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.
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