KatieJane Garside

Katrina Jane Garside (born 8 July 1968) is an English singer, songwriter, and visual artist.

She is known for her variegated musical projects encompassing numerous genres such as noise rock, alternative metal, acoustic, and neofolk, and vocals that range from childlike whispers to harsh scream singing.

The London Evening Standard once described her as "one of the scariest women in alternative music."

Garside had an itinerant childhood, growing up in several locations throughout England due to her father's service in the British Army.

She spent a significant portion of her adolescence aboard a yacht sailing the high sea with her family.

As a teenager, she was discovered by record producer Glyn Johns, and collaborated musically with his son, Ethan, for approximately one year.

Katrina Jane Garside was born on 8 July 1968 in Buckrose, East Riding of Yorkshire, England, the first of two daughters.

She spent her early years in Salisbury, Wiltshire, though her family relocated frequently as her father was in the British Army; he also had a musical background, having played in local bands in London.

When she was 11 years old, Garside's father took the family to live aboard a 9.8 m yacht, and they sailed the world for four years.

Garside has said that spending her formative years living on the sea gave her a "different perspective on things": "You have no reference points, so everything you know ceases, including time on the long passages. It’s the same thing every day, relentlessly. There’s nothing to see, there’s no one to talk to. Which is... terrifying. You’ve got nowhere to hide, you’re literally so exposed. But it’s also very beautiful because all distraction falls away."

While living on the sea, Garside and her younger sister, Melanie, spent significant amounts of time listening to cassette tapes given to them by their grandfather, largely soundtrack albums to musical films, such as the West Side Story soundtrack by Leonard Bernstein.

To pass time, they would often reenact sequences from the film soundtracks with ragdolls.

Among the tapes Garside listened to also included albums by Led Zeppelin, which she said "really completes some idea of a story."

After returning to England, Garside's father went abroad to earn money, as the family had returned from sea with "about fifty pounds".

Garside's younger sister Melanie was subsequently enrolled in a boarding school where, while in her dormitory, she played a cassette tape of Garside singing along to "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac; record producer and engineer Glyn Johns, whose daughter was also enrolled in the school, was visiting and overheard the tape.

Impressed by her singing, Johns contacted Garside, inviting her to join his son, Ethan, who was beginning to make music himself.

Garside, who had recently been offered a scholarship to attend art school, forewent her enrollment and instead spent approximately a year collaborating with Ethan at his father's studio, writing and recording material, which she later described as "atrocious... but we were learning, you know? Learning all of the time. Ethan and I were going to go off to L.A. and become rock stars—and then it all fell apart, as it should do when you're sixteen years old."

She subsequently relocated to London, working odd jobs while seeking to make a living as a singer.

She later rose to prominence as the lead vocalist of the indie noise rock band Daisy Chainsaw, which she formed in 1989 in London with guitarist Crispin Gray.

Garside formed Daisy Chainsaw in 1989 after responding to an advert in a newspaper by guitarist Crispin Gray.

Bassist Richard Adams joined the band, along with Canadian drummer Vince Johnson.

The group quickly became well known for their raucous live performances, and her appearance described as a "Gothic street urchin image, complete with dead flowers meshed into her dreadlocked hair".

In a review of one of the band's concerts in 1991, an unnamed journalist for Bust magazine wrote: "KatieJane Garside is either in drastic need of psychiatric help or she deserves an Oscar for best actress."

The band toured the United Kingdom with Hole and Mudhoney to promote the album prior to its release, and Garside drew comparisons from British press to Hole's frontwoman Courtney Love.

Love allegedly cited Garside as one of the "first true riot grrrls" in 1991 and admitted to borrowing heavily from Garside's aesthetic.

Garside never associated herself with the movement, which was based in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

The band released Eleventeen in 1992, which would be their only full-length album before Garside left the band in 1993.

The album spawned "Love Your Money", which was the band's most popular single; they performed the song live on British television show The Word in 1992.

"Love Your Money" reached number 26 in the UK Singles Chart in February 1992.

After quitting Daisy Chainsaw in 1993, Garside went into seclusion for several years before reuniting with Gray in 1999 to form the rock band Queenadreena, with whom she released four studio albums between 2000 and 2008.

In both Daisy Chainsaw and Queenadreena, Garside received critical attention for her alternately harsh and childlike vocals, manic onstage behaviour, and raucous live concerts.

Garside self-released a solo album, Lullabies in a Glass Wilderness, in 2007.

The same year, she worked with composer Hector Zazou on the collaboration album Corps Electriques, and began writing and releasing material with her project Ruby Throat, an acoustic collaboration with her partner, American guitarist Chris Whittingham.

In late 2007, Ruby Throat released their debut album, The Ventriloquist.

Garside concurrently held a mixed media art exhibition, Darling, they've found the body, which was shown at WOOM Gallery in Birmingham.

Ruby Throat self-released their subsequent albums Out of a Black Cloud Came a Bird and O' Doubt O' Stars in 2009 and 2012, respectively.

During this period, Garside and Whittingham resided on a yacht with their children, sailing the world.

Ruby Throat released their fourth album, Baby Darling Taporo, in 2017.

Garside and Whittingham subsequently formed a new musical project called Liar, Flower, under which they released the album Geiger Counter in April 2020.

Garside discusses this album at length in a career spanning interview on Conan Neutron's Protonic Reversal.