A New Documentary Uncovers One of Pop’s Tragic Mysteries: Q Lazzarus

Luckey wanted to be a singer from childhood. Born in 1960, she grew up in Neptune Township, N.J., and sang in her church choir. At 18, she moved to New York to try to make it in music and met William Garvey, with whom she recorded “Goodbye Horses,” and Dan Agren, who was her backup dancer for performances at East Village haunts like the Pyramid Club and Boy Bar.

“You could just sort of hum a melody, and she would just right away put the music to it,” Agren said in an interview. Luckey, who sang and played keyboards, gigged around New York, and also formed a band named Q Lazzarus in the late ’80s in London. “She couldn’t perform at 50 percent,” Jon Bouillot, that band’s bassist, said in an interview. “Everything she performed was 100 percent.”

Luckey’s biggest break came during a 1986 snowstorm, when she picked up Demme and the musician Arthur Baker in her cab. That chance meeting led to the inclusion of Q Lazzarus music in four of his films: “Something Wild” (1986), “Married to the Mob” (1988), “Silence of the Lambs” (1991) and “Philadelphia” from 1993, in which Luckey appears, singing a cover of the Talking Heads’ “Heaven.”

“He truly believed in her and wanted to help promote her,” Suzana Perić, the music editor of those four films, said in an interview. Perić was first tasked with finding a place for “Goodbye Horses” in “Married to the Mob,” but it was an even better fit for “The Silence of the Lambs” (the Buffalo Bill character sings along to it). “That particular song stuck with all of us,” Perić said.

“Goodbye Horses” captured listeners’ imaginations, later appearing in the soundtrack of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, a 2016 Gucci ad campaign and an episode of “Family Guy.” It has been covered frequently, by artists including MGMT and Jon Hopkins. Kele Okereke, the lead singer of Bloc Party, included a Euro-disco-inflected remake of this “weird, magical song” on his 2011 solo EP “The Hunter.”