Interview: The Kooks are back with new album Never/Know and they want you to log off social media and listen to the birds (and their songs)
The Kooks are back with their seventh album 'Never/Know' and here they talk about the soul influences on the record, why they are feeling the love as newly accepted British indie legends and reminiscing about Mick Jagger catching a band member naked backstage...
Seven albums into their career, The Kooks find themselves at the forefront of the renaissance 2000s indie music - which is proving to be as enduring popularity as Britpop, the era that came before.
Luke Pritchard and Hugh Harris - the only original band members remaining - are suddenly feeling the love and respect that often evaded The Kooks early in their career, despite their debut album 'Inside In / Inside Out' being certified quadruple platinum in the UK and spawning the hit singles 'Naïve', 'She Moves In Her Own Way' and 'Ooh La'.
Back with new LP 'Never/Know' - yes the slash is a deliberate call back to that first record - singer Luke and guitarist Hugh sat down with Contact Music to talk about the influence of Noughties Indie, why this album is a positive riposte to the negativity of social media, a memorable meeting with Mick Jagger and why Luke would've been perfect to play Bob Dylan in 'A Complete Unknown'...
Never / Know is The Kooks' new album
Contact Music: It's been almost 20 years since you started how exciting is it to have another new album coming out?
Luke Pritchard:
It’s amazing. It’s a time where you can really see the moment as a whole; the 2000s music scene.
The fact that indie and rock ‘n’ roll was the commercial music, which is something I was thinking about the other day, it was a zeitgeist moment for us. We were influencers, there were other bands that we liked that were influenced by the same thing. It was the popular thing.
What do you think is the biggest impact 2000s indie had on the current music scene?
Luke:
We had the explosion of the festivals. I think that’s maybe one of the biggest impacts of the 2000s indie scene - the festivals. Because I just feel there’s so many, it wasn’t like that when we started.
It was because of the immediacy and the rock ‘n’ roll energy everyone wanted to go out to the indie clubs and that went to proper big festivals, now there’s loads of them.
Hugh Harris:
It’s also the campfire kind of aesthetic. I think that people really start to open up to that. The longing for community in the camping area and campfire songs. That’s how we kind of got into playing music in a band was testing songs to people at parties who were half-cut.
That’s a great way to test your music…
Luke:
It is. We just used to go to parties and play tunes for people and if they liked it we’d be like, ‘OK, that’s one.’
Do you feel that era of indie is getting a reappraisal now of how important it was to British music?
Luke:
Definitely, there’s a huge appreciation of it now.
What we’re seeing as The Kooks – I can’t speak for other bands of our generation – is the young people now, the teenagers, are getting into our music, which is crazy. I guess that shows the appreciation of what it was and the carrying on of guitar music, rock ‘n’ roll, which is more of a kind of mentality than anything.
After Britpop you had a lot of garage and stuff like that. Then White Stripes and The Strokes came along and we as Brits answered it.
There’s a lot of punk bands now, it’s getting punky, which I guess is a sign of the times. It’s like the societal anger bubbling and that’s really exciting, I think. They’re positive bands as well. What they’re singing about is positive but it’s got that direct punk kind of attitude. It’s more punk than Britpop.
Are you getting a lot of love from the new generation of guitar bands?
Hugh:
Last summer I had to Google Fontaines DC. I was outside our dressing room and they came to say hi and give their respect and love to the band. I was like, ‘Who the heck are they?’ Then I was like, ‘Oh my god they’re huge!’ It’s nice to have that support from both sides.
Luke:
Yeah, everyone loves us now. It didn’t used to be like that! We do. We are lucky like that. The thing that I hear a lot about The Kooks, which is maybe a unique-ish thing to us, I always hear the same thing, which is, ‘I used to listen to The Kooks in the car with my parents and my younger brother.’ It’s always an intergenerational thing. Their parents would get us because they would hear The Kinks and The Beatles and Bob Dylan and the kids liked us, too.
That’s a cool thing because that mix of people are going to be in the audience at your arena shows...
Hugh:
Hopefully it will be all generations on show. It’s like a Neapolitan ice cream; Gen Z, Millennials and Generation X. Our live shows are quite like that.
Luke Pritchard and Hugh Harris wanted to get back to the roots of the band on the new LP
Where does the soul influence come from on this record?
Hugh:
I’ve been wanting to play guitar soul music our whole career. I guess Paul [Garred}, our original drummer, brought the punk, with his ‘80s influences. The Police thing, that kind of made sense to chug and go along with that.
I got to play on this record with my favourite guitar and my favourite amp and also bring back the guitar solo, which is something I think is in need of re-defining, in a soul and rock ‘n’ roll way. The humble guitar solo is famously non-humble. To try and find a softer version of that I think we achieved that on this record. I think it’s soft melody and I think that’s our strength.
'Never/Know' seems to be a very positive record, was that a deliberate thing?
