Second Impressions Count Double

A salutory side-effect of having the entire history of music available for free on YouTube at the touch of a mouse button is that once in a while I get to have my face rubbed not just in my own ignorance (An everyday occurrence.) but worse, my own arrogance. Before the 'tube, if I formed a lasting judgment based on little more than supposition, I could hold onto it quite comfortably without worrying about finding myself contradicted by those pesky, annoying facts.

These days, though, every time I follow a link I run the risk of being exposed to something that challenges my personal prejudices or overturns them entirely. Such an event happened only a few days ago, when I was lying in bed, looking at my laptop, wondering what I could watch to pass the last few minutes before switching off and going to sleep.

All I wanted to do was watch a couple of music videos but for once I had the notion to look backwards instead of forwards. I was scratching around in my mental files for possibilities but if there's one thing I can't do with any facility any more it's pull random names to order out of what's left of my memory. 

To do that, I almost always need some kind of external prompt, which was how I ended up typing Daisy Chainsaw into the search field, just to get started. I don't suppose I've thought about that particular nineties band since... well, since the nineties. I only thought of them then because I'd recently written a post featuring Daisy Dreams, whose excellent song Molecules I'd listened to half a dozen more times since I posted it.

I remembered Daisy Chainsaw, in so much as I remembered them at all, as some kind of female-fronted pop-rock act along the lines of Transvision Vamp, a point of comparison that should already have been raising red flags, since it was only a few years back that I discovered, with a confused combination of delight and discomfort, that Wendy James and her band were a whole lot better than I'd either remembered or even realised.

It's with a similar sense of contrition I come here to day to affirm that KatieJane Garside, singer, songwriter and lifespark of Daisy Chainsaw, is also very much better in just about every respect than I knew or more likely let myself know. In fact, having spent some considerable time now, going through her extensive back catalog and reading about her career, I feel I need to realign her and her work alongside the likes of Polly Scattergood, Jane Weaver, Victoria Astley and P.J. Harvey.

Like all of them and a few other favorites of mine, I now recognise KatieJane as a true original, a genuine artist and an untameable force of nature. The incontravertible evidence, now readily available to anyone willing to tap a few keys and sit back and listen, is that she always was. How I came to think otherwise is testament to my unfortunate tendency to avoid things I've already chosen not to like, regardless of any short-fall in exposure to the thing itself.

About all I can say in my defence is that I am generally willing to change my mind, when presented with a convincing counter-argument, particularly if I'm the one making the presentatation to myself. I'm also more than willing to admit my mistakes and try to make some amends, so in that spirit, here's a brief selection from KatieJane Garside's sparkling career, beginning with the only band I knew she'd been in until I learned about all the others just a few days ago.

Love Your Money - Daisy Chainsaw

Where else to begin but with her notorious performance on that most '90s of all '90s TV shows, The Word, a show notorious in its own right for any number of reasons. I used to watch the show most weeks but I don't remember if I saw this particular episode. You'd think I would if I had but The Word was not a show one watched sober. At least not if one had any sense. Many weeks it passed me by in a blur.

Had I seen it, I'd like to think I'd have realised what a stormingly powerful, subversive stage presence KatieJane was. What I suspect I might actually have thought was that she seemed a bit hyper and her band looked a bit like Sigue Sigue Sputnik which, very superficially, they did.

Of course, I really liked Sigue Sigue Sputnik but it wasn't the sort of thing you admitted to in certain circles back then. It's OK to admit to it now. Probably.

Love Your Money - Daisy Chainsaw

If you didn't like the live version, you aren't going to like the studio cut any better, I imagine, and the official video is disturbing in a whole number different of fresh ways, not least that bass sound. How are they even making it do that?

The building reminds me of the party scene in Dogs In Space, the movie in which Michael Hutchence from INXS tries his hand at acting. He's playing himself, mostly, and quite well, too. It's a talent. Not everyone can do it.

There was an awful lot of that student house/anarchist squat chic going around in the early '90s. If you told me this was shot in the band's actual house I wouldn't question it. When you listen to KJG speak, she's very posh but then all the squats were full of public school types. It was a strange time in many ways.

Interview from Rapido

I used to watch Rapido fairly religiously, too, but I don't recall seeing this before, either. If I had, I'm not sure it would have endeared me to the band at the time. I wasn't as big a fan of that kind of chaos then, not when it frequently imposed itself on me in the street, at gigs or pretty much anywhere I went outside the house. It all looks a lot more fey and harmless now with thirty years between us. Honestly, if anyone thinks things are bad now, they clearly weren't around for the casual street violence of the '70s, '80s and early '90s. It only calmed down when they took the lead out of petrol.

Watching all this, it's not at all surprising to find KatieJane an acknowledged influence on Courtney Love and also, I read, on Arrow from Starcrawler. I imagine on a lot of less well-known front-women, too. Makes me sad to think I missed it all when it was happening right under my nose. I didn't really stop going to these sort of gigs until a decade later. I could have been getting elbowed in the face in that mosh pit.

Pretty Like Drugs - Queen Adreena

And here we are, exactly a decade later, in 2003 with KJ's new band, Queen Adreena, who I had never even heard of, much less heard, until a couple of days ago. I blame EverQuest. 

The progression from Daisy Chainsaw is remarkable. Live, there's still the same wild energy, the same pagan abandon, but in the studio...

Medicine Jar - Queen Adreena

So much more disciplined. Ten years will do that, although leaving the band where you wrote none of the songs to start another where you write them all must help. And yet the relentless drive, the remorseless attack, remains. That claw hammer bass. Those merciless drums. Guitar squalls like choking gulls. And KatieJane just rises above it all. She just rises. 

Has she peaked? Of course she hasn't!

Daisy Chainsaw released just one album in maybe five years. Queen Adreena put out half a dozen between the turn of the millennium and 2008 and inbetween those there was also a solo album, released under the name Lalleshwari. 

It's very different.

Puppy Love - Lalleshwari

Now you see where I was going with that Polly Scattergood comparison, right? I have no more proof Polly follows knowingly in KatieJane's wake than Let's Eat Grandma do but there's natural progression in art, too, isn't there? That ground has to be broken before flowers bloom.

For You I Hold My Breath - Lalleshwari

Another track from the album Lullabies In A Glass Wilderness, here set to footage from the problematic Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders, such a perennially popular choice among YouTube creators I sometimes feel I must have seen pretty much all of it just through watching music videos.

In The Arms Of Flowers - Ruby Throat

Even before Queen Adreena's last album hit the record stores, KatieJane was off again, this time to start a neo-folk duo called Ruby Throat. Another four albums followed until, in 2020, she changed names again to release what remains her most recent album, this time under the name Liar, Flower, although the members of that band remained the same as before - KatieJane and her partner Chris Whittingham.

Broken Light - Liar, Flower

What, if any, the difference between these two ongoing projects might be I have absolutely no idea. I just hope there will be more from one or other of them Or some new aggreation. It's been a while. I'd hate to think I've finally caught up with her just when she's stopped.

Even if, I'm very glad to have gotten myself straightened out over all of this. There's thirty years of back catalog to explore including not just all those albums but poetry, lithographs, a biography, even a  graphic novel published by Image, no less. 

Some of this but by no means all is still available from Katiejane's website. The rest, like the truth, is out there, somewhere, just like KatieJane herself.

I wonder who or what I need to re-assess next? It could be a long list...