Ready Steady Kooks

So there I was all revved up to play devil’s advocate and pin the world’s indie ills on the latest bunch of complicatedly-coiffed skinny white boys to breeze into town.

The case for the prosecution?
One: indie acts are criminally slothful, producing a mere dozen generic songs every two years, having become so institutionalised by touring and promo schedules that they’ve all but forgotten how to write when it’s time to deliver those crucial second and third albums.
Two: their frame of reference is narrow and inbred, confined to Xerox copies of the ’60s classic rock template, when in fact the original arts-lab graduates (The Beatles, Bowie, Roxy) referenced everything from kabuki theatre to Beat literature to French and Italian new wave filmmakers.
Three: their roots are sunk in the shallowest musical topsoil, leaning heavily on Weller, the Stone Roses and Oasis, never investigating the soul, jazz and blues sources that fertilised the ’60s boom.
All this baggage, dear readers, I was prepared to lay upon The Kooks’ slender shoulders. Then I played the band’s forthcoming second album Konk, the follow up the multi-platinum debut Inside In/Inside Out, and I have to admit, it ain’t half bad, a selection of nifty little pop tunes distinguished by singer and chief songwriter Luke Pritchard’s whelpish yelp, guitarist Hugh Harris’s remarkable fluency (more of which later) and a Jack-be-nimble rhythm section. I was further disarmed when I met Pritchard and discovered that not only is he a prolific little bugger, but a pretty well-read one, and a student of pre- as well as post-war pop.
Nursing a JD and coke in a Morrison hotel meeting room, The Kooks frontman is as immaculately tousled and pretty as any 22-year-old can be, but he’s no cultural amnesiac. After the interview, he expresses wide-eyed astonishment that, like the other 49,999 punters at Slane in 1984, your reporter witnessed first-hand his favourite ever live variation of Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up In Blue’, cherry-picked for the Real Live album.
And, unlikely as it may seem, The Kooks – that most Britcentric of outfits – might just be the latest ones to forsake the parochial pleasures of Blighty for American soil, having sold-out New York and LA dates when their first album made a dent in the Billboard charts back in late 2006.
That said, Pritchard is well aware of the litany of great English bands that came a cropper in the mid-west. By the time The Clash, The Smiths and Echo & The Bunnymen were starting to crack America, America had cracked them.
“Yeah, The Police split up when they were massive,” Luke observes. “We’re by no means there, and I can imagine it happening to us, but having said that, as a band we’re quite resilient. Like, we’ve gone through shit the past few years and we just keep going.”
What kind of shit?
“Well, obviously our bass-player. (Original member Max Rafferty finally left the band last January after a four-year on/off tenure; he was replaced by Dan Logan). I say that loosely, cos he’s much more a mate, a best friend or a brother or whatever. But when you’re thrown into situations where you can’t really be that anymore, it’s very difficult. He left just before we released our first album, and it was really hard to keep going. I mean, we did so much touring. I don’t think there’s any other band that did as much touring as us last year or the year before. It was just stupid. But it was great too, because as people we managed to accept each other and our surroundings quite easily, and get on with it.”
Which they did, deftly avoiding the dreaded sophomore slump and writing songs like ‘Do You Wanna’, ‘Mr. Maker’ and ‘Sway’ for Konk, produced by Air, Thrills and Beck man Tony Hoffer, whom Pritchard pronounces “a genius”. Mind you, guitarist Hugh Harris, busy conducting his own round of interviews outside in the Morrison bar, is no slouch either. Over the album’s 40-odd minutes, he pulls off abundantly tasteful acts of six-string ventriloquism, from George Harrison slide to Townsend chording.
“Mick Ronson as well, big time,” Pritchard notes. “I think he’s probably the best young guitarist in the country. The amazing thing working with Hugh is he doesn’t overdo it. It’s so rare that you find a person who can play but doesn’t overplay. And he’s melodic.”
Pritchard himself was born in 1985, the son of a charity worker mother and a businessman/part-time blues musician father, who died when Luke was three. Any residual memories of his dad?
“No,” he reflects. “I mean, you invent memories, don’t you? I don’t know what’s real or not from that time. I pretty clearly remember the day he died. But it’s interesting, I always say to people that when your dad dies so young, he becomes like a total idol.”
A mythical figure.
“Yeah, exactly. And my mum – this is quite personal, but fuck it – my mum had a long-term boyfriend, and he died as well, which was shit for her, really terrible, but for me, never really having a proper man of the house, my dad became this… figure, and so music was obvious for me to get into.”
