Surely this has happened to everyone at least once: You get assigned a school project to form a band, so you pair up with a classmate, find a couple of other guys to make it a foursome and before the teacher has even had a chance to slap a big, fat A+ on your project you've got six hit singles, a quadruple-platinum album and an opening slot for The Rolling Stones.
That's how The Kooks got started in 2003. Singer/songwriter/guitarist Luke Pritchard and bassist Max Rafferty were classmates at the Brighton Institute of Modern Music, and they enlisted fellow students Hugh Harris (guitar) and Paul Garred (drums) to help form a band for class, and in quick order they'd named themselves after a David Bowie song, discovered that amongst their wildly varied musical tastes was a shared love of The Police, The Strokes, The Everly Brothers and Funkadelic, and accepted a major-label record deal. Over the next couple of years they wrote hundreds of songs before entering the studio in July 2005 to record their debut album; that same month they released the first in a succession of U.K. hits and they've been on a turbo-charged joyride ever since.
Their album, Inside In/Inside Out, came out in the U.K. in January of 2006, nine months before its U.S. release. Its classic two- and three-minute Britpop songs find a way for strains of Regatta de Blanc-era Police to make sense alongside hints of The Cure, XTC, The Beatles and, well, even a bit of Herman's Hermits.
Provenance: Brighton, England
Latest release: Inside In/Inside Out (2006)
© 2007 Nigel Music Media LLC. Used by permission.
The Kooks