Luke:
I think it’s kind of like our thing. We wanted to do what we are really great at. A lot of it, from my point of view, was to try and recalibrate the identity of the band, because we’ve made so many albums and we’ve sort of pushed our limits on the past few albums of what the band is.
This record was a real coming together of just doing it ourselves, no exterior forces, and really thinking about what is the kind of music we would put on at home.
So a lot of that is going back to the original roots and influences of The Kooks. So it does have a certain bounce and playfulness and humour, as well. With my lyrics I wanted to bring back a bit of my humour like I showed on the first album. I haven’t done that for a while, it was goof fun, a bit of The Kinks thing.
From the songwriting perspective my feeling was I kind of see music as a medicine and my version of that would be I refuse to be all doom and gloom because we’re told all the time that there’s no hope. Music is a space where you can imagine hope and you can lose the blues. Guitar melodies and vocal melodies they change your brain chemistry. A lot of music – the sonic choices of the past few years – are really quite dull, or dark. I think our reaction to that was lets brighten what we do and make a really bouncy record.
If we consider that pop culture, or youth focus, is on social media, a lot of social media interactions can be very negative which then reinforces those messages. Is this album the opposite? Listen to this and feel better…
Hugh:
It doesn’t have to be all singing and dancing, and la-ti-da. Just feeling buoyant in a world where things seem to be sinking.
Luke:
There is introspection on the record, and melancholy as well, but we chose to put the more positive songs in at the beginning. It seems counter intuitive, but at the moment the music that I want to listen to is to raise my mood. That’s where I’m at.
If you put your phone down and step outside things aren’t quite as bad…
Luke:
The birds are still tweeting.
Hugh:
Whenever you pick up your phone there’s just polarisation and people not listening or talking or communicating. I think that’s what’s really nice on the song 'Compass Will Fracture' is that you [Luke} address that.
There’s this kind of dissidence between sectors of societies which is just perpetuated by the insular nature of how we communicate with each other. Music is probably the only thing that can. Distinctively, music is something that is enjoyed and pictures are painted in the mind by the listener so there’s a real advantage there, and it can be interpreted many times over unlike a painting or a film. You can listen to a song and find different meanings.
Luke:
It’s not unlike the ‘60s reaction, actually. I watched the Bob Dylan film and I guess the message the director was trying to make and the scriptwriter, is they had their problems then, they thought that nuclear war was going to break out at any time. My mum talks about it, they had drills on the Isle of Wight. The ‘60s expression was let’s take LSD and go get some flowers and let’s try and metaphysically change things. That music turned out in that kind of way. Through the modern lens sometimes people see it as a little bit too sunshine-y, but I think that’s an interesting parallel.
Luke, you would have made a great Bob Dylan...
Hugh:
It’s a shame you missed the casting call for that film!
Luke:
Oh, if only I could act! If only I’d gone to RADA!
Do you think there could be a Kooks biopic one day?
Luke:
Timothee Chalamet can come in and play me!
Hugh:
It’s not OK to write your own - you’ve got to die first! You can’t be alive and write your own biopic because history is inherently bias towards the people that wrote it. I think there’s got to be some committee that takes the storytelling of yourself off your hands.
It's been 19 years since your debut album 'Inside In / Inside Out' came out, you must have had some wild times when things were blowing up?
Luke:
I feel people think we went to more things than we did, I never felt like I was really in the scene as much as people think. I went to the NME Awards once, I went with an ex band member and I invented a drink that was called ‘The Pritchard’ that was rum, whiskey, vodka and coke and he passed out at the table. And then I never went to another awards ceremony again!
Any encounters with your rock 'n' roll peers?
Hugh:
We sat Mick Jagger behind my dad at Brixton Academy which was huge for my dad, and for us.
Luke:
Mick did come in as we were sort of changing, which was embarrassing. Someone was naked, I think.
Hugh:
Tony, our tour manager, came in and said, 'Mick is just waiting outside,' and we were like, ‘We’re making Mick Jagger wait for us?!’ Tony said, ‘No, he wants you to have your time.’ Small details like that to someone’s character just really mark out a person.
The 20th anniversary of 'Inside In / Inside Out' is is in 2026, will you be revisiting that album again live for the fans?
Hugh:
There’s a lot of people doing that at the minute. I think it would be hard to do something original, wouldn’t it? Perhaps we’ll do the 21st year anniversary, do it the American way. Legal in America!
'Never/Know' is out now and available to purchase here
The Kooks play 'TRNSMT Festival' this summer and head out on a UK arena tour later in 2025 joined by special guests The K’s.
To buy tickets for 'TRNSMT Festival' click here
To buy tickets for The Kooks arena tour go here
Full arena tour dates:
Fri 3 Oct 2025 – Manchester Co-op Live
Sat 4 Oct 2025 – Cardiff Utilita Arena
Sun 5 Oct 2025 – Brighton Centre
Thu 9 Oct 2025 – Newcastle Utilita Arena
Fri 10 Oct 2025 – Birmingham Utilita Arena
Sat 11 Oct 2025 – London The O2
