1) While listening to ‘Ghost Boy’ and ‘Fuck Me Doll’ the other day, I sort of thought that your music takes me back somewhere, to a place I’ve never been but still feels familiar to me, to some corner of my past or imagination I’ve forgotten or let go. Where does your own music take you while creating it?
I grew up at sea, a tiny boat crossing oceans, a pinprick in infinity turns her attention inside, she scours out and populates her own landscapes, the tiniest impulse or sensation becomes acutely magnified in the vastness of nothing, almost has a name and a face, almost, this is where she lives out her existence and continues to, the older I am the most insistent this becomes, I am very much at sea, do all rivers lead to the ocean?
2) Not only are you a recording artist, you’ve exhibited photography, are a lyricist, vocalist and have worked on comics. It is admirable that you allow yourself complete creative autonomy in a time when other so-called-artists don’t have the balls to allow themselves that kind of freedom. Do you feel that many artists lack backbone? What I mean is, do you think artists are scared of holding onto their IQ, their Ideals, that daring childlike part of themselves which refuses to let go, scared that their own ideas and identity will somehow stump their growth?
I wonder who you are talking about, Alan? ‘That daring childlike part of themselves which refuses to let go’….I know I am afflicted with severe arrested development always looking for a container ship to pick me up, out of the by now extremely damaged life-raft, there is nothing noble about this, something solid and firm with defined edges staying on course to god knows where, in which to house a desolate fragmentation, if only they could find all the pieces. I wonder if there is truly such a thing as autonomy or if it is some easily written down unattainable idealized state? A crude politic?
3) This is a rather sordid question but I’ll ask it anyway: in your own worlds, how has navigating the musical landscape changed from your time in Daisy Chainsaw to Queenadreena?
These days I send out flares and maydays but I know no one will come (I would look straight through them if they did). Some days I remember to delight in the starry patterns the flares make against the night sky. There is little left of Daisy Chainsaw, an old photograph in a drawer in a house clearance shop, a feint echo of strobes on the retina in blackness. Perhaps I set out at fever pitch to rescue something, what it was I have no idea, I think I ran on and on ’til the sonar lost its way and dissipated.
4) I read that you choose not to “live by yourself”. Is isolation something you run from and, if so, why?
No, no I am isolated. I can pretend otherwise but that is the fact. I am lucky, though, that even in my impenetrability, another chooses to listen to my heart rattle in its cage. I don’t quite have dementia, I recognise as this being returns again and again.
5) Do ideas for different expressive mediums be germinating at some fallow level for you at all time? I ask this because your output is surreal, ethereal yet sometimes frenzied. The content is schizophrenic: sometimes dreamy, sometimes nightmarish but always beautiful. There is so much more going on beyond the stage persona, behind the artist: who is Katiejane Garside?
Fragmentation means a cacophony of voices all insisting their own autonomy. Light hits a shattered glass at innumerable angles, a dazzling blinding distorting seductive display. I blindly reach out for a thread; if it holds I wind it in ’til it breaks, if it cuts I push down harder ’til it cuts through, dismembered hands flap about wildly ’til they grasp another thread. A constant process of drowning, standing on the head of another as it disappears into the infinite beneath, horribly remorseless and alone ’til she remembers to look up. A child looks back quizzically and wonders what all the fuss is about. I think this is an entirely rational response to the human condition.
First posted: Wednesday, December 9th, 2009.
