The bar on the 40th floor of Tokyo’s Cerulean Tower hotel buzzes with the discreet hum of money. Wealthy Japanese lean into their tables, talking in hushed tones to ladies who twirl their hair around their fingers, distracted by the Tokyo neon glimmering through the huge panoramic windows. So far, so Lost in Translation. Except one of these tables houses the Kooks, a young British band that is currently discussing the ideal interval between hair washes in order to maintain optimal greasiness. A fortnight? Three weeks, tops? They move on to whether Katie Holmes was actually impregnated by L Ron Hubbard’s supersperm to create Scientology’s new messiah. “I’ve got friends in LA who know about it,” says 23-year-old lead singer Luke Pritchard excitedly, if not entirely convincingly.
The Kooks are in Japan to promote their second album, Konk, which they recorded in London at Ray Davies’s studio of the same name. But where Davies’ band, the Kinks, sang about simple lads who could not “tell water from champagne,” the Kooks have now had a couple of years of the high life and can tell champagne from prosecco — Pritchard is trying to explain to a bemused Japanese waiter that he would like his bellini made with the latter. Accuse them of being posh, though, and you get the slightest hint of irritation: on all other matters they take the line of least resistance by deciding that what ever people say they are, that’s what they, er, are.
Ask if they’re a pop band, on the basis that guitar types tend to shun such categorization, and Pritchard replies: “Of course we’re pop! My whole thing, when we started the band, was that I wanted to bring back great pop music. Soulful pop.” Ask if they’re a boy band and they can live with the idea — though having come of age in this group, they are “Boyz II Men maybe.” Ask about stage school (Pritchard went to the Brit School, where he dated Katie Melua, about whom he wrote most of the band’s first album) and it was apparently a great place to meet other musicians and some inspiring teachers.
Ask if they are prepared to do anything to break America and you are told: “But that makes it sound like a bad thing to drive around playing shows in all these crazy little towns you’d never get to see otherwise — how could that be bad?” But suggest they are posh, and there is a murmur of dissent — their frontman may have boarded at a leading liberal private school in the south of England, but, he says, he felt out of place there among the offspring of millionaires. And they didn’t all go to private schools, they protest — new bass player Dan Logan was home-schooled — and what does class matter anyway? And as for making music for girls, an accusation leveled at them by Kasabian: “It’s true though, we do make music for girls. We love girls! Why wouldn’t we want to make music for them?”
The Kooks, plainly, are not on a mission to develop an inflated sense of self-importance, despite the pressures that must be attendant after their first album, Inside In/Inside Out, went multi-platinum. “We’re the sort of band who’d trash a hotel room — and then tidy it up afterwards,” they explain. And the girls do love them back here in Japan — they line the front rows of the Tokyo gig.
“It started like that in England, but then the girls brought their boyfriends and now it’s half and half,” says Pritchard.
At an in-store signing the next day, girls queue up to shake their hands, give them presents. Some more daring ones reach over for a hug, amid fits of giggles. One says, with scary devotion, that she even went to see them play their charity gig at the Oxfam shop gig in east London.
The band remains good-natured throughout; they know exactly what they are here to do. Yes, they tell their admirers, they adore Tokyo, yes they have feasted on sushi every night, they do have a thing for Japanese girls. In fact, says drummer Paul Garred, flashing a Colgate grin like a London market trader, “We just love the beautiful people of your fine country.” “Honest Paul, I call him,” chuckles their tour manager, as the fans swoon.
It’s not that they lie — in fact it’s a pleasant surprise how much they will tell a journalist, even when a dictaphone is waggled in front of their faces. They reveal that their song Jackie Big Tits is actually a riposte to Mike Batt, Melua’s mentor, with whom Pritchard had an angry confrontation one night in Amsterdam.
Pritchard tells of reports that he dated the British TV presenter Fearne Cotton, “and in the newspaper it said that apparently — APPARENTLY — she dumped me. Nothing could be further from the truth. I didn’t go out with her at all. I mean, a few nights — she’s a nice girl — I suppose I had a fling.” He reveals that he finds American groupies different from British ones, in that they’ll “just come up to you and say: ‘Hi, do you want a threesome?’” Is that unappealing? “No! Sorry to ruin your myth there, but it’s very appealing actually!” The Kooks are just exceptionally good at playing the game.
