Artist, musician, poet. Katie Jane Garside can make a claim to all three, and yet remains completely anonymous to most.
Words like Queenadreena, Daisy Chainsaw, Ruby Throat or Woom will mean nothing, but for those who are familiar with Garside’s incredibly diverse output, she represents a hidden and fragile treasure.
Her life story reads like a blend of fact, fiction and fairy-tale. It can be difficult to separate the myth that time and an air of mystery has wrapped around her like a vine.
Although sometimes appearing ill at ease, she’s not averse to giving interviews, but is inexplicably seldom questioned by the mainstream media. Instead her interrogators seem, in the main, to have been fans. Whether they have been so dumbfounded by her presence to be rendered mute, or just hold her in such esteem that to veer off the trodden path and into the realm of intimacy is impossible, the questions put to her have tended to be slight – largely focusing on her music and rarely stripping away the outer veneer.
But the truth is that Garside’s starkly unusual upbringing is one that has cause to be explored. There is little doubt that hers created an exceptional woman who walks her own path unashamedly, even though that route has been beset by hazards along the way.
Without the chance to confirm their validity, the facts appear to be that she was born in 1968 in Salisbury. She was plucked, aged 11 along with sister Melanie to sail the world with her parents. The youngster would spend the next five formative years afloat, at one time not going ashore for 47 days.
Only she can say how such an unconventional childhood affected a girl of such tender years. Suffice to say, years spent with infinity above and countless black fathoms below must have been a revelatory experience.
Speaking to Belgium’s toutepartout, she explained the experience as ‘seamless days of ocean and two little girls with dolls.’ Her confession regarding her eventual return to terra firma set the tone for what was to follow. “I just carried on making dolls but this time the doll was me. I was the puppet and I was the one that pulls the strings,” she said.
And it’s this introspection that has coloured Katie Jane Garside.
In the 1990’s, she joined the band Daisy Chainsaw after answering an advert from guitarist Crispin Gray. One album, ‘Eleventeen’ followed, spawning the single ‘Love Your Money’ and a live outing on cult programme ‘The Word’.
The performance is reminiscent of a homemade bomb. Barely contained and threatening to explode in different directions, it mirrored her brittle state of mind.
The apocryphal story suggests that during a live show while touring with Daisy Chainsaw, she took a razor to her dreadlocked hair, cutting both follicles and flesh. Either way, she succumbed to a nervous breakdown and retired to Rigg Beck, The Purple House, in the Lake District to rest and recuperate.
Some seven years later, Gray asked her to join his new project Queenadreena. Older and wiser, she embraced her demons and returned to the stage, where watching Katie Jane Garside perform remains both an entrancing and schizophrenic experience.
Whether it’s a legacy to years exposed to the vastness of the oceans, she wears very little on stage in an almost child-like innocence. But these are no Fashion Week model-draped outfits. Her self-designed clothes bring to mind a concentration camp – ripped, flimsy and stained. One of her fashion creations was simply entitled Treblinka, complete with internee number.
Even dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, she would still exude vulnerability. While she’ll bound across the stage to wrestle with Gray and bring him crashing to the floor, you find yourself waiting for her unwinding clockwork to bring her to a grinding halt.
Her only stage props are a bottle of wine and a rickety chair. Suicidally, she’ll clamber onto the piece of battered furniture with half the bottle downed. As she teeters, literally, on the brink, you have the urge to rush on, hug her and bring her down to safety.
At other times, she’ll curl onto the seat in a foetal position. From somewhere among the womblike figure, a breathy voice emerges, quivering and scarcely audible. Anyone who’s ever heard her version of ‘Jolene’ prostrate on the stage, alone and lit by a single spotlight can’t fail to be moved.
The overriding feeling when watching Katie Jane Garside is the desire to protect her, wrap her in cotton wool, and enclose her in a glass jar so no one can hurt her – and yet that’s undoubtedly doing her a huge disservice.
She has an unguessed at inner strength. Confessing to being watched at home by a voyeur with binoculars, she used the experience in her CD and DVD 2005 release ‘Lalleshwari – Lullabies in a Glass Wilderness’.
In the films, ‘At the Window’ and ‘In the Kitchen’ she uses herself as the subject – a lone figure framed by her lighted window in a pitch-black house as an unseen watcher slowly creeps ever closer. It culminates in a chilling close-up as the voyeur watches his unaware victim from immediately outside.
Using herself as both muse and canvas recurs frequently in her work.
Part of her 2007 art installation, ‘Darling, they’ve found the body’ in Birmingham art studio, Woom, contained Polaroids of herself looking like a victim among shattered mannequins. In others, she posed naked save for an equine mask for ‘Trixie and the Mule’, while shots simply entitled ‘Garden’ portray her again wearing nothing but an eagle mask and butterfly wings while posing among the trees and branches.
