The Great Kat

Guitar virtuoso the Great Kat entered the world as Katherine Thomas in Swindon, England. Once her family relocated to Long Island, she launched her musical training with piano lessons at seven and violin studies two years after that. A Juilliard scholarship allowed her to pursue classical studies, and she completed the program with honors before expanding her skills to include heavy metal guitar alongside violin, ultimately reinventing herself under the Great Kat moniker. She presented herself publicly as the "High Priestess of Shred Guitar" and "the Reincarnation of Beethoven," releasing her first album, Worship Me or Die, in 1987. Beethoven on Speed arrived in 1990, maintaining her signature mix of original material and speed-metal reworkings of familiar classical compositions. Additional releases in the same vein appeared throughout the 1990s, among them Guitar Goddess and Bloody Vivaldi, while her public image and live performances grew more overtly S&M-oriented. In 2000 she put out the six-and-a-half-minute CD Rossini's Rape, built around a treatment of the William Tell Overture.