Laurie Anderson

Genres:	Comedy • Documentaries • Holiday & Seasonal • Pop / Rock
Descriptive "tags":	experimental • avant-garde • female vocalists • electronic • spoken word
Decades Active:	1980s • 1990s • 2000s

Biography

Laura Phillips Anderson, 5 June 1950, Chicago, Illinois, USA. A product of New York’s avant garde art scene, Laurie Anderson eschewed her initial work as a sculptor in favour of performing. The Life And Times Of Josef Stalin, premiered at Brooklyn’s Academy of Music in 1973, was a 12-hour epic containing many of the audio-visual elements the artist brought to her subsequent canon. Anderson’s debut, Big Science, included the eight-minute vocoder-laden ‘O Superman’, which had become a cult hit in Europe in 1981 on the 1/10 label and subsequently reached number 2 in the UK chart after Warner Brothers Records picked up the record. The song’s looped, repeated pattern combined with the singer’s part-spoken intonation created a hypnotic charm. Mr. Heartbreak, arguably Anderson’s most accessible release, featured contributions from Peter Gabriel and writer William Burroughs, while her next release, a sprawling five-album set, United...

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