The Kook of Love

Luke Pritchard is lost in music. Crouched low over his guitar, as though preparing to whisper sweet secrets to it, he strums and coos in a delicate falsetto, sinking deeper into himself with every plucked chord.  

“Sorry about that,” The Kooks frontman will eventually chirrup, reluctantly putting the instrument away and snapping back to the present. “We’ve been asked to write a new song for a charity album and the melody has just come to me – I needed to get it down before I forget.” 
The record, he explains, will raise money for child victims of global conflict. Pritchard (20), who is charming and a little goofy but, underneath, you sense, terribly competitive, has caught wind that Franz Ferdinand and Belle and Sebastian have each written toddler nursery rhymes for the album and doesn’t want The Kooks to be left out. 
“I’m writing a sort of fairy tale – about a prince and a castle and a dragon, which is a bit of a change for The Kooks.”
Funnily, this mightn't be as much of a departure as he imagines. Some bands one cannot ever conceive of writing songs about princesses and castles and dragons – The Kooks, whose jaunty Britrock has delivered a top 10 album, Inside In/Inside Out, and three hit singles since the turn of the year, are not such a group. Cuddly and polite, you could easily picture them enrapturing a room of toddlers. Pets, the sick and old people would probably love them too.  
Even if you’ve never encountered their music, you probably know a few things about The Kooks. Such as: they are rather posh, fell together at a sort of finishing school for stage brats and that frontman Pritchard once dated Katie Melua, whom several of his songs seem to serenade. 
“That’s the way I write songs – I really expose a lot of myself. I’m not for one moment comparing myself to Bob Dylan. However, I do see myself in that songwriting tradition of being very honest and confessional," says Pritchard, who glances constantly over my shoulder as we natter. We’re in a suite at Dublin’s Camden Court Hotel and a waiter has been dispatched to fetch the ravenous singer a burger. 
Does he worry that somebody close to him – Melua for instance – might chance upon The Kooks on radio and realise Pritchard is singing about her? 
“It’s very weird, that – the way when you write something personal and it suddenly becomes public property,” he proffers. ”Take the song ‘Jackie’s Big Tits’ [the title, which is misleadingly puerile, is courtesy of a line from the 2001 Jonathan Glazer film Sexy Beast – EP]. It’s about an incident that happened to me, something I got really cross about, and all of my friends know about it. Now, when we play the song, the whole crowd joins in on the chorus – although they haven’t a clue what it’s about.”
Melua appears to pop up on several songs. Intriguingly one, the single ‘Eddie's Gun’, addresses the narrator’s erectile dysfunction – surely the first top 10 hit to do so. How embarrassing it must have been for Pritchard to appear on Top Of The Pops, warbling about his wilted manhood. 
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he laughs. “Whether it’s down to booze or whatever, it’s happened to me and pretty much every guy I know at some time. The thing is, it’s not about anybody specifically – it’s a spoof really.”
Of the band’s stage school origins, Pritchard is dismissive. Yes, they came together at The Brighton Institute of Modern Music but The Kooks are not a class project with legs, he insists. 
“It wasn’t like that at all. It was very chilled-out. You’d roll in there with a hangover at 11am and sit around discussing Led Zeppelin records.”
While The Kooks weren’t exactly tearaways, they certainly didn’t slot into the school’s workaholic ethos: “I won’t name names, but there were a few people there who really did see music as nothing but a career. They seemed to be bitter and cynical about the whole business and they were still only kids.”
For all his sunny disposition, Pritchard has been in the wars. His father, who fronted a minor ‘60s band called Bob Pritchard and the Echoes, died of a heart-attack when Luke was just three. Cast into genteel poverty, Pritchard’s mother was forced to sell the family record collection (10,000 strong and stuffed with rarities). 
Later, the death of his mother’s long-term boyfriend would deprive him of a second male role model. By now, Pritchard was attending the elite Bedales boarding school – alumni include Daniel Day-Lewis, Minnie Driver and Princess Anne. He admits to being a problem pupil, narrowly escaping expulsion on several occasions.
 Sitting opposite this sweet young man, I tell him it's impossible to imagine him ever getting out of hand. 
“Well, thank you,” he replies, as if it's the nicest compliment he’s ever received. A knock on the door distracts his attention – it’s the waiter, bearing a plastic case: those long awaited burger and chips. 
“Before you go, I just want to say that our new stuff is a lot more ambitious,” says Pritchard. “Some of the songs on the album I wrote when I was 14. Now, we’re doing more rootsy stuff. I hope people will dig it. We feel that we’ve only just begun. We want the whole word to hear our music.”
I leave him alone, with his soggy takeaway and gentle dreams of stardom. 

The album Inside In/Inside Out is out now on Virgin