Forever Young: Be Your Own Pet

It’s been two years since Be Your Own Pet unleashed themselves on the world with the furious punk-angst of their eponymous debut album.  Now back in the UK to promote its sequel, ‘Get Awkward’, it still seems impossible to imagine these stateside kids as fully grown. With an average age of barely twenty and more energy than an ADHD kid on blue Smarties, the Nashville foursome show little signs of slowing things down.  Gigwise caught up with guitarist Jonas Stein to find out about being a teenager on the road, coping with the British rain, and the future for a band whose music seems more rampantly teenage than ever…

Despite the name of their new album, there was nothing awkward about Jonas Stein when we caught up with him. You could almost see him slumped in a hotel room chair from the laid-back drawl emanating from the phone, playing the introverted skater kid behind his long rocker-boy hair.  Be Your Own Pet had landed in Glasgow just a few hours beforehand, Jonas explained, and he’d managed to escape to the hotel room to get some shut-eye before their Scottish debut that night, elaborating of life on the road: “there isn’t too much middle ground, it’s like really fucking fun or really shitty.” 

In keeping with the adolescent theme on ‘Get Awkward’, that addresses everything pubescent from playground feuds to high-school heartbreak, Jonas seemed to have plenty to moan about, particularly “lack of sleep, and waiting around.  We had to catch a ferry to get over here, and it was really tiring, just trying to find a comfortable position to get some sleep. Another big problem is jet-lag.  It usually takes the first two weeks to adjust to that, so the first two weeks are tiring because of jet-lag.”

The troubles don’t end with the jet-lag, either. “One thing I have trouble with is the weather - I’m very weather-sensitive.  It’s just pretty grey and wet and cold, so I have to deal with that.”  And then, just as Jonas began to risk descending into proper teenage paroxysms, he rescued his rant with: “Aside from that I like it.”

Be Your Own Pet have a special brand of nu-punk, one that blends the heavy guitar riffs of eighties Buzzcocks with the musical fun of Blondie.  Like Karen O stripped of her maturity, but still smarting from the fight, vocalist Jemina Pearl is capable of terrifying lyrical rage, transforming the juvenile in “I don’t wanna do what you tell me to/I don’t have to listen to you,” into to the genuinely fearsome.  When asked about the different reception the band get here compared to stateside, Jonas began to sound a bit more cheerful: “I feel like everyone’s a lot more up for it over here.  There are always a lot more fans over here.  I wouldn’t call us mainstream, but I think we’re more mainstream here than in the states.” 

Pressed to say why that might be the case, he elaborated, “I think the UK is exposed to better music, the radio’s a lot more diverse.  There’s a bigger population in a smaller square number of miles.  Half of the people in America never hear anything other than rap songs and pop songs.”  But being so young, there are a few perks to still being pretty unknown in the states, as Jonas explained, “Home’s kind of tame.  It’s the one thing that’s stayed the same for us, which I like.  Everything stays normal back home, and I hope that it stays that way.”