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Photo by Gary Lloyd

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Astoria, London, 3rd November 2004. Photos by Gary Lloyd

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21.11.2002 Zodiac, Oxford

photo by Gary Lloyd

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Mean Fiddler, London, 14.08.2002. Photo by Gary Lloyd

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photos by Gary Lloyd

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The Purple House

In 1993 Katie Jane Garside infamously suffered a very public mental breakdown. Tired of being in the spotlight, viciously mocked by some journalists and not allowed to express herself through her own lyrics, Katie Jane left Daisy Chainsaw and disappeared for several years. She described reasons for going away in THIS interview. She spent that time in a few different places, hiking in Lake District area, experiencing paranormal activity in an old Welsh cottage, before coming back to music for a short tour with Test Department (as well as recording guest vocals for their Totality album). Finally, she moved back to London, where she accidentally bumped into Crispin Gray, which resulted in duo deciding to start working together again, this time as Queen Adreena. However, the most extraordinary sounding and somewhat mythologised was the year when Garside lived in Lake District, in certain colorful house, with a an elder lady helping her to recover mentally. In various interviews Katie Jane mentioned she spent that time walking, screaming into wind, as well as writing poetry and lyrics.

Katie Jane: It’s magical, I lived with a woman called Varya V. in a house called The Purple House.  At the time I had no idea, but Ted Hughes had lived there.  I had no idea, I lived there with Varya and a young couple who were about to have a baby and one other young man… I was there to meditate.  I was recording more of that “primal scream of consciousness” with the idea that I was gonna make it all into a record.

So that was a very verdant and beautiful time, and then I came back to London to make that into a record.  I had little detour with Test Department.  That was a fun time, I could be a cog in machine rather than having to front something. It was so different, I wasn’t “important” at all, I use that word with quotation marks.

What's interesting is that Queenadreena's fans were able to track that house. The early 00's Katie Jane fansite called Room 11 even had a picture in their gallery. If you google the name, you can find quite a bit of info about the house, the extraordinary landlady and some of the guests that once lived there.

Cumbria’s famous Purple House was located near Rigg Beck, a stream in Lake District’s Newslands Valley. It was built in 1881 and at first served as hotel.

The place was bought for £500 by Varya Vergauwen in 1950's.  She provided lodging to unemployed, struggling actors, writers, singers and other lost souls. Varya Vergauwen, also known as Varya Vee, was a sculptor, a member of Bloomsbury Group, and rumoured to be a "witch". She was married to a captain and raised 10 of her kids in the Purple House. 

This isolated place served as a sanctuary to many artists. Keswick’s Blue Box theatre performers, actor Bob Hoskins, actor Tom Courtenay, comedienne Victoria Wood and even poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath had all stayed at Rigg Beck.

The house was apparently full of weird artifacts like stuffed fox, a harmonium, guestbooks including Ted Hughes penned poem and alcohol and food ration packets with expiry dates reaching times before WWII. The comment on one of the blogs mentions a lot of stuffed animals standing and collecting dust... Who knows, maybe that was in part the inspiration behind Queen Adreena's Taxidermy album name?

By the time Garside moved there, the house was already in a very bad condition. You can find several related stories of former inhabitants online. If you read THIS account, it will give you an idea how the house looked in the 90's. For the long time, it had no electricity at all. It's interesting that even despite these harsh conditions, most of available accounts paint the Purple House stay as one of the most magical moments in their lives:

(...) Rigg Beck was becoming dilapidated, and Varya hated spending money. By the time I was lured from London in 1985, the house was on its last legs. When you opened the front door, the smell of cabbage and dry rot wafted out. We few, we happy few, were unemployed, underemployed, fully employed, but above all poor, and the last of the hippies. It was a good time to be high in the hills in that strange house, and I have never again felt so free from the cares of the world.

Katie Jane: I was there for about a year, long enough to see the seasons come and go. It’s a really extraordinary place (…) I always loved to go there and walked in the mountains with my family and just adored it and one day, I met a man who took me there, he said he thought I’d like it. We just walked in and there was extraordinary things there just very strange art and decrepitude and skulls of all different animals and the door was always open and it turned out that a woman, the maverick, lived there called Varya V. And the house was literally falling down, the roof was caving in and it had different floors. The top where the roof was caving in was the winter floor and below that was the autumn floor. I lived on the summer floor and then there was a spring floor in the basement, that’s where Varya lived and I met her and said, “Can I come and live with you” and she gave me a room which was utterly completely infested with mice and rats. Anytime you turned the light up at night, they’d just come alive and yeah, the house had just really gone back to nature, really. It was being taken back by the land, but it was utterly beautiful and everything was so filthy and I had a sleeping bag. There was a made-up bed there, but I think the sheets on it hadn’t been changed for like ten years or more or something, so, I chose not to sleep in those sheets. There was no hot water or anything like that and yeah, I lived there and it was just beautiful and I’d just walk in the mountains and find my voice there. 

KJ: After Daisy Chainsaw, which as you pointed out, was quite a ride, for one so young there was a lot of pressure and lots of world tours and burn out and lots of shaving heads and I was toured-out! They told me they wanted me to do another world tour and I was like, “Well, I don’t think I’ve got another world tour in me, right now.” So, I stepped away and yeah, went up with the intention of recording me singing against waterfalls and avalanches and the walk in the mountains and I recorded loads of it. Actually, I recorded loads of stuff to portable DAT tapes and the plan was to cut it all together and make that a record but I never got around to it. I have the DATs somewhere, maybe one day, and I’ll sooner find out what happened in the mountains, but I never did that stage of the journey, but I did wander for extensive days and nights screaming into the sky and it was just a really beautiful place and one day, it was done and I said goodbye to Varya and I took my little car and drove back to London and sometime after that, I found out Crispin had moved into the area and after a long, long journey, we started putting another band together and that became Queenadreena.

At some point, Varya moved to Kendal. She died at the age of 90 somewhere around early 2010s. Afterwards, The Purple House would stay abandoned and slowly decaying for years (now only frequented by squatters, bats and ghosts hunters) up until it burned down on June 30, 2008. There were (fruitless) talks about possible restoration, but the house was bought in 2007 and then lost in the fire just a year later. Rigg Beck was rebuilt after the fire, but currently standing building looks nothing like the original (trust me, it just looks bad) and many believe the fire was spread intentionally.

KJG: It was burnt down on purpose because it had a rare breed of bats living in the falling-down roof but whoever bought the land had always planned to knock it down but they were unable to take the house down because it was protected, you know. Anyway, it was, one day, mysteriously burned down, so, I suspect sabotage. Obviously, I have no proof of that.

 There's more to find about the Rigg Beck online, from accounts of living in a dilapidated house to info on Varya's life to ghost stories. You can read some memories here:

After I finished writing this post, i managed to find photographs showing how the house looked inside in 2007. In abandoned state. It's a mess, but you can see a lot of the items mentioned in these online accounts!

Other photo sources:

www.beautifulrailwaybridgeofthesilverytay.wordpress.com/

www.bbc.co.uk/cumbria/content/image_galleries/purple_house_gallery.shtml?4

www.flickr.com/photos/exacta2a/5520785794

www.facebook.com/groups/ilovethelakedistrict/posts/10159745314398072/

Katie interview:

www.pleasekillme.com/katie-jane-garside/?fbclid=IwY2xjawIjLcFleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHaul_dHjj48B6SGrSrZNW8lXmPQF3NbogAKgXGFXhW5siRer4PH1znRHVQ_aem_oXPza_bnyJzUrIi5XmKzhg

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The Purple House/ Rigg Beck

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