The Kooks are heading down under!
Image: María Villanueva.
Beloved UK band The Kooks are returning to Australia! Ahead of the shows, we caught up with Luke Pritchard and Hugh Harris to chat about the tour, new music, their newfound success on TikTok and so much more.
Serving as the bands biggest Australian run to date, the band will kick off their Australian tour at Sydney's Hordern Pavilion on February 20. The run of shows will continue on to Melbourne's Palace Foreshore, Brisbane's Fortitude Music Hall and Adelaide's Hindley Street Music Hall, before wrapping up Perth's Red Hill Auditorium on March 6. Suppored by Briston Maroney, tickets are on sale now!
The Kooks are also set to appear at Party In The Paddock on February 7 in Launceston and Yours & Owls on March 2 in Wollongong.
You are returning to Australia soon for your biggest Australian tour to date, if I'm correct.
LUKE PRITCHARD: Come on.
I think your first Australian show was at the Hi-Fi in Melbourne in 2008, which I don't even know if that venue still exists. Sixteen or seventeen years ago - I'm pretty bad at math, but I think it's around there.
LP: That sounds right to me. Yeah, it
HUGH HARRIS: It took us like two years to get out there actually. Because we released the album in 2005, so I remember it being quite late. We went on our second album.
You finally got here, and you've been back so many times since. Looking back on the past two decades of touring, how do you think you have evolved as a live act into what you will be presented on this upcoming tour?
LP: Wow. We've changed a lot. I mean, we get a lot less drunk than we used to. We were like so energetic before - we've got a lot of energy now, but it was like our lives depended on it, you know, every single gig. I think now we just - we used to play songs twice the tempo of the song [laughs], you know? That's kind of cool that it's kind of changed a bit and there's a bit more nuance I think to the playing between us and stuff like that. We're a bit looser. So it has, yeah, it's changed quite a lot. We can switch gears. It's more dynamic in the set, going up and down.
HH: Those in between bits become less of a problem. I think the more you play live, like the kind of the quiet bits and the bits that you try and feel. That sort of being more comfortable on stage leads to being more adventurous as well. So I think the playing gets a little more... Whereas previously it would be off-roading, but like, on the guitar, in a way at which you had no idea how to get back to the song. But now it's a bit more late stage miles Davis in London.
I love that analogy. Obviously touring and playing live is an outlet not only for you to share your art, but make that in-person connection and exchange with the audiences to do resonate with your music. How important are the live shows and touring to you in that context?
HH: I think we live and die by our live shows. I think they really are our, uh, plat de résistance. You're only as good as you are live, and we are probably a touring band. So it means a huge amount kind of connecting with audiences like that. It's really our bread and butter as well. So yeah, it's a massive, massive, massive deal for us and we still love it - which is kind of impressive.
LP: I like festivals as well, like where you have to try and win new people. I particularly like thinking of people that really hate our band. No, no, I'll rephrase that. They think they hate our band and I'm like, 'I'm gonna show you, you might actually like this band' [laughs]. I really like that. It's like connecting, that's the thing. And maybe it's just being loose with that and trying to find people, like show people a side to you they didn't think they could see and stuff like that. It's quite fun. And then new people who were really young when our first stuff came out is really exciting as well, you know?
Speaking of festivals, you will be playing a few whilst you are here; Yours and Owls, and Party in the Paddock. Have you guys had a chance to peruse the lineups? Is there anyone like you are keen to see? Or anyone you think that everyone should go check out and see, obviously apart from you?
LP: Just us [laughs]. We're the only good ones [laughs]. Very excited to be back in Tassie. I have very cool memories of Tasmania. We played New Year's Eve once or twice I think we did.
HH: [The lineups] look really, really cool. Aussie music is freaking happening, man. Seriously, you guys are smashing it. It's wicked.
I'll say thank you.
LP: [Laughs] What's that band, the one they have these kind of gold masks?
HH: Oh yeah, I've seen that. Yeah,
Glass Beams.
LP: They're crazy. I think it's all instrumental.