It suggests the actions of a woman who’s become happy in her own skin, although only those close enough to peer behind the performer’s mask could say for certain. But what doesn’t appear to be in doubt is that she seems at her most content in her most recent musical project, Ruby Throat.
Seeing guitarist Chris Whittingham perform on the tube, Garside told website Dieselpunks: ‘This man’s imperative brings the wild ocean of the South Pacific to the London underground. I could do nothing but immerse and fall in love.”
As the vocalist in Queenadreena, Garside switches between the haunting melodies of compositions like ‘Pretty Polly’ to the voice-shattering ‘Pretty Like Drugs’ as she tries desperately to compete with Gray’s chain-saw guitar and the tribal drums that shake every internal organ.
It’s no coincidence that Ruby Throat have taken ‘Pretty Polly’ into their own sets. Many believe it’s the softer work where Katie Jane Garside soars highest.
The minimalist Ruby Throat set-up, a duo, with Whittingham’s superb guitar accompanying and complementing her lone voice, gives her the freedom to both fly and dive, and explore her range and her lyrics.
And it’s this, her writing, which really exposes what makes up an extraordinary woman.
To read her, whether its her poetry, her blogs, her websites or her lyrics is to realise that she operates on a slightly different literary plane from most writers – in any field. Her words feel slightly out of kilter and you are left with the unshakeable impression that her phraseology somehow shouldn’t make sense – and yet it does.
Without speaking to her face-to-face and hearing her spontaneous replies, it’s impossible to say how much of this is a construct, but it’s doubtful. Instead, it feels a genuine part of her larger all, fitting in with every other multifaceted part of her.
Describing ‘Lalleshwari’ – which was a painstakingly self-produced and self-packaged release complete with genuine one-off personal effects inside in each one – she said: “This is my work. It’s a fingerprint, I’ve been barricaded into a room, but managed to slip it out through a crack under the door.
“It’s a message in a bottle caught in returning currents, a child on a desert island discovering these footprints are her own. It’s ingrown and corrupt with a terrifying impermanence and therefore safely beyond a critique,
“It asks everybody else’s opinion whilst ignoring its own motion and knowing it’s feet are bound and hobbled but I did the binding, she chooses her reflection in incarceration because she knows she could have the sky.
“It blames itself for blaming and chooses for herself a violent lover. The auditory is fractured and whispering in the blindspot, torrential downpour and splintered broken water. She is in another room, inches and a world away. Some collaborated and chose to stay the night so she fights me using his hands to throw the punches. I wash her face and hands and eventually sing her to sleep.”
The devotion Garside gives to her projects is phenomenal. Ruby Throat’s “The Ventriloquist’ came bound and laced in leather and diagonally wrapped in an individual page from a dictionary.
Their latest offering, ‘Out of a Black Cloud Came a Bird’ arrived in a mock-up of an office internal envelope, complete with prints of Garside’s own artwork and more personal items.
Such is the reciprocal devotion she inspires in her fans, a recent collection of individually hand-written poems – on paper and in script that seems as delicate as her – was released with her explicit plea that they should not be reproduced on the internet. A quick search reveals that her secret remains safe. It is difficult to think of anyone else where the bond between artist and audience is so unbreakable.
The ties are strong because simply, she appears adored by men and women equally and attracts those who were likely to be the talented, artistic misfits in their own sphere.
For men, her openness and seeming innocence brings feelings that are paternal, fraternal and sexual. To the young women who flock to her performances, she appears inspirational, aspirational and mesmeric. It would not be an exaggeration to say she holds them in thrall.
Whether it’s because she remains largely unknown, to be part of Katie Jane Garside’s world is to feel a solidarity with like-minded souls. The object of their affection, however, somehow stills feels remote, even when she is performing, literally, inches away.
While she will occasionally reach out, close in and hold a member of her audience, there still feels an unbridgeable gap. She’s paradoxically untouchable and somehow alone even when surrounded.
She says in the poem ‘Meniscus’:
“dancing on a window ledge
15 stories high
i take it up upon myself
to learn me how to fly
i got a step on natures brim
and a head above the clouds
to take the leap
and dive right in
and learn me how to fly
the surface tension
snapping back
her walk-on-water eyes
consoled for mysteries deepest depths
would let me down to cry
would angels borrow me their wings
a surface tension lied
to tease me up against the brink
and learn me how to fly
but fear all made corruption be
her twisted wings denied
she could ever reach the stars
so i lay me down to die.”
It should be pointed out that there is much light among the dark in her work, but she has seen literal and metaphorical depths that most can only imagine.
To have once plumbed so deep, Katie Jane Garside may never reach the stars, but she can still fly.
Acknowledgements:
Ruby Throat picture taken from www.katiejanegarside.com
Main pic courtesy of Claude Z. Daisy Chainsaw 1991 pic courtesy of Mick Mercer.
www.katiejanegarside.com
www.toutpartout.be/adreena/adreenaRbody.htm
www.dieselpunks.org/profiles/blogs/interview-katie-jane-garside
