. Inspired by these early churchical experiences to work in the music industry, she moved to New York City at 18, where she found work as a backup singer and jingle writer for Sigma Sound Studio. It was then that she formed her band Q Lazzarus and the Resurrection.
Her career as such has been shaped by two synchronistic encounters. The first occurred in the mid-1980s, when she picked up filmmaker Jonathan Demme in her taxi during a snowstorm. While working on getting her musical career off the ground, Luckey held down a bewildering array of part time jobs to make ends meet, including acting as live-in au pair in a Chelsea townhouse where some of her vocal takes were recorded. But one of her jobs was as a taxi driver, and she would sometimes ask fares if they worked in the music industry. She asked this question of Demme and decided to play her demo tape over the car’s speakers regardless when he said no. This encounter won her an unexpected champion in the acclaimed director, who went on to feature her track ‘Candle Goes Away’ in his 1986 film, Something Wild. He also featured her music in Married To The Mob (1988), and, famously, The Silence Of The Lambs (1991), as well as Philadelphia (1993). Despite ‘Goodbye Horses’ becoming an eventual cult hit – copies of the original 12″ can now fetch up to $1,000 on Discogs – it is claimed that she never received any royalties for the song, which was written by a fellow band member, William Garvey, with whom she had a poor relationship. Her lack of support and fair remuneration is sadly typical and symptomatic of how many artists – but particularly Black musicians operating outside expected genre norms – are treated within the music industry.
The second encounter came decades later. In 2019, she was once again working in transport, this time driving a bus on Staten Island when she encountered the filmmaker Eva Aridjis. In the intervening years Luckey had fallen almost completely into obscurity even as the mythos surrounding the disappearance of Q Lazzarus continued to grow online. She had simply chosen to reject obsessive fan speculation that cast her as an enigmatic phantom rather than a person who had simply chosen a different path in life. Something in Aridjis’ approach convinced her to reconsider her music, however, leading to the eventual creation of the documentary Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives Of Q Lazzarus, which was in production at the time of her death in 2022, and is scheduled for release next month. As part of this process, the film maker was also entrusted with the cache of unreleased music on cassette, the source of this release.
That ‘Goodbye Horses’ has maintained such a grip on the public imagination for over three decades is entirely understandable. The androgyny of Q’s voice, contrasts provocatively yet sublimely with the Buffalo Bill scene in Silence Of The Lambs, reflecting the character’s self-image and to what extent this contrasts with how the viewer sees them. ‘Goodbye Horses’ quite rightly maintains an enduring presence in underground culture, reappearing in covers by Kele Okereke, Wild Beasts and MGMT. The song’s theme is transcendence—rising above those who see the world as only earthly and finite—an interesting and somewhat direct contrast to the themes in her cover of ‘Heaven’ by Talking Heads. Both of these tracks in particular highlight a juxtaposition key to her work: deeply soulful vocals contending with beauty and loss. This kinship is shared with other African American musicians and artists whose ability to merge the deeply spiritual with the deeply unsettling, and reflects themes explored in Leila Taylor’s Darkly: Black History And America’s Gothic Soul, which examines how esoteric themes, gothic aesthetics, and modernity converge in such cultural narratives. Lazzarus’ work operates within this tradition, embodying the tension between transcendence and entrapment, between spiritual release and cultural marginalisation. Her androgynous voice continues to haunt gothic dance floors – unmoored, enigmatic, untethered temporally or spatially.
But, of the lesser-known tracks, ‘Hellfire’, is doom-laden and camp, being evocative of queer cabaret, transmitting drag aesthetics – it is an unholy fusion of gospel roots with the profane gothic sensibilities that colour most of her discography. Elsewhere again, a surprising range is revealed. ‘Bang Bang’ and ‘I See Your Eyes’ both have a distinctly Britpop, leaning into Madchester baggy sensibility, conjuring the looseness of Pills ’N’ Thrills And Bellyaches, to the extent one can even hear that these tracks might have suited Shaun Ryder’s sneering delivery. It’s a completely unexpected detour, away from shadowy synths, into more 1960s pop territory, refracted through 90s digital dance culture. Not everything that you might expect to hear on such a compilation is here however. Musically, the original ‘Goodbye Horses’ b-side ‘White Lines’ evokes All About Eve and The Mission – a gothic rock ballad with a deep, churn of drama, although this absence may be due to poor recording quality.
Diane Luckey’s adventures included a six-month stint on a fishing boat in Alaska and a long trip through South America with a friend. It will be exciting to see what Aridjis’ documentary reveals about her life and music, and we should celebrate that Q was able to begin to (re)present herself before her death. Despite contemporary culture’s tendency to sensationalise, both Diane Luckey’s contribution to underground music culture and her choice to take a different life path should be celebrated.
