Chances are you’ll have noticed Cassyette over the past two years: on TikTok, where she’s racked up millions of views doing nu-metal covers, at Download Pilot, on tour with Sum 41, being invited to support My Chemical Romance at their Milton Keynes stadium show, supporting WILLOW at London's Electric Ballroom, the same 1,500-capacity venue she’s now about to headline herself. On this last item, her response that it’s “fucking unbelievable, babe, I don’t know how I’ve gone from doing that to playing there myself,” is instructive. Something of a tightrope walker by nature, having found herself through the door of a situation, she’s in her element when she’s got to make something work.
“I have such audacity,” she laughs. “I think I can do anything. I will literally go in unprepared as fuck, and just wing it. And sometimes it works. I feel like when it comes to performing, I know I'm a strong performer so I can mask it. If you throw yourself in the deep end and make the mistakes early on, then it gets easier.
“I'm very scattered,” she admits. “My mum would describe me as ‘chaotic’. But I think that sort of energy can be seen as a negative thing. I try to watch how I am, so that I'm being my best self. Because I know I can be quite intense sometimes. But I think it's a natural thing. I like chaotic.”
As is so often the case, though, chaos is the thing that prevails. As her biggest headline tour to date rolls into view, with half a million monthly streams in her back pocket and enthusiastic patronage of artists as varied as Gerard Way, Oli Sykes and legendary Blondie singer Debbie Harry, she’s buzzing with the infectious, neon-lit energy of an alt.superstar primed for takeoff. Boom, indeed.
Pondering how she’s done it, she frowns and admits that she doesn’t really know, just that whatever she’s doing she tends to run at full speed, and often quickly finds herself in the thick of it. Ask what else she might be doing right now, had music not worked out, and she gives a Very Cassyette Answer.
“I always loved horses,” she says after a moment. “I thought I was gonna be a jockey.”
Anyone else, you’d think they were taking the piss.