The Kooks

Just a few months before arriving to our shore to play Falls Festival, The Kooks frontman, Luke Pritchard, tells us that the band have tried to shake things up a little on their third album, Junk Of The Heart.

The Kooks have been pretty absentee from the music scene over the past couple of years, besides recording the new album, what have you been up to?
Basically we had some time off to just chill and be at home which is nice. It was good to do because we were on the road for pretty much two years solidly, so we all felt we needed a bit of downtime. But you know also the whole time we were writing songs; we were sort of getting to grips about writing a new album, which is kind of like a long process really.

Tell me about Junk of The Heart? What exactly is “junk of the heart”? Is it like broken pacemakers and stuff or what?
[Laughs] Well to me I like the phrase a lot, and even before recording that album title seemed to stick out at me, and I liked it because it has some kind of conflict within it y’know? It wasn’t like this one dimension thing, you can kind of put different things on it, for me it was about the contrast of the word junk and the word heart, there’s a lot of context, you might put heart as being a positive thing, and junk is so negative.

So would you call this album classic Kooks, or is there a new kind of twist to the sound that’s made what you are today? How does it compare to your previous two efforts?
Well I mean that’s more for people to interpret really, I think the same mentality is still there, and the songwriting… like the core is still in a similar sort of vein to what we’ve done before, but the way we recorded the album and the presentation is quite different. What we really tried to do is strike a balance, and not go too far away from where we’ve come from, but we’re also being different y’know?

I gave it a listen this afternoon, and I really liked it, particularly tracks like Rosie and Fuck The World Off, the latter in particular had a nice groove to it, it all just sounded really fresh.
They’re probably two of my favourite tracks as well y’know, they’re quite different really for us, in terms of the beats, one of the main things we tried to do was develop the beat system, and we ended up changing rhythms a lot. We have a kind of archetypal beat that seems to fit with our song writing, so we try and change that up, and for sure with songs like Rosie and Fuck The World Off its quite a different groove.

So I read that you guys worked on the album a bit in Norfolk? Whereabouts?
I can’t quite remember mate, it was in the middle of nowhere, it was near a town call Diss? Do you know Diss? Well the nearest sort of town was Diss, but it was really beautiful man.

Since you were out of it for such a long time, were you ever worried that people might have forgotten you, or that you might not be as relevant upon your return?
Oh I don’t know about that man, I mean I can’t start thinking like that. I guess in a way if you worry that it seems too long, then the great sort of thing you had in the band is sort of gone…and the magic… I dunno… that’s some pretty heavy shit to worry about. But really to be honest, I think we just got on with making the record, I mean right now it’s great music, so it doesn’t really matter. And with so few bands releasing records at the moment, I think it’s a great time for it to come out