"I Don’t Think That Was Me" - The Kooks' Luke Pritchard Gets Really Honest About Their Early Days

When The Kooks burst onto the British music scene with the release of their 2006 debut LP, Inside Out/Inside In, they were seen as successors to a lineage of English rock bands, routinely compared to The Libertines, and viewed through the prism of Oasis. For singer/guitarist Luke Pritchard, this meant that, as frontman, it was assumed he’d fulfil the role of rock’n’roll reprobate, as the Pete Doherty or Liam Gallagher of the group.

“I felt, personally, that I was really pushed into being this mouthy, kind of mini-Liam-Gallagher in the press,” recalls Pritchard. “I was that, in some ways, but I was also an insecure, 18/19-year-old, just trying to do what was expected of me. [The press] made me into that character, put words in my mouth, created that perception. It’s a cliche to talk about the press like that, but that was something that I always felt, on a personal level. I’d so often meet people, and they’d be like: ‘Oh, you’re actually really nice, I thought you were going to be really fucking rude.’

“That whole rock’n’roll thing, in our era, it was this ‘naughty’ thing. You were pushed into being this misbehaving, mouthy kind of guy. I don’t think that was me. I hated that. I want to be the lover, not the fighter. I want to be the positive person.”

Years later, and Pritchard, in conversation, radiates positivity. Not just for The Kooks’ new LP, Let’s Go Sunshine, or for the glad fact they’ve survived “losing members, 18th nervous breakdowns, daily struggles” to last for five LPs and 15 years. But, these days, Pritchard has come to peace with his band’s early days, and their debut album. Inside In/Inside Out remains, by far, the most successful album of The Kooks’ career, which meant that, for years, they tried to both live up to it, and live it down.

 “I got lost in a real existential thought pattern: ‘Who are we? What are we trying to do? Are we making a record just because people expect us to make a record?’”

“We [spent years] running away from our first album. Our first album became a bit of an albatross,” Pritchard admits. “I say this without any ego, but it was an album that seemed to soundtrack a lot of people’s lives. It was an album that, we’re always told, people grew up to. For so many people, we’re synonymous not just with that music, but with that time. It was hard for us to come back from that, to break out of that… I was always trying to move away from that, to do something new, because I don’t want to be always associated with the past. I want people to think of us as a fresh thing.”

On their fourth record, 2014’s Listen, that meant pushing ever-further away from their rock band beginnings, working with electronic elements and loops, taking influence from R&B and hip hop production. In the wake of it, Pritchard wasn’t sure where The Kooks should go next. “I got lost in a real existential thought pattern: ‘Who are we? What are we trying to do? Are we making a record just because people expect us to make a record?’”

Clarity came when they undertook a 10-year anniversary tour of Inside In/Inside Out, and released a career compile, The Best Of... So Far. Venturing back into the past led the band to embrace it. “We felt like we needed to make [an album] to define what the band is, again,” Pritchard said. “If we’d done another record where we’d gone off in another direction, again, we might’ve got a bit lost. We finally reached a point where we could say: 'We got a lot of love for this [kind of] music, so why don’t we indulge that?'”

And, so, Let’s Go Sunshine is “uplifting and playful”, an unabashed Britpop record that circles back to the sound of their first album. “We wanted to make a big guitar record, like a classic record, rather than trying to be super-modern or change too much,” Pritchard says. “I wanted it to be a nostalgic record for people... I think people that loved, or love, our music, will really enjoy it. It will really remind you of that time in your life when you listened to that first album.”