GW CARDIFF: Jess Daly

GW: What was life in Cardiff like growing up? 

Jess: My earliest memories of Cardiff were of family; my grandmother used to have a swimming pool and she would give us magic lemonade, which would all look a different colour. On the rare occasion Cardiff was sunny, those days were beautiful. Cardiff is a small community and I was always a bit different, I became fascinated with music at an early age, grime music. People used to shout out to me on the streets “Jess Daly on a Grime Ting Daily” because I loved Grime music so much. I discovered Grime music through Channel Aka music videos that I would watch as a kid, I loved the raw aesthetic – it’s not the multi-million pound industry it is now, it was just people on estates, on rooftops, with very little money making videos in their community. I liked that authenticity of the struggle.

GW: You work in media now, and your sister works in media too, so did you have creative ambitions growing up?

Jess: I think my sister and I both found media randomly, my sister Lizzie Daly was from a science background, she’s done wildlife films for National Geographic, BBC Earth now, and I’ve worked BBC Wales, ITV Wales, Daily Express and much more but I took a bit longer to find my feet in the media because I was a bit wild when I was younger. I didn’t study media until I was 27 years old and I was one of the oldest in my class but by that time I wasn’t partying so much, I was going out to Ukraine through my time at university. One of the kids in the class made a meme of me, that one with a boy with a red face and the veins popping and wrote underneath ‘Jess Daly trying to stop herself talking about Ukraine’, but I knew were my passions were at that time. My mum was an actress in her early twenties but she didn’t like the competition of the industry so she stopped because she didn’t like that she would have to work with someone on a project then a week later you are put against that same friend, competing for another role. My mum doesn’t necessarily like that I’m working in Ukraine, she worries, I’m working on another project coming up that I can’t talk about right now and she says “well what about if you get pushed off a bridge?”. Her friends say to her “why do you let Jess go to the Ukraine and she says “Jess will be Jess, you can’t stop her when she has her mind set on something”.

GW: How has your life changed since going out to the Ukraine?

Jess: I’ve been coming out to the Ukraine for 7 years now, I don’t have many injuries fortunately, but I am partially deaf in one ear, I can’t hear high pitch or low pitch noises. Someone unloaded an AK-47 right next to my ear without letting me know, and I wasn’t wearing ear protection. It does affect the way I listen to music now but when you see what other people out here go through it’s nothing, I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve met who have been killed, and limbs blown off. There was someone who came out here from the UK and within 3 hours of being deployed, lost their leg when stepping on a landmine.

GW: How do you learn to adapt to these deadly circumstances out there?

Jess: I have great friends that help me, I was at a wedding not so long ago with one of the Hospitallers, you make close connections out here, and these people, their job is to help everyone, not just Ukranians, they help people in need of help. I have a friend Bulik also, who I met when I first went out to Ukraine and he’s like a brother to me. The very first time I was supposed to go to the front line, I was supposed to go with the International Red Cross and their director was ill, so they had a stand in director refused to take me due to danger, he told me it was a real weapon war and I’m not ready, so he refused to take me. I was a bit stuck, I was in Ukraine already and I was prepared to go but obviously I had never been to a warzone before. I spoke to a friend who is a graffiti writer who is from Kyiv, now he paints cars and weapons in camouflage for the front line but at the time he was painting trains in graffiti and so I asked him for help on how I can get to the frontline so he introduced me to Bulik, who said he would take me because he is a filmmaker as well and he has been to the front many times. I met him that night, the next morning we were on the way to the frontline. We have been in many situations together, I’ve now worked with him many times. Both of us were civilians going on a wander on the frontline.

GW: What was the reason you first went out to Ukraine?

Jess: At the time I was writing for a Hip-Hop magazine, Wordplay in the UK. I spent one rainy weekend in Wales watching documentaries about Ukraine. I then really wanted to go to Ukraine to orphanages and help kids. I had no idea where to start so I typed into Google ‘top Ukranian rappers’, I then listened to their music, found a group called ‘Tulym Posse’ and contacted them on social media and asked if they could help and they replied straight away to say they could help. After months of planning, I went out to Ukraine with Res One from Split Prophets, and BVA from The Four Owls and we went to these orphanages together and we did Hip-Hop music workshops. BVA actually missed his set at Glastonbury to be in Ukraine.
So between Hip-Hop music and graffiti it was the Hip-Hop culture that really connected me on the ground here. Music does weird and wonderful things in ways that you would never expect.