Obvious because of his father’s extensive record collection. So many musicians – Lennon, Lydon, Bono – turn to writing songs as a means of filling the mum or dad-shaped hole in their lives. Can Luke remember the first time a piece of music affected him?
“It’s an interesting question, because it was actually more selfish than that,” he considers. “I loved listening to music, but from when I was very young, I found a place in writing songs, I found that a real relief. All the people I knew were into American punk, as in Offspring and Green Day, and hip-hop, and I just hated both those forms of music, couldn’t stand them, I was listening to – probably again it goes back to my dad – the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran. Really old stuff. I was obsessed with being in a real traditional modern beat band. And then it was weird because the ’60s movement did pop back into fashion.”
Did he inherit his dad’s album collection?
“Yeah, but my mum sold it. My dad had massive book and record collections, but she had a bit of a shit period with money, and so she sold all the records, they were worth a lot of money, about 10,000 albums. It’s interesting, cos I actually got in touch with a few people who bought a lot of the collection, and I’ve got a list of all the vinyl, so I’ve started collecting them from scratch, which is quite good for me. I’ve gotten in touch with a few people who have parts of the collection, so I can get them all back.”
So he’s found a way of connecting with his dad through that lost vinyl library?
“Yeah, it’s very weird!”
As he came of age, Pritchard gravitated from ’50s hitmakers to ’60s and ’70s songwriters: Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young. Small wonder that he felt more kinship with the folk movement than anti-authoritarian noisemakers. If anything, his songs betray more than a working knowledge of the English music hall tradition.
“I think I know what you mean,” he acknowledges. “I got a double CD of that stuff, they released it quite recently, it’s called Music Hall (most likely A Little Bit Of What You Fancy: The Golden Age Of Music Hall by Various Artists, released on the Asv Living Era label in 2001) and it’s all honky tonk pianos and ukuleles.”
Music hall’s fusion of songs, storytelling and variety show performance also influenced Ray Davies, Morrissey, the Small Faces, and latterly, Blur and The Libertines. If American burlesque hipsters like Lord Buckley impacted on Tom Waits, the British had Arthur Askey and George Formby.
“This is the root, I feel,” Pritchard says. “It doesn’t necessarily matter if what you’re saying is very simple, it really has no bearing on the depth. You can write very complicated lyrics about topical things, politics or whatever, but that isn’t necessarily the most important thing with music. The simplicity in that music is what I love about it. It’s direct. See, I’m fascinated by Motown. You listen to that music and it’s fucking pure soul to you, and it’s all really simple, but all those songs came out of a factory. That fascinates me. The same with The Beatles, you had Lennon and McCartney going, ‘Right, let’s write a song.’ It’s fuckin’ weird.”
Neil Young once said he never even thinks about writer’s block. If the songs aren’t coming, he goes fishing.
“(Laughs). To me, the way I see it, there’s periods when you don’t write of course, but I write all the time, cos you’ve got to keep it going. If you stop, then you’re fucked. That happens to bands who don’t write on tour. I write loads of stuff when I’m on tour, cos so much stuff happens. Basically you have your craft, you start to realise how to write a pop song. There are ways you can push it, but always the best songs come when it just hits you, like that (snaps fingers), but you have to have the craft to back it up so that when it comes you know what to do. When I stop writing, I start thinking, ‘What’s wrong with my life?’ There’s something wrong because I’m not feeling it.”
Pritchard once admitted that he’d love to write books but doesn’t have the patience. He’s hardly alone. Master songwriters like Dylan, Cohen, Nick Cave and Steve Earle could’ve easily carved out respectable (if hardly lucrative) careers as prose writers, but the endorphin hit of performance and the social whirl of the touring life is all too addictive. Plus, music is a more emotionally direct artform.
“You know it’s weird, I don’t think Dylan is a great writer,” Pritchard says. “I’ve read Tarantula: what the fuck was that? It was beautiful in parts, his use of language is incredible, I can appreciate that massively, but I think he was trying to be like William Burroughs, and it didn’t quite fit because he’s a songwriter.”
Has he read Chronicles?
“Yeah. To be honest with you, I felt out of my depth. I’ve loved Dylan since I was a kid, but I really didn’t know a lot of what he was talking about… I feel stupid saying it, I just started writing a book, but it’s just for fun. When I’m on planes I get my laptop out and just write and it’s cool, but I find it so hard because I didn’t really do A-levels in English, so I don’t have a real understanding of structure within a novel. I’ll go on one tangent and then forget about what’s happened, I just go on and on and then before I know it I’ve lost the thread of my story. It’s really hard man. When you first do it, it’s like, ‘This is a piece of piss!’ And then you realise, ‘I don’t even fucking know what this is about anymore!’
