The beautifully unsettling world of Katie Jane Garside
One of alternative music’s most striking voices is also one of the most underrated. Katie Jane Garside, who hails from England, has been creating music under various band names and aliases since the 1990s, yet she remains somewhat of an enigma.
Garside’s first band was Daisy Chainsaw, an alternative rock outfit that blended grunge, noise rock and punk influences. Formed in 1989 with the guitarist Crispin Gray, Daisy Chainsaw released two albums before disbanding in 1994. Garside only performed vocals – and served as a producer – on their debut album, Eleventeen, but it was enough to cement her as one of the decade’s most mesmerising lead singers. While the band enjoyed brief success, including a tour with Hole and a top 40 hit, they now have just 20,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, typically left out of discussions regarding the best British ‘90s alt-rock bands.
Yet, listen to any of the songs from Eleventeen, or even better, watch one of the band’s live performances on YouTube, and you’ll wonder why they never became more significant. Garside was the perfect band leader, bringing true emotion and visceral urgency to her performances, both in terms of her voice and her stage presence. Garside threw herself around the stage without a care in the world, often wearing dishevelled clothing consisting of faded babydoll dresses, messy hair, bare feet and smudged makeup. Writhing around the stage as those she’d been possessed, Garside captivated audiences, although she soon found the pressures of being such an intriguing public figure to be too much, and she stopped making music for several years.
It wasn’t until 1997 that Garside was in another band, Queenadreena. Also featuring Gray on guitar, this project gave Garside much more creative freedom, and she continued to showcase her incredible vocal abilities by moving between whispered, girlish tones and riot-grrrl-esque screams. Like before, Garside gave all of herself to every live performance, often echoing a wraith-like figure floating across the stage with a presence too haunting and otherworldly to be considered human.
After four albums, the band split, with Garside claiming she could no longer perform with such intensity. She told Vice, “In the end, that noise and that violence had to end. I couldn’t sustain it. And by violence I don’t mean it in a bad way. It was a beautiful thing to be in that… but ten years is a long time. There’s so much passion involved. It was going to be me or it and I decided it was better for me to survive.”
During her time in Queenadreena, she released a solo album called Lullabies in a Glass Wilderness under the name Lalleshwari. The 2007 record is a beautiful and often unsettling collection of songs, ranging from the ethereal ‘Dark Angel’ to the unusual yet captivating ‘Lesions In The Brain’, which really showcases the complexity of Garside’s voice. It also features the devastating ‘For You I Hold My Breath’, a truly vulnerable and moving masterpiece.
Since leaving Queenadreena, Garside has moved onto the less abrasive projects Ruby Throat and Liar, Flower, both with her partner Chris Whittingham. Bearing more of the quieter qualities that can be found in her work as Lalleshwari, these projects are magical – they sound as though they’ve been sung by a fairy dwelling in the forest. However, that’s not to say that she has abandoned her grittier roots – songs like Liar, Flower’s ‘My Brain Is Lit Like An Airport’ features some of the screaming and strained vocals that defined Daisy Chainsaw and Queenadreena.
Garside’s lyrics are often deeply evocative and rich with bold imagery, such as in Ruby Throat’s ‘Barebaiting’, in which she sings, “He cut it out stitch by stitch/ In my fallopian grip/ I hang the dead meat on his tree/ And as I screeched through the night/ He said, ‘My wife fell on that knife’/He coughed and he coughed until he bleed.”
The intrinsic appeal of Garside’s work is the power of her voice, which is unlike anything else. While she could easily train herself to sing in one uniform way, instead, she experiments with her voice like it’s an instrument. Sometimes, it flutters with a child-like sensibility; other times, she sounds exasperated, uncertain, and wounded. In Liar, Flower’s delicate ‘I Am Sundress (She of Infinite Flowers)’, the nakedness of Garside’s voice, which is sometimes layered like a congregation of angels, is wholly transfixing.
These days, Garside continues to keep a low profile. She moved her family onto a sailboat in 2011 due to her love of the sea, inspired by her childhood years living on a yacht. Everything about Garside seems beautifully unconventional, and her minimal public presence means fans really have to search out her other projects to keep up with her output. Diving into Garside’s vast discography is highly rewarding – it unlocks a world of genuine, frenzied, whole-hearted passion that is rare to witness in such an all-consuming way.