A Closer Look at Katie Jane Garside

Hello everyone, and happy International Women’s Month! I’m really happy to be writing about one of my favorite iconic riot grrrls today, Katie Jane Garside, and I’ll bet you’ve probably never heard of her before. Everything from her vocal work in bands like Queenadreena and Daisy Chainsaw to her fashion style shaped the 90s feminist movement and shouldn’t go without recognition. I hope you all enjoy, and I’ll drop a link to my favorite work of hers on Spotify, ‘Lullabies in a Glass Wilderness,’ it’s considered to be her best and is probably her most noticed work. Let’s begin!

The best way I can describe Katie Jane is a chameleon, constantly changing, rebranding, trying things out, nonconforming to popular culture. Others and I consider her one of the founding mothers of the riot grrrl movement for her creativity and originality. A pattern I notice with the third wave riot grrrls (post Bikini Kill) is the overwhelming sentiment of white feminism. While the riot grrrl movement brought about a necessary change in the '90s punk scene, allowing women to be taken more seriously, every rose has its thorns, and every masterpiece has its cheap copy. Olympia, Washington, fostered great bands and ideologies as well as bad ones; bands that watered down the feminist movement and ideologies that were strong in their feminist approaches but exclusionary to trans folk and those of color. Bands like The Frumpies jumped on the bandwagon, so to speak, and tried to emulate the lo-fi, amateur sound of strong bands like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney from the previous wave, minus the actual passion for justice and equality. 

I bring all this up to emphasize the total and distinct originality of singers like Katie Jane Garside, which she instinctively incorporates into her art. Garside’s fashion, especially, is eye-catching and has influenced more than just riot grrrl culture. Below, I have paired a photo of Katie Jane Garside performing live, wearing a beautiful, wispy slip dress (left), with two models showing off Marc Jacobs’ 1993 Grunge Line (right).

(both photos taken from pinterest)

She is the vision!! She's been the vision!! While many may accredit Courtney Love with the kinderwhore fashion subculture, icons like Katie Jane have been fostering it since the late eighties. I’d love to do a post diving deeper into kinderwhore fashion sometime soon, so stay tuned for that. Now, let’s talk about her sound.

I’m really bad at naming things. I have trouble naming my blog posts every week. Katie Jane Garside does not struggle with naming things, apparently, because all of her band names rock. She got her start singing vocals and thrashing around in fake blood-stained babydoll dresses in the band Daisy Chainsaw in 1989, before leaving to start the band Queenadreena in 1999. Garside has always been a figure of harsh contention, mostly for her singing; drawn-out, ethereal whispers and squawking, maniacal screams. It’s reminiscent of figures like Kat Bjellend, who have a highly variable vocal range with an unbelievably intense stage presence. Later in 2007, Katie Jane adopted the stage name “Lalleshwari,” after the Hindu mystic poet & philosopher of the same name. She released one solo album, “Lullabies in a Glass Wilderness,” which I mentioned previously, and is considered a cult classic, influencing genres like dream pop, noise rock, and lo-fi alternative. Following the release of her solo album, she formed the bands Ruby Throat and Liar, Flower with her partner in 2007 and 2020, respectively. 

As I mentioned previously, her vocal performances and appearance overshadow her lyricism and overall aesthetics. I would describe her lyrical narrative as mindless, but not in a negative sense at all. Her earlier music is more intense and thought-provoking, but her modern projects, from her solo album onward, are an homage to the Earth and her secrets. Her work feels like an eternal lazy summer afternoon. Or perhaps an eternal nighttime

filled with tragedy regarding motherhood, familial conflict, and pain. I’ve heard a lot of people describe her online with familiar, yet tarnished concepts and objects like warm milk before bed, isolation and bleak depression, an abandoned childhood home, those sorts of things. A YouTube comment I saw about her said, "If fairies were alive, this is the kind of music they’d make," and I wholeheartedly agree. I was going to embed this into the text, but it looks weird, so here's a creepy video of her she displayed at her own art gallery exhibition, "Darling, They've Found the Body": (https://youtu.be/twCJ_ajneRo?si=ikhc8oSC4veicILZz).

(taken from pinterest)

Katie Jane Garside ultimately scribbles over and vomits on the line between good and bad music; she mixes familiar elements like guitars and soft singing with eerie synth patterns and speaking in tongues. She’s influenced so many modern artists not only as a riot grrrl idol, but also by doing what interests her, making mistakes, and playing the music that makes her happy. She may have gotten her start in screaming, but she seems much more content with the mellow music she produces now. I strongly encourage you to listen to this album and get to know each track intimately, in all its bizarreness. It will do you better than before you listened, I promise.

Hope you all enjoyed this one as much as I did writing it! Katie Jane is an icon through and through, and so interesting to analyze deeper than what she reveals on a surface level. I’ll probably be talking about a movie next week, but as I said earlier, I’m really interested in doing a post about kinderwhore. Regardless, have a great weekend, and I’ll see you next Tuesday. BYE!!!

Farewell,

Mila