Katiejane Garside: Five Encounters With Performative Arts That Changed My Life

Ex-Daisy Chainsaw Katiejane Garside shares five momentous encounters with the performing arts as she releases the debut album with liar, flower

The duo KatieJane Garside and Chris Whittingham, known collectively as liar, flower are releasing their debut album Geiger Counter on One Little Independent Records. Stylistically varied, the album ranges from raw, bewildering, venomous rock to gentle folk musings.

The album will be available via download and streaming services initially, then as a 2×12” vinyl + CD deluxe package (already available for pre-order), as well as a standard CD version.

liar, flower is the reincarnation of Ruby Throat, consisting of KatieJane on vocals and multi-instrumentalist Whittingham. As Ruby Throat, the duo released four albums and an EP between 2007 and 2017, as well as their 2018 compilations Stone Dress, and Liar, Flower. 

It began with Daisy Chainsaw in 1991 when KatieJane emerged as a furious icon of the alt-girl underworld in a torn dress and matted hair howling ‘Love Your Money’ a confused and violent mixture of lust and loathing, then came QueenAdreena bolder, darker, louder, unpredictable and violent. 

Courtney Love proclaimed that Daisy was one of the three instigators of the “Riot Grrrl” scene, along with Courtney (of course) and Babes in Toyland’s Kat Bjelland. Katie has since gone on to inspire and enthuse a new generation of artists including Arrow De Wilde of Starcrawler, all while keeping her mysterious and creative integrity intact, a true artist in every sense.

KatieJane said of the album:

“i found her one day in a notebook, she spoke of a new chapter
and the dropping away of tenure she likes to make noise
this record was conceived and collected through a year of submersive meditation, trance and improvisation, insisted by my bird bones insisting, i went down deep into the soil, set alight corrupt files and malware, something needed routing out taking me ever deeper

there is a prescience to this record that we are not entirely sure what to do with
the words are too big, they vanquish, swallow up, this is why i use so many words to say ‘i will not speak’

here is an offering of music as we skate the frozen lake of unknowing…the sun and the wild wind alien fingers typing alien phone

i love you bright heart, i love you
as our daughter asks ‘how does the queen ant know she’s the queen?’“

Katiejane and Chris had been living together on a small sailboat while raising their young daughter and spent years out at sea. In recent years the pair have lived a life of isolation, and the album reflects those experiences, coincidently fitting for the current times.

“We’re just a tiny, super-self-contained operation,” said Chris, “with not much outside contact. It’s been 14 years and all our records are played, recorded, mixed, mastered, art-worked, videoed, etc., solely by us, and in the end there’s probably little else to say beyond the recordings.

1.

‘downtown’ petula clarke – little me, 6 years old with one of those battered suitcase record players in my bedroom playing this scratched up, sticky fingered 7” single over and over and over again…the exuberance, the sweet delirium, the promise of petula’s lights still fuel me

2.

the actor tim mcinnery playing hamlet in an old school hall seen by a nine year old miserable me within a circle of girls on plastic chairs… without costume, without props, the power of this close-up bareboned transfiguration took me into hades… that exposure, that knife edge risk, that close proximity, artifice stripped, a transmission, a prayer, it went in me

3.

the great musicals ‘my fair lady’, ‘the sound of music’ and ‘west side story’ among others recorded for us by my grandfather on drunken, wobbly cassette tapes… my sister and i would spend days, months, years singing and playing along with our handmade (by me) rag dolls, making up stories in isolation, sailing across oceans in a 32-ft sailing boat, no distractions, no communication systems to the outside world, just us and our stories building synaptic connections, setting the stage…and on making a sydney landfall, the biblical chaos of an orchestra tuning up at the opera house sticking knives and forks into my 13-year-old brain (a deep bliss)

4.

‘dreams’ by fleetwood mac – making a cassette recording of me singing along with stevie… how on earth did glyn johns hear that tape? well he did, my little sister went to boarding school with his daughter and one day glyn walked into the dormitory and the tape was playing…he enquired as to the singer and sometime later i was messing around in a vast recording studio playground with his son ethan, making fledgling terrible music…

and while these dreams obliterated (as they should have done) they configured and established my broken, corrupt arrogance, to make possible the tenuous and swaying matchstick foundations of what might dubiously be called ‘a career in music’

stevie’s song was a portal for me to an absolute reimagining, i was 15…

5.

keith dobson: a tiny guitar god ,under the ubiquitous, cracked, dingy yellow light of every low rent pissy backstage sits, ‘asbestos, lead, asbestos’ world domination enterprises – of angle grinding, ship breaking, teeth missing, squat living, rolled up in filthy carpets: that was us and i so wanted to talk to him and imagine stories with him but i couldn’t speak and after a while he went on his way…angle grinding the firmament to let the light in, i wish we could’ve been friends

i can hear angelic choirs wrested from the sea in air conditioning units, in certain extractor fans in certain bathrooms…this is where i am writ and at peace