Annie Hogan’s work has always been at the cutting edge of innovation and deviation, from her first recorded outings on the Marc and the Mambas ‘Sleaze’ (1982) to her more recent, genre-bending forays into spectral techno with Regis. She has worked her alchemy alongside the heavyweight likes of Nick Cave, Lydia Lunch, Gavin Friday, Jarboe, Barry Adamson, Kid Congo Powers and Simon Fisher Turner. While most famously, her decade-long musical partnership with Marc Almond spanned every Mambas, Willing Sinners and La Magia release, culminating in the 1988 Number One hit reworking of ‘Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart’ as an epic duet between Marc and Gene Pitney. Nico also featured as a guest on the duet ‘Your Kisses Burn’, her final studio recording.

Annie’s formative influences can be traced back to the music she was listening to from an early age. Notably, The Tornados’ ‘Telstar’ (1962) and Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’ (1964). Both Joe Meek’s Space Age explorations on the former and the widescreen groove Tony Hatch created for Petula Clark’s exuberant vocal on the latter left indelible imprints on her subsequent work. Ditto the contents of her record bag when she was a DJ at Leeds Amnesia and Le Phonographique and London’s Batcave clubs in the early 80’s drawing from her own unique collection of records bursting with alternative pioneers and fuelled by film scores by the likes of Quincy Jones, Elmer Bernstein, John Barry or Ennio Morricone. All of this nourished the distinctive sound and vision that was first showcased in Marc and the Mambas’ remarkable debut Untitled back in 1982.

2019 Annie released an album that showcased the full range of Annie’s creative, musical and technical skills while reuniting a stellar cast of old friends. Lost In Blue, made with co-producer Dave Ball, was a compelling collection of Hogan originals, contemporary torch songs set in a dreamlike Soho night, with contributions from Lydia Lunch, Kid Congo Powers, Gavin Friday, Wolfgang Flür ….

2022 Annie revisited her innovative dj sets from Soho’s Batcave club ‘83 for a trio of mixtape reduxes for the cult cassette label Reel Torque. She quickly followed up the same year with Amnesia 1981 and finally The Colours of Darkness Le Phonographique 1981-1984 (2024)

Since the beginning of this decade, Annie has been based at Studio Blue, close to her birthplace on the Wirral – a landscape that is as much of an inspiration as the freedom of having her own dedicated space. A pivotal meeting with Downwards Records owner Karl O’Connor, aka Regis, in 2018 brought about a fruitful new phase in her career starting with recording Lou Reed’s Temporary Thing with Regis in Milan in 2019. On Downwards, she has released a succession of extraordinary, atmospheric albums written in response to various landscapes. Honeysuckle Burials (2020), was inspired by wanderings in the Clwydian Range in North Wales, a place of Neolithic mounds, Roman hillforts and Iron Age earthworks. Funeral Cargo (2021) explored her Viking ancestry in the Wirral, while the retrospective Without The Moon released in the same year, gathered pivotal recordings from her debut Kickabye EP (1984), featuring Marc Almond, Nick Cave, Banshees drummer Budgie and JG Thirlwell aka Foetus with vintage rare grooves made with Jarboe and Barry Adamson and a brand new piano piece featuring Kid Congo Powers on guitar.

Destress of Permanence (2023) Hogan composed a wholly absorbing hour of layered and mulched organ and field recordings that pushed the aesthetic of her Downwards works deep into silty oblivion and re-wilded beauty, revealed a brooding unyielding lament invoking the bleakest dockside noir and belly rumbling low end harmonics offered as her “emotional response to my connection to Earth.”

Depths of Disturbances (2024) produced spellbinding results from a winter residency in the Bidston Observatory in the Wirral, NW England. In situ, Hogan oriented herself in the vaulted Victorian structure to realise some of her most elusive recordings; unravelling passages of densely layered drone like weathered reels of film left to marinade in memory. An uncanny stillness runs deep in murky 3D throughout the album’s two-part movement, using three judiciously-placed zoom recorders to capture herself in dialogue with numerous instruments.

Teaming up with Karl O’Connor as ‘Hogan & Regis’, the dynamic duo released the exquisite electronic salon suite Reversing Into Tomorrow (2020) and the soundtrack to the film Hospital For Beasts (2023), an unnervingly beautiful marriage of their unique form of rhythm and blues. 2023 Annie contributed keys on Regis solo album Hidden In This Is The Light That You Miss (2023) and has been an extra member of Regis’ Berlin-based band EROS since 2024, along with Boris Wilsdorf (Einstürzende Neubauten) and Liam Andrews (My DISCO) contributing piano on both of their album releases, the debut A Southern Code and the (2024) LP Your Truth Is A Lie

All of which sets the scene for her latest revelation. Tongues In My Head is an aural spellbook that channels every aspect of Hogan’s musical genius. It was created at Studio Blue in the spring and summer of 2025 and fashioned on a 1930s baby grand and 1880s upright piano, clavichords, harmoniums and all manner of vintage keyboards. Its shimmering, glimmering soundscape and richly evocative vocals gather up the threads of a lifetime’s immersion in musical magic to form the dark masterpiece of her solo career.

Cathi Unsworth – 2026