East Vancouver two-piece rock act Kitty & The Rooster (aka: Jodie Ponto & Noah Walker) share tales and wisdom from the lives of the loud and out-of-control!
Where are you from originally? If not from Vancouver, how did it become your home? And what is one thing that you love about Vancouver?
JODIE: I am originally from Taylor, a small town in Northern BC that is a 15 hour drive from Vancouver. You may know it from CBC’s reality show Village On A Diet. I ended up in Vancouver 9 years ago. I was on tour managing an all-girl rock n’ roll band called Miss Quincy & The Showdown and had a roadmance with a hotshot Vancouver guitar player (Noah) who somehow convinced the whole band to move here!
NOAH: I am originally from the islands of Haida Gwaii in Northern BC (when I was born my family lived in a cabin that was a seven mile hike down the beach and across two rivers to the nearest road) but I have lived in Vancouver now for over 20 years. We poke fun at Vancouver in a lot of our songs (Paid A Million Dollars To Live You’re Poor, No Fun City, Damp Cold), but only because we care and we really do love it here! Nothing beats eating pizza in the rain at 2am on Commercial Drive after going to a show. Some of our favourite bands & music nights in the whole world are right here in Vancouver. We’re really missing Petunia & The Vipers’ Monday night residency at The Wise Lounge right now.
Tell us your story. How & When did you get into music?
We are a rock n’ roll duo. Our music is surfy & comedic and our shows are a sequined & sweaty spectacle. We wear cat & rooster masks in our promo photos and sometimes on stage too. When there is not a pandemic we spend a lot of time in our minivan (the Cock Rocket) touring across the country. We sing a lot of silly songs about life as unfamous touring musicians. Jodie plays a stand-up cocktail drum kit. Noah plays the electric guitar & bass at the same time.
Noah has been a professional guitar player for 20 years, he plays in at least 50 different bands and has toured all over the world, from Turkey to Tokyo and Dawson City to New York City. Jodie started playing drums when we started our band, 3 months before our first ever show. When our band was born in 2016 we had already been a couple for a number of years and it was starting to get to that point in a relationship where you either need to have a baby or start a band. We picked band.
What inspired the band name, “Kitty and The Rooster”?
Like a lot of things we do, it was a joke. It’s a dirty joke so we won’t ruin the fun of figuring it out 😉
What has been your most memorable experience in your career so far?
Playing at Vancouver Folk Festival last summer was a pretty big highlight. It’s always exciting & validating to get asked to play your hometown fest and we had a dream slot as the sun was setting over Jericho Beach. We decided to close the set with a song called “Play Like A Motherfucker”, which was inspired by all dumb things people say to you when you’re a woman who plays music. We were nervous to play it because we didn’t want to get in trouble for dropping so many f-bombs on stage, but it was totally worth the moments of pre-show food-poisoning-esque anxiety because by the end of the song we had old ladies and teenage girls crowded at the front of the stage pumping their fists and singing “I don’t play like a girl, I don’t play like a boy, I just play like a motherfucker”.
Lousy Lover is probably one of my favourite songs of yours. What is your favourite song and is there a good story behind the meaning of it?
I’m glad you like that song, we love it too! It is actually a cover of a song written by the great Vancouver musician & poet Al Mader (aka: The Minimalist Jug Band). Our song Paid A Million Dollars (To Live Like You’re Poor) holds a special place in our hearts. We wrote it when we were asked to play a block party right across the street from a house we were renovicted from. We only ever planned to play it that one time, but it really struck a chord with people (I guess who hasn’t been renovicted in Vancouver!?) and now we play it at almost every show. We’ll never forget the sweet revenge of getting an entire block party to chant “god hates homeowners” at the house that kicked us out.
During these interesting times, how do you stay inspired?
Since we can’t play much music right now we have had to find other things to do. Early on in the pandemic, we hosted an online exercise class called “Aerobics for Musicians”. Noah did his best Richard Simmons impression (despite having never done aerobics in his life) while Jodie DJ-ed workout tunes wearing her Kitty mask. Facebook is still sending us warning messages for copyright music violations from those videos 🤣
What advice do you have for aspiring musicians.
You can trick people into playing in your band! If there are some musicians you want to play with, first book a gig (any gig). This way you are not asking someone to join your band, you are asking someone if they are available to do a gig. I guarantee if you offer someone a gig, the answer will almost always be yes. Next, they will have to learn all your songs in order to play the gig, then after the gig is over you can say, “you might as well be in my band now, YOU KNOW ALL MY SONGS!” See? You can trick people into joining your band!
What’s your ultimate goal as a band? Where do you want to be?
Kitty & The Rooster’s main goal is to make our friends laugh. We figure if we can achieve that then we are on the right track. So far so good, we intend to keep doing this as long as we can get away with it.
What’s coming up for you? What should we look out for you in?
Right before the pandemic hit we recorded a new album. We are super proud of it and can’t wait to show it to people. It features some of our favourite songs & song titles to date: Everybody’s Somebody’s Asshole, Play Like a Motherfucker, We Ain’t Pussyfootin’ Around, Dick Roulette, Relationshit and many others. The pandemic has delayed the release, but we will be putting it out along with some videos as soon as we can.
Fun Facts!
- Jodie is a photographer who creates all our masked photos. Shortly after our first rehearsal we ordered away to a company called State of Latex for some cat and rooster masks and we’ve been using them ever since for funny photoshoots and Photoshop creations (or as we call them, Pontoshops).
- Our merch, which has lots of fun with innuendo (prayer candles with images of Mary Kitty and Rooster Jesus on them and lollipops called Cock Suckers and Pussy Lickers) was banned from display at a music festival in rural BC. Noah’s mom was the one who came up with the idea for the merch that was banned!
- We were accidentally booked on the children’s stage at a music festival on the westside of Vancouver. We went on right after a pre-teen Yo-Yo champion. Noah is now really into Yo-Yos.
- Jodie is probably the only person you will meet who has both survived a plane crash, AND been to North Korea.
For more info:
Website: www.kittyandtherooster.com
Instagram @kittyandtherooster
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/kittyandtherooster
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/KittyTheRooster
Kitty and the Rooster’s latest album, One Gig Hard Drive, can be purchased at Bandcamp: https://kittyandtherooster.bandcamp.com
Listen on Spotify