Hello and welcome to the show. I'm Stuart Goldsmith. This is the Comedians,

comedian'sian podcast.

But today, rather than being a Comcom pod, we are another non-com pod. Remember them?

Philippa Perry, Greg Jenner, Brett Goldstein under false pretenses.

Today I am joined by Johnny, who is not a comedian. He is the lead singer and co-founder, I guess, of the band Pet Needs. And they are a punk-fueled melodic rock four-piece from Colchester, who previously supported bands like the Hives, Frank Turner and Flogging Molly. Bit of a curveball, eh? They're now back with their fourth studio album, Elbows Out, This is Capitalism, which is out today, and which I have heard an

advance copy of and enjoyed, and her bits of when Johnny very kindly invited me to go and

see them live in Bristol. The reason why Johnny is on the show is that he is a long-term Comcom fan and over the last few years we've been corresponding about the parallels between his life and our lives, those of us in comedy.

Oh, I've just remembered another non-com pod. Do you remember Scott, Colt Cabana, brilliant, brilliant wrestler.

And you remember the parallels between the life of a wrestler and the life of a comic? Well, it turns out being a touring band is similar in some ways, different in others. Who could have predicted that? But the ways in which we discover those similarities and those differences are pretty fun. We are going to find out in the first half of

this episode. We'll talk about how the band survive. And you should, listen, I've launched straight

into the bullet points there. The key point is, I'm pretty fond of pet needs. I really enjoyed them

live and what, I mean, we'll talk about this in the interview, but they had a really lovely,

vibey sense of community in the room. There were people there of all ages and it was just, it was just a really lovely, vibey sense of community in the room.

There were people there of all ages, and it was just a really nice, felt like a family,

and I'm very, very inclined towards them.

So listen, we've all got wildly different musical tastes.

Maybe they're up your street, maybe they're not, but they're definitely worth a listen.

So do find elbows out, this is capitalism, wherever you young people or old

people, or people find your music. So in the first half, we're going to talk about how the band

survived COVID through playing in strangers living rooms. We'll talk about why fans don't feel like

fans anymore. We'll talk about turning down the easy route to fit a genre and find out

why punk isn't dead. It's just complicated. There's never been a better time to support this

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