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Cat Burns is reunited with her fellow Celebrity Traitors contestant

On Joe Marler Will See You Now, our host (Dr Joe) asks celebrities probing questions that may lead to uncomfortable truths. As ever, he is joined by his beloved assistant, Jake, in a session where it's anyone's guess who's really getting therapised.

In this episode of the podcast, Joe and Jake are joined by singer-songwriter and fellow Traitors star Cat Burns. Joe tackles her people-pleasing habits while daring Cat to roast him 'in the name of science'. And because Joe can't resist, he enlists Cat's songwriting expertise to help craft a love song for his wife. The outcome is... unpredictable.

Here are some of the things we learned from their therapy Q&A.

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Cat never addresses Joe Marler as ‘Joe’. She only refers to him as ‘Mr Marler’, or uses his full name. “I like to play around,” she says.

Her star sign? “Gemini.”

Her go-to breakup song? “I know one. It’s a really good song, by this really cool artist, called Cat Burns. I don’t know if you’ve heard of her. It’s called Go.” (Joe says he prefers Goodbye My Lover by James Blunt.)

What’s on her algorithm? “Random, silly things. Memes. Funny sounds.”

Does she consent to being analysed by someone who is not a real doctor? “Yep. I mean, I let myself be analysed by TikTok every single day.”

What came first, her dream to be a singer, or her TikTok posts? “The dream was to be a singer first and then lockdown happened so I started posting on TikTok for fun. And then the rest is history.”

Her single Go was first posted in May 2020. “I teased it, just singing on my windowsill. And people really liked it. And then in July 2020, I put it out. It does okay. But it wasn’t life changing. A year and half later, all of a sudden I start seeing people making videos to it online, and I still to this day don’t really understand how. So I kind of capitalised on that, and posted a video asking, what’s going on? And then it kept going up and up and up. And it just didn’t stop, and it got to number two in the charts.”

The viral hit brought some pressure. “I think I would have had [more pressure] if it went to number one. But because it got to number two, I hope there is a world in which another song will do that. Fingers crossed!”

Writing her new album, How to be Human, came naturally. “The songs sort of flew out of me,” she says. “I never really understood when people said, like, trauma breeds the best art. But it does. When you go through hard stuff, the art just kind of flows out of you. So when I was making the project, after about song four or five, I was like, this is going to document how you can get through grief and learn to live with it. Once I finished the album, I knew it was going to help a lot of people. Grief seems to be an awkward thing, especially if you haven't experienced it yet. If you speak to somebody who hasn't lost somebody, it's kind of awkward.”

Cat is ‘not very metaphorical’. “I don’t really understand them. So, what you see is what you get with my music. It's very blunt, on the nose, you understand what the song's about as soon as you hear it. Whereas other artists, you might hear them speak about loving this massive metaphor. And I don't even know how I could begin to try and write a song like that, because my brain is just not wired like that. So I think that’s why people maybe find my songs relatable.”

What makes her angry? “If people are not nice to the people I care about.”

What’s guaranteed to make her cry? “The animation Soul.”

What gives her the ick? “Men.” All men? “Love gay men, and men written by women.”

What confuses her? “Mince pies.”

Joe, Cat and the other finalists from Celebrity Traitors 2025. Credit: BBC/Studio Lambert/Paul Chappells

Listen to other episodes of Joe Marler Will See You Now on BBC Sounds now, as Joe therapises Nick Mohammed, Lucy Beaumont and Eddie Hall!

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