8 April 2000 -Telegraph Magazine
Disturbed and disturbing, Katie Jane Garside fronted the band Daisy Chainsaw, prophesied the end of the world - and then disappeared. Seven years later sheās back, ready to shock again.
QUEEN ADREENA were on stage for only half an hour or so. The audience at Londonās Hammersmith Palais had come to see Bush and the collected youths did not know what to make of this support act. Itās lead singer, Katie Jane Garside, is thin, provocative and confrontational. She has uncut Miss Havisham hair and wears pervy Victorian underwear. Twisting and squirming in the dark, often screaming, often prostrate, often turning her back to the audience, she is a performance artist rather than some chart-lipsticked Everywoman. Sexual in a very weird way, she looks as if she is lap-dancing in a gas-chamber. The blokes stare in disbelief. They shuffle about. Then, as the mike goes between her legs, they jump up and down.
Backstage afterwards the band squash into one of those huddles of Marlboro Lights and flushed analysis. There is a sign saying that CCTV is in operation and anyone taking drugs will be handed over to the police immediately. Orson, the bass guitarist, is wearing a long burgundy evening dress and complaining that his shoulder hurts because he fell off his horse. In Surrey. Very rock'n'roll. An individual wearing a jacket which looks as if it was made out of Wombles turns out to be Katie Janeās boyfriend. She points to a huge man wearing black lipstick.
āThatās Billy Freedom,āĀ she says.Ā āHeās one of the weirdest people I have ever met.ā
The lead guitarist, Crispin Gray, turns up. All eye-shadowed and Glam, Gray is from Islington and both his parents were West End actors. He understands theatre and has worn make-up for years, though not so much when he was signing on because he couldnāt face the hassle in the dole office.
āQuite a lot of girls seem to be attracted to the band and Iām sure it is because of Katie rather than me,āĀ he says modestly.Ā āMost guitar bands are still fronted by tough rock chicks trying to beat men at their own game, but Katie is not trying to be tough and I think girls like that.ā
Katie Jane, ripped stocking, long lace bloomers, shoes that she has dyed herself, drinks quite a lot of red wine from the bottle and agrees that yes, she has come a long way since the days that she drilled babiesā heads
She used to shave her head. In 1992 she went around as Daisy Chainsaw, a short-lived, explosive act distinguished by the dramatic theatre of self-battery. In seizure to a megaphonic fuzz of electric guitar, she sang I Feel Insane and other loud angry songs coloured by dervish dancing and props - a doll, red paint, stained wedding dresses, wigs and dead flowers.
Those who went to see her perform in Deptford pubs described a grimy child-woman convulsing to āgrandcore punk riffsā, and quoted scenes of fury.Ā āI hit Crispin and he beats the shit out of me,āĀ she said at the time.Ā āOnce he smashed me against a wall and I played a gig with blood running down my face.ā
Daisy Chainsaw were managed by an ex-punk named Jason and they did pretty much as they pleased, turning down Glastonbury, Top of the Pops and advances from Madonnaās label, Maverick.Ā āI think Katie is psychotic,āĀ the bassist once said.Ā āShe lives through her emotions rather than her brain.ā
She was accused of manufacturing her madness in order to merchandise pain, a useful pop trick subsequently deployed by Alanis Morissette et al. But Alanis is acceptable: she likes lipstick, takes a bath and conforms to the dreadful truth that a haircut can make you happy. Katie Jane is more unfathomable than this; she has no labels.
Pressed to explain herself she came up with a range of disparate theories founded on a basic witchy eccentricity that deviated into an offbeat belief system. She took on everything from white magic to David Icke, the former spokesman of the Green Party who announced that he was the Son of God.
āPeople can laugh,āĀ she said at the time. āBut I always realised the insignificance of role-playing and he gave me the courage to stand up for my convictions.ā
In essence, she wanted to break down conditioning and communicate some of the terror and disillusion that we all feel. She enacted ugly sadness. Most of all, though, she was a fatalist. She did not think about where she would be when she was 30 because, she said in 1992, the world was due to end in 1998.
Daisy Chainsaw were not commercial and in 1993 they split up. The world did not end and now Katie is 30. She went away for five years, had a nervous breakdown, and now sheās back.
