06/2000 - Dazed and Confused
QUEEN ADREENA
WORDS: ROGER MORTON
AGAINST THE HARSHLY LIT BACKDROP OF CALIFORNIA, QUEEN ADREENA’S SEXUALISED ROCK THEATRICS APPEAR AS A WELCOME BEACON OF DARK.
“I think childbirth is pretty fucking amazing,” says Katie Jane Garside. “I think that sex isn’t golden copulation. I think sex is like childbirth really I do. It’s blood, it’s blood and it’s caring and it’s breaking out.”
We are trying to draw correlations for Katie Jane’s rock'n'roll band, but somehow even with prompting in the direction of Frida Kahlo and some edging towards Anais Nin, we keep slipping out of highbrow into something more amniotic. It is disconcerting, particularly because the Pre-Raphelite dryad of a singer is intermittently slurping pink slush through a straw with matching coral vampire lips.
If the job of an artist is to make you reinterpret life, then Queen Adreena’s ectoplasmic chanteuse is due for promotion. It’s been a long time since a band came along with such a powerful, prenatural, psycho-sexual aura. Drop the fourth ‘e’ out of their name and you find its derivation in the notorious American dominatrix Queen Adrena, a six foot four giantess who specialises in crushing submissive men. A fascination with the fetish world surfaces again in Martina Hoogland-Ivanov’s Victorian postcard style short films made to accompany the album Taxidermy. In one scene guitarist Crispin Gray crawls on all fours with a bit in his mouth while a naked Garside rides forth. In another, the singer towers spookily, a 12 foot child giantess in a 19th century ballgown.
In less skilled hands the Adreenal vision of insane sex faery rock would be in danger of descending into the dungeon of camp, but Garside and Gray plus bassist Orson Wajih and drummer Billy Freedom have taken extreme pains and a good few years to perfect their current incarnation. In 1991 Gray and Garside were the creative core of the briefly mesmerising Daisy Chainsaw. Their electric chair punk and Garside’s damaged doll charisma made a sizeable impression, but only one album - LoveSickPleasure - emerged before “fragile” Katie ducked out of the spotlight, shaving her head and literally heading for the hills. Most of the '90s was spent recovering.
“I haven’t ever not been involved, I’ve always just done music,” says Katie. “It’s the one thing that’s been consistent in my life from the moment I can remember. I’ve always sung and it’s always given me solace, sanctity. It’s what’s kept me safe. Because I think art, or whatever you want to call it, it’s not, in my experience, a choice. If I don’t do what I do, I get very sick. I don’t want to make it sound too melodramatic, but what it does is allow me to be a witness of myself so I’m not absorbed by the other stuff that’s going on around me. That’s what I mean by it keeps me safe.”
In the intervening years before she met with Crispin again and reconciled their differences, Courtney Love had popularised Garside’s ripped petticoat and lace “kinder-whore” chic (“I adore Courtney, I think she’s amazing”). But no one apart from PJ Harvey proved much cop at the lid-off-female-subconscious volition. Backed by a ridiculously great band, Katie Jane is now the most stage-articulate and daring woman performer in music, making Tori Amos look like Sarah Brightman.
In LA, showcasing he Taxidermy album, she terrifies the crowd at the Viper Room. Her voice is now beautifully controlled, cutting from petal-child to succubus harlot. Eyes rolling beneath the flowerpinned snake tresses, she approximates possessed sex with the mic stand and spends half the show upside down. Then she heads to the nearest strip bar to study.
The music and the performance express a version of sexuality that goes against the norm. Is that a political act?
“I’m not sure that I want to be political, but I think the true feminine has been denied and is really being written out. It’s got just a tiny little edge of the screen and I think that’s why so many women are so down on themselves. You don’t really witness the true feminine at work very often at the moment, but I know that she’s bubbling underneath, and things like eating disorders, they’re symptomatic of that, because she’s being denied. She’s being forced out of existence, but whenever you repress something or deny something it comes back with such a force.”
Unlike her very distant relatives the goths, Garside does not melt in the tungsten sunshine of LA. She’s of a different shade. Her complexity and the close partnership with Crispin shine through in Taxidermy. “Madraykin” is a blues in calipers; “Hide From Time” a creaking womb; “Sleepwalking” a dreamscape and “Cold Fish” is bloody bones violence. It sounds like Jane’s Addiction fronted by Ophelia. Katie’s addiction however, is not going to fuck her up this time.
There’s a track called “Are The Songs My Disease?” which appears to be saying all this might be bad for your mental health.
“Yep, that’s true. But that’s what I meant in the beginning about if you’ve got a choice about this stuff don’t do it. But I’ve got nothing left to lose in a lot of ways. See, when the struggle really comes on, it’s taken me to some really, really crazy places that I wouldn’t have anyone else go to. It’s the place where people become Jim Morrison and Napoleon Bonaparte and where you become God and omnipotent and you think you’re the only thing alive. That’s the most frightening place I’ve ever been to and that’s also a kind of living death because there’s nowhere to go after that.”
