Pop star Katy Perry is famously a little bananas, so it’s no surprise she found a new friend in a cheeky chimpanzee.

The quirky I Kissed A Girl singer got caught up in a some monkey business on Katie Couric’s All Access Grammy Special for U.S. network CBS.

The programme, which tracks the 24-year-old singer’s rise to fame, shows her cuddling up to her new playmate during a magazine photo shoot.

Going ape: Katy Perry enjoys the company of a new friend on Katie Couric’s All Access Grammy Special

Katy is up for best female pop vocal performance at this Sunday’s Grammy Awards where she will go head to head with Adele, Sara Bareilles, Duffy, Leona Lewis and Pink.

She previously revealed she ‘screamed at a very unreasonably high pitch’ over her first nod.

Katy, who was raised by evangelical Christian parents before leaving home at 17 to pursue a pop career, says producers kept trying to mold her into a typical pop star.

‘They would take the very most popular song of the time, like Since You’ve Been Gone or Complicated, and say “Katy, you really have to do something exactly like this,”‘ she revealed in a separate interview on the Early Show.

Lip service: Footage from the special shows the I Kissed A Girl singer posing up with the chimp at a magazine photoshoot

‘I’d tell them that I want my own path. That’s really hard to do.’

She said music executives remained uncertain of her and would criticise her behind her back.

But she remained determined, saying: ‘I’m never hurt by what people say because everybody says whatever they want to say.’

‘I was just kind of like, “Well, one day when I’m going to the Grammy Awards, I’ll wave to you like this. You’ll be at home heating up your microwave dinner”‘.