Not too cool for school

Britpop hitmakers the Kooks hit the books

CLASS ACT: the Kooks

by ERIK LEIJON

With at least one or two can’t-miss rock ’n’ roll bands coming from England every year, you would think the country was actually teaching them rock music in school. In the case of Brighton hitmakers the Kooks and their latest album Konk, they actually did learn the tools of the music trade at the Brighton Institute of Modern Music, a college that specializes in teaching popular music to students who otherwise would be studying for arts degrees.

“You don’t have those [schools] in Canada?” asks drummer Paul Garred, who met and began to collaborate with fellow Kooks members Luke Pritchard and Hugh Harris at the school in 2003. “It was a great place to be creative. It was brilliant to be able to play drums for a year and not worry about overdoing classical training or marching drums. Instead, I was able to rock out.”

Not every student is lucky enough to apply their trade immediately upon graduation, but the Kooks were already a hotly tipped group as 21-year-olds (Harris was 19) by the time their debut album, 2006’s Inside In/Inside Out, was released. Well versed in punchy riffs and infectious choruses (perhaps they majored in Kinks-ology?), the album featured seven singles and immediately made them the darling of loutish soccer hooligans across their home country.

“I’m glad that we were semi-naive about the music industry because we came in without any preconceived notions about how things worked,” says Garred of their early post-grad days. “Over the past few years, we’ve become more confident and more willing to do more outlandish things on stage we wouldn’t have thought of doing before.”

When most British rock bands sit down to record a follow-up to a commercially successful first album, there’s typically a compelling urge to experiment beyond one’s britches in an effort to write the next White Album or Revolver, but the Kooks’ primarily road-influenced sophomore release Konk (named after the Ray Davies studio where it was recorded) is unapologetically poppy. Garred says while they’ve become more mature after touring extensively in support of Inside In/Inside Out, there was no internal push to dramatically cast aside their Britpop influences.

“I think the way we’ve always gone about things is we’ll put the songs on the record that we’re happy with, and it doesn’t matter where they come from, just if they make us tick,” says Garred, adding: “Then again, I look at the pop template of the Beatles and see that 99.9 per cent of their songs are absolutely phenomenal, and it gives me the drive to work hard because if they can do that and still experiment, then we should push forward too and not worry about replicating what we’ve done before.”

If the Beatles present the long-term goal for the group, then their immediate plans likely revolve around capturing the British music press buzz that propelled the likes of Oasis and the Smiths to mythical heights. If there’s anything to be learned from both those bands, it’s having a larger-than-life frontman, and the Kooks’ Luke Pritchard is the energetic face for a band fast becoming known for rowdy live performances.

“I prefer him when he doesn’t have a guitar on him,” admits Garred. “The original line-up was supposed to be Luke as the singer and us as the band. On songs like ‘Sofa Song,’ you really get to see him jump around and go crazy. When we play bigger stages, we’ll take a step back and give him space to do his thing.”

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