So what kind of books keep him quiet on the tour bus?
“I really like science fiction.”
Now we’re talking. Anyone in particular?
“Philip K Dick, I really like his stuff. My favourite book of his is Valis. It’s incredible, really short and very, very clever. Even more traditional stuff like Aldous Huxley: Brave New World is one of my favourite books ever. I like it for the philosophy and for the social issues raised in it. I have this whole theory about science fiction, that basically it’s prophesy. That’s what Orwell did with 1984. Science fiction now has been bastardised into something else. There are some great films of course, but when you watch a film of a science fiction novel, like a lot of Philip K Dick’s books, you don’t get a lot of the social content; they’re about much deeper things than a two-and-a-half hour film. Predictions and warnings.”
It’s often held that the great prophetic novels – Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451 – are really about the era in which they were written. Orwell famously arrived at the title 1984 because it was a reversal of 1948. Bruce Sterling once wrote, “If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophesies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless.” But heavyweight literary heads like Pynchon and DeLillo and McCarthy have all borrowed from sci-fi themes.
“And Kurt Vonnegut. That’s so true, that’s exactly it.”
But we digress. About a thousand words ago, we were talking about Pritchard’s formative years. As a teenager, he won a scholarship to Bedales co-ed boarding school in Hampshire (writing the top five hit ‘Naïve’ at the age of 15), before attending Croydon’s Brit School for performing arts, where he dated singer Katie Melua for three years, and also met his future bandmates. The Kooks enrolled in the Brighton Institute of Modern Music, where they played their first gigs and began attracting the attention of A&R scouts, eventually signing to Virgin in 2003.
“One of the things that really pisses me off is when people start slating major record companies,” Pritchard ventures, “because they were pretty amazing to us to be honest. Phillipe Ascoli, the MD at the time, he’s truly an amazing person. It was quite a strange process, because it was really quick, we’d only been together four months and we didn’t want to sign to a major label, we were dead against it, but I would never have a bad word said about them, because they signed us on basically a development deal, but it was a proper deal, we got cash so we could tour. And basically we just toured for a year.”
I didn’t realise labels still did that sort of thing. I thought it went out with the ’70s.
“This is the thing,” Luke reiterates, “development. All my friends are in bands, and when they started, they went and did albums. I don’t know any other band that they worked on like us. We went to meetings, and you know what they said to us? ‘Your songs are fucking amazing, it’s just you’re shit live. You can’t play. Go and fucking play.’ Literally that brutal. And at the time we were like, ‘Fuck you.’ But we went on tour and we played for a year solid, in all the shitholes you can imagine, had a lot of fun, and then came and did the record. Nick Burgess, our A&R man, was on that level, he said, ‘I want to do it the way they did it in the old days.’ And the whole campaign, as they call it, the ethos behind our band, was to not get the quick money, not to smash and grab. We were really lucky.”
They certainly were. The first Kooks single ‘Sofa Song’ was followed by a string of top 20 entries including ‘You Don’t Love Me’, ‘Naïve’, ‘Ooh La’ and ‘She Moves In Her Own Way’. The album Inside In/Inside Out peaked at number 2 in the UK and spent half of 2006 in the top 20.
But right now, Pritchard is anxious to put the accent on his band’s evolution.
“The first record was totally different,” he asserts, “because when we went to record it we were a lot less ambitious than on the second one. We were just kids going in to record an album, and when it came out, our whole thing was to be proud of being a band, but for the right reason.”
So what’s with the Kinksian title of the new album?
“That was the name of the studio we recorded both albums in. It wasn’t massively about The Kinks really, just the studio. We didn’t put an awful lot of thought into it, I just like the word, Konk. When Hugh first said it I thought it was great, it sounds completely abstract, one syllable.”
That’s that cleared up then. Any final thoughts?
“We want to be a great pop band, in the best sense. Yeah, the song is king, but not just to have catchy songs, but to have soul, interesting guitar playing, an interesting band. Our whole sort of take on being in a band is to try and claw a bit of that back – being proud of it.”

The Kooks release Konk on April 14, and play Dublin Castle as part of the Heineken Green Energy Festival on May 5.

Visuals: Graham Keogh