āI had worked really hard for a long time and given too much away. When I look back, Daisy Chainsaw represented a bottleneck of desperation and that is why it came out in such violence.ā
The climate is different now. In 1992 the queens of the scene were L7, Babes in Toyland and Courtney Loveās Hole. They were linked by defiant unprettiness, crashing guitars and a Riot Grrrl wildness. But the backdrop was middle-class. Some of them had been high-school cheerleaders; Courtney Love arrived from suburban America.
The contradictions between the rockstar on stage and the real person who created the image caused insoluble tension, and one which arguably destroyed this genre. L7 disappeared; Hole simply sold out. There are no wild women now. No one dares to be odd or to flout the diktats of traditional beauty because they know it wonāt get them on magazine covers. That is why Katie Jane is important. She is difficult to manipulate and difficult to package and thus encourages healthy deviance from the universal definitions of 'normalityā.
In 1992, Katie Jane signed on, drove her 'patchworkā Mini on a ley line from Cornwall to Norfolk, recorded the wind on DAT, mucked about with a musician from Test Department (a cutting-edge industrial band), stayed in a haunted house, did some group therapy, had visions, nearly went mad, but avoided prescription drugs.
āThe doctor told me that, emotionally, some people have a football pitch and some people have a rocky landscape. I chose to stay with the rocky landscape. It was what I was born with.ā
You have to trust nature, she believes.Ā āI donāt think psychotherapy works. It simply creates a new set of crutches.ā
She laughs and tells a story about the afternoon she was sitting in the hollow of a tree and all these blue tits flew around her in a huge flock. Very strange things have always happened to her.Ā āI do hear voices,āĀ she admits.Ā āBut itās not a regular thing.ā
Her life is full of entities and strange synchronicity. There is a Zulu warrior that watches out for her - āI have seen his face,āĀ she says. She could be psychic or she could simply be someone who looks at a lot of different ideas, feels everything and understands empathy.
One day, a year or so ago, she was walking down a street in Belsize Park and ran into Crispin Gray. They had not seen or spoken to each other since the Daisy Chainsaw days. He had tried to run the band without her and it had not worked. They needed a singer.Ā āIt did not end properly,āĀ he says.Ā āAnd I knew it wasnāt over.ā
Katie Jane re-entered the music business in her own inimitable way. One meeting with a record company executive was staged on Hampstead Heath.
āThere is a beautiful undergrowth bit,āĀ she says.Ā āMy friend Louise led him to this clearing. Then we stood there and did a cappella. I said nothing and he gave me a big lump of money.ā
So now they are back with a manager, an agent and a public relations company. Their name, Queen Adreena, arose from Katieās dream about a warrior queen. Later, looking in a book by Annie Sprinkle (a porn star/performance artist) she noticed that 'Queen Adrenaā was the name of a legendary Californian dominatrix.
There is a new album, Taxidermy, and a CD-ROM of their new songs played to complement a black and white film made by Martina Hoogland-Ivanow, a 25-year-old photographer/director.
Katie Jane Garside grew up in Salisbury, the child of an army background. When she was 12 her father announced that the family were going to live on a 33ft yacht. The sailed around the world for four years. As teenage girls, Katie Jane and her younger sister, Mel, saw deserted islands, ate meals out of tins and disappeared into the realms of imagination.
Finally, they ended up near Poole where Katie attended a rough state school. She was beaten up for many things, but mostly because she had very small bosoms, a memory which transmuted (as these things do) to become a part of her work.
At 17 she arrived in London, penniless but determined. Then she met Crispin Gray when she answered an advertisement in a music paper, and her professional life, from then on, was about working with him.
The voyage around the world had left her feeling different and displaced. She was left with a love of the ocean, and indeed all places that allow a person to be alone. She is still displaced. When you ask her where she lives she says she doesnāt really know. She has lived in a lot of places. She wanders around in her thrift-store chic, with a battered brown leather suitcase containing all her possessions, her pale flesh bruised from falling around on stage. There is an atmosphere of acceptance around her. She will end up where she ends up.
āYou might become a major rock icon,āĀ I say, thinking this would be a good thing.
She smiles.Ā āThat would be a funny place to be.ā
Jessica Berens
