In August 2019, the New York film-maker Eva Aridjis Fuentes embarked on a cab ride that would change her life. Though her driver sported sunglasses and a turban, Aridjis Fuentes thought she looked eerily familiar. “The driver played Neil Young’s Harvest album in its entirety; we sang Heart of Gold together. I asked if she’d ever seen Neil play. She said: ‘Oh no, my concert days are long over’. So then I asked if she’d ever seen Q Lazzarus.”
Q Lazzarus was the stage name of Diane Luckey, a singer from the 80s whose song Goodbye Horses had soundtracked Buffalo Bill’s infamous nipple-tweaking scene in The Silence of the Lambs. The track became a cult classic, covered by Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke, Deftones’ Chino Moreno and MGMT among others. Q vanished in the mid-90s, with many, including friends and collaborators, believing she was dead. But Aridjis Fuentes – who regularly played Goodbye Horses at club nights – had a hunch that Luckey herself was driving this taxicab. “She looked in the rearview, said, ‘Oh, I’ve heard of her’, but abruptly changed the subject,” Aridjis Fuentes remembers. Later, though, the driver admitted: “I’m Q.”
That night, for the first time in 15 years, Q dreamed she was performing. She called Aridjis Fuentes the next morning, telling her: “My dead mama raised me not to ignore signs from God.” Thus began a beautiful friendship, one that yielded Aridjis Fuentes’ documentary, Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus, which will be released this spring. It will be accompanied by a soundtrack album that will finally shine a light on Q’s voluminous catalogue of unheard music. Tragically, Q, who died in 2022, is no longer around to tell her story herself, but, as she says in the documentary, she collaborated with Aridjis Fuentes on the movie to explain “the truth: what went wrong and why I disappeared”.
Diane Luckey was raised in New Jersey, a Baptist chorister whose sister Abbie says in the documentary “always wanted to be Rod Stewart”. Against her parents’ wishes, she relocated to New York aged 18, making money there as a session singer and cab driver. By the mid-80s, she was performing at clubs such as the Pyramid, Boy Bar and Limelight, accompanied by a drum machine, guitarist Bill Garvey and dancer Danny Z, AKA Dan Agren. “In New York clubs back then, anything went,” says Agren. “Rampant drug use, people having sex in the corners. I was often nude on stage, wearing handcuffs, and Q would drag me around. I’d shout, ‘Honey, you’re breaking my arms!’ It was like she was possessed.”
Agren and Q lived together in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. “Q was very protective,” says Agren. “If I got harassed in the street, she’d get right their faces. She was a big woman. She was not afraid. A couple of people made the mistake of trying to rob her when she driving her taxi, and she beat the crap out of them.” One night, the director Jonathan Demme hailed Q’s cab; after hearing her sing at the wheel, he handed her his card. “She came home that night and said, ‘I have a feeling. This man is for real,’” remembers Agren.
Demme used Q’s song Candle Goes Away in his 1986 movie Something Wild and, two years later, tapped her for another track for Married to the Mob. Garvey had penned Goodbye Horses for himself. “But the way Bill sang it, it would have gone nowhere,” says Agren. “Q gave it her melodic harmonies, turning it into her opus.” She recorded Goodbye Horses at 4am in a single take, after an 18-hour taxicab shift. Her androgynous, shadowy and soulful vocal raised the track’s new wave melancholy to sublime heights. Realising its brief appearance in Married to the Mob hardly did the song justice, Demme foregrounded it in The Silence of the Lambs three years later. “That’s when the song really took off,” says Agren. “But by then, Q was in London.”
Q believed the Demme connection would snare her a recording contract. But, says Aridjis Fuentes, “the record labels told her they couldn’t market a black woman singing rock.” So Q bolted for London, where she recruited local musicians for her new, heavy metal direction, met boyfriend-manager Richard, and began dabbling in drugs. She slogged away for several years, but London proved another dead end. However, Demme then offered another opportunity: singing Talking Heads’ Heaven on screen in his 1993 Aids drama Philadelphia.
Demme then invited Q to sing at the movie’s premieres in New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC. But Q was bumped off its soundtrack album for, she claimed, a piano performance by star Denzel Washington’s wife. The disappointment hit hard, as did her breakup with Richard. “It was incredibly painful for her,” says Aridjis Fuentes. “She had tried so hard, and had so much talent. But nobody would give her a chance.”
“She was so unhappy,” sighs Agren. “She hardly got out of bed. She wanted to go off the deep end and just do drugs endlessly.” Q’s account of these years in Aridjis Fuentes’ documentary makes for harrowing viewing, a gruelling descent into crack cocaine use, homelessness and prison. Miraculously, though, she eventually broke out of this downward spiral; by the 00s, she had married and was raising a son, James Luckey, in Staten Island.
Demons conquered, Q kept her past hidden from her new friends, and even James. Goodbye Horses’ remarkable afterlife made that tricky, however. “Mom never talked about her career,” James remembers, “but I figured it out myself. I didn’t realise what a big deal it was until I heard [Goodbye Horses] in Clerks II, and Family Guy, and Grand Theft Auto IV. I told schoolfriends: ‘My mom’s a rock star!’ She overheard and said, ‘Stop telling people about me!’”
“Q was an extremely proud woman,” says Aridjis Fuentes. “She didn’t want people from her old life to know what happened to her, and didn’t want her new friends to know about her past. It takes a lot of strength to bury all that, to never mention you were a singer, to not even listen to your music.” By the time they began work on the documentary, however, James was graduating college. “Q said, ‘I don’t need to take care of him any more, why not go back to my music?’”
With her son’s help, she began the slow process of chasing performance royalties for Goodbye Horses. She gave Aridjis Fuentes a sack of demo tapes, spanning her work with Garvey, material she wrote with Agren and rock tracks cut with her London band, for the documentary soundtrack. It’s about to be released as an album, the first time any of her music other than Goodbye Horses has seen official release. “She always wanted to put out a record of her music,” says Aridjis Fuentes, “one she would finally get royalties from.”
For the documentary’s climax, Q and Aridjis Fuentes planned a New York concert, with Q performing material from throughout her career; her London bandmates were to back her, reuniting for the first time since her disappearance. But it wasn’t to be: in July 2022, Q broke her leg, and then died of sepsis while in hospital. “This infection had taken over her whole body, and nobody had noticed at the hospital or at the rehab,” Aridjis Fuentes recalls. “It was already too late for them to save her.” The director was devastated, having lost “this extremely magical, special person, who’d become one of my closest friends”.
“She died the way Black women die when they go to hospital,” adds James. “Through neglect. Look at the data. How many Black women die in surgery or during childbirth, compared with other races? It’s an ugly truth.”
Q’s passing changed the tone of Aridjis Fuentes’ film. “I had been playing with the whole ‘Lazarus’ thing – chronicling her rise, fall and her resurrection, this happy ending where she’s back from the dead,” Aridjis Fuentes says. The production turned into “a nightmare”, she adds. “We had some big-name producers involved, but when Q passed away, they disappeared. I wound up having to do a Kickstarter to finish the movie.”
Still, Aridjis Fuentes’ movie is a moving and honest triumph. And making it granted Q some long-deserved joy. In those final years, she made peace with her past and was again chasing her dream. “The thought of releasing the album, playing the concert, finally getting her music heard, rejuvenated her,” James says. “It was a true Lazarus effect. She was ahead of her time, and I’m just glad people will now be able to truly hear her music.”
• Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus will be in select cinemas from 7 March, and released on streaming in April. The soundtrack album is released on Sacred Bones on 21 February.
