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.”