GW: Did music ever connect you to anyone in Cardiff?

Jess: So many of my friends back home are producers, DJ’s. Cardiff has a really big music scene but unfortunately a lot of independent music venues are shutting down like they are all over the UK, and across Wales too. In Newport TJ’s shut down and that’s where Kurt Cobain reportedly proposed to Courtney Love. Cardiff has lost a massive part of its music scene, and music is at the forefront of everyone’s life in Cardiff, most of my friends I met at music venues from whether in the crowd or they were performers.

GW: Generation W has a show coming up in Cardiff on Friday 6th October at the Norwegian Church, do you know anything about that place?

Jess: It’s a really beautiful place but I’ve never actually been in it. I’ve painted a picture of it when I was very young, and my mum actually has that picture still framed in her house on her wall. I’m really gutted I can’t come to the show but know you will have an amazing show, I heard the acoustics are lovely in there too. Cardiff Bay where the Norwegian Bay is situated is gorgeous and the building is very important to Cardiff, everyone should visit there.

GW: You lived in Berlin, how was that for you?

Jess: I originally was couchsurfing, I was staying in someones house for the weekend, which turned into five weeks and then one of the girls was moving out, so they asked me to move in, I went home quickly (to Cardiff) to grab my stuff quickly and came back. I miss Berlin, there is nowhere quite like it. And of course that is where me and you met, one early morning where I was working in a cafe called Curry 66 and some British voices were causing a scene early in the morning before we were even open and one of the guys I was working with said “this is some of your lot, go and speak to them” and you guys were having a great time so I said sit down, and I will grab you a beer and food and then we started speaking about UK Hip-Hop. If I remember rightly didn’t you have Cognac with you?

GW: It was actually Kazakhstan’s finest vodka, ‘Snow Queen’.

Jess: Well whatever it was, I remember you guys spent many hours there.

GW: And then we left very cordially…..

Jess: And that’s how our friendship began, again, talking about music. You opened many doors for me so I will always be grateful to you for that. I will always thank you for that, after that you took me to my first festival, and then things escalated from there. I had a passion for photography when I was younger and I stopped because Instagram happened and it felt like everything became a hype, but for me with photos, I was developing pictures back when I was 13 years old. I stopped taking photos and I shouldn’t have, and it’s thanks to you I got back behind a camera. You put me back onto following my passion.

GW: I think beyond the festivals what made me most proud about your career growth is that you said to me you wanted to go to university but you didn’t have grades so I wrote a letter to Cardiff University and said they wouldn’t regret it if they took you on with an unconditional offer because you were going to become a great documentary photographer one day, and you rewarded my faith.

Jess: I actually had no grades at all and I got the place, and got the highest grade in university in my year. Something I thought I would never achieve. This is why you should never have fear about who you talk to, I never thought when I met you in 2014 in Berlin I would be here taking photographs in Ukraine. If you aren’t able to be open to meeting new people and new surroundings opportunities will never happen.

GW: You are someone who has made many friends over the years, but there must have been times in recent years where you maybe wouldn’t want to have communications back in the UK?

Jess: I certainly don’t tell my family where I am or what I am doing. Sometimes I want to say about how hard it is, but I don’t want to panic them, and when I’m dealing with death or seeing people lose limbs, I don’t want to tell my family because it makes them worried. Hospitallers often won’t tell their parents where they are, they will say they are in a hospital, not the truth that they are in a really dangerous place on the front line with bullets hitting the buildings they are in. You sometimes hear the whistles of missiles, just this week a group of volunteers had a direct hit on their car and they all died. The reality of war, it’s brutal out here.

GW: Do you know a lot of journalists out there?

Jess: Yes, there are many people that care and we are able to talk to each other about how this affects us, because we don’t feel we have the rights to talk about that to Ukranians, we are visitors here, this is their life.

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