The game is, ultimately, to sell vast numbers of albums. It’s not that they have much hope of truly making it big in Japan — a country so enamored of its own artists that a Japanese star can sell millions of records while Arctic Monkeys, the most successful band in the “UK rock” section of record stores, have only shifted 100,000 copies, with the Kooks lagging behind on 30,000 — but they do hope to consolidate their position as one of the biggest groups in the UK.
The opportunity the Kooks took with Inside In/Inside Out was created by the collapse of the boy-band market. While Girls Aloud and Sugababes have thrived, their shiny male equivalents have been replaced by indie males in skinny jeans. The success of this new breed of commercial indie — see also Razorlight, or the View, or dozens of others — is because these bands understand that having a catchy chorus is more important than keeping your indie credibility. And the Kooks are masters of pop hooks — seven of Inside In/Inside Out’s 14 tracks reached the Top 40, with Naive and She Moves in Her Own Way both making the Top 10. The album sold 1.5m copies in the UK and a further million overseas. Their record label, Virgin, has classed them as a “priority act” for 2008 — as long as they keep churning out the hits. So how is that whole “difficult second album” thing working out for them?
“The thing is,” says Pritchard, “talking to other friends in bands, whether they’re signed to indies or majors, they seem to have a lot more meddling from their label. But because we deliver pop songs — in their terms, songs they can work with — they always leave us to it. Our A&R guy only came to the studio once while we were recording the album.” He thinks a bit. “I mean, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a few moments where I ... where you worry about it, but they feel it much more outside than us. When you’re in the studio you’re just four mates playing guitars.” Oh come on, you know you’re expected to write catchy hooks on demand. “But I don’t do it for that, never, never, never ... . All I can remember is from an early age, just sitting in my bedroom with a guitar finding just total solace in it. And then later on realizing that my friends were humming my songs back to me. You know when people start bands and say, ‘Yeah, let’s play Led Zeppelin songs’? I hated playing other people’s songs. I only ever wanted to play my own songs.” He must feel like a hit machine, though. “I am a hit machine!” he replies in a fake American accent. “I just roll ’em out! I’m a one-man hit factory! Shit, I can just see the headline now.”
Pritchard’s artlessness about why he makes music is rather contradicted when I speak to an old school friend of his, who would jam with Pritchard in the music room at break time. Pritchard was always the one talking about what a hit song needed, about the structure. Music seems to have stopped being merely solace for Pritchard at quite a tender age. That said, he — and his bandmates — gush with enthusiasm for what they do, despite the rigors of their promotional schedule.
And there is something in the idea that they make music for girls. They say they were mainly raised by women — Pritchard’s dad died when he was three, and Garred wrote the song Gap about the death of his own father. There’s something in the way the choruses always linger on words such as “sweetheart” or “angel,” and the way they worship women in the songs (loving a girl because She Moves in Her Own Way, or on the new song Shine On, wishing a girlfriend would stop looking at celebrity magazines and realize how naturally beautiful she is; taking good advice from a supportive woman on Love It All. It’s not exactly Oasis, though they have had the nod from Noel Gallagher.
“When Ooh La came out, that’s when it all changed for us, because we were massive and all of a sudden we had respect from Noel Gallagher and all these people — Paul Weller, who’s been really amazing. Noel said to our manager, ‘I really like that Ooh La tune.’ And he invited us to a party after the Brits. I was off my face, dancing with my girlfriend at the time, we were just going crazy. Oh no hang on, that was a different Noel Gallagher party.”
Still, they don’t always gel with all other bands. “I like the idea of musicians playing together and sharing songs but it isn’t like that now — or maybe it still is like that and we are just outside of it,” says Pritchard. “But I just find, sometimes people look at me like I’m fucking crazy when I say, do you want to go and have a jam? I asked Caleb from Kings of Leon — we were in this horrible club, shitty boom-boom-boom music, table full of vodka, and I just said to him, ‘Look, I know this really great blues bar round the corner, it’s open mic night. Do you want to go and sing a song? It’ll be really funny!’ And he just looked at me like I was from another planet. Surely you’d rather be there than surrounded by ugly girls who think they’re models, listening to shitty hip-hop? It’s boring. I just think it’s us — it’s whatever they think of the Kooks. But I can’t worry about it — life is too short to be sat round looking moody in a club. Come on, smile, come and play some blues.”
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