HH: Do you know Eleni Drake? The song is called King Street, like the whole album is kind of named after like places in Melbourne. Amazing.
I love that you're across our local artists. By the time the tour kicks off, I think it would have been about three years since you last toured Australia, which of course was the Inside In/Inside Out anniversary tour. What have you got planned for this upcoming run of shows for all the devoted fans?
LP: What have we got? Listen, we have a new album, which is very exciting. We're touring with Briston Maroney of course, which is really exciting. Hopefully we'll see if we can do some collaborations on stage and stuff. But we'll see how that goes. You never know how the chemistry is. Me and Hugh haven't really got into it yet, but the set, I'd like to play some fan favourite tunes that maybe we've not played. Some songs that I always see people commenting on that we just don't play live, I think would be really cool. Because I don't think we'll lean so much on our first album. I think we'll do quite a few songs off that, but I think we've been doing the fifteen year anniversary of that for like a hundred years now, so it'll be fun to like bring some more album tracks from some of the other albums. But mainly just like energy. We're just in a good spot, it should be really fun.
I can't wait to see it. Speaking of new music, you guys recently dropped Jeanie.
LP: Yeah, we're having our TikTok era. It's crazy.
Tell me a bit about that song; what inspired it, how came to be in and teaming up with lovelytheband for this one?
LP: Yeah, it's really exciting. Well the song firstly, lyrically I've been kind of trying to reconnect with storytelling. I was singing so many songs about myself and I was like, 'I just wanna really embrace some more songwriting, storytelling; storytelling songwriting I should say. I was wanting to retell the kind of Neil Young Unknown Legend song, it's on Harvest Moon. We are so obsessed with people that are asking for pats on the back and being told they're great, and there's all these people who are incredible, who are completely unknown and they're just working away and they're just like the most exceptional human beings. So this song is about one person in that particular situation who is just very selfless and she's maybe trying to tell the story of like, don't judge people too harshly on what you might see on the surface, because underneath maybe it's not quite. And you shouldn't judge anyway. So Jeanie is like a special character that we probably all know a few in our lives. It's for those people, that song. It was one of those [songs] that had been hanging around for a while and I'd always loved it. Mitchy from lovelytheband gave me a shout and I'd never met him, but he'd heard a song from a producer and just was like, 'I really connect with this tune and can we do something?' So he brought him, and the band brought something really fresh to it and kind of brought it up a few years, you know? It had been sat around on the shelf and that's an amazing thing with songs sometimes, they sit around, you don't find the right space for them. I'm really thankful to them for doing that, and I've been a fan of them, you know, I was aware of them. A friend of mine was working with them and then Hugh came on in the end and created some amazing... well, how would you describe your guitar part Hugh?
HH: Fucking awesome. It's basically [laughs] George Harrison. The inspiration was to kind of, I guess, I don't know because it's really nice to actually hear that. I don't think I knew about the ins and outs of it. Actually I kind of realised now that I thought that it had a kind of mystical angle, like genie in the bottle, which is interesting because it has actually been our genie in the bottle for TikTok. The guitar part is just, I guess, just me playing guitar, me doing what I love doing [laughs].
LP: I felt like it was like some of the stuff you do live, that you don't sometimes do on a record. Where you just let it rip, and because of that bold, the production's quite different for us. It's like big, slick, disco, you know? And it's stadium rock to me, but like cool stadium rock.
HH: It's got like a bit of Daft punk in it too that guitar, definitely. What Al and I did was we stripped everything back. We thought it sounded really cool when you just have like bare minimum stuff, and then it started sounding a bit Daft Punk-y, and there was these kind of like mystical, dissonant elements in it. That's where the solo was kind of born, from this world of kind of Daft Punk-y dissonance, like post-apocalyptic dissonant, kind of The Weeknd sounding jam [laughs]. Yeah, that's a probably bit of an over description.
No, that was a perfect description. I love it. How have you guys found the TikTok-ification of the song?
LP: I saw a woman just eating a burger to the song, which I thought was bizarre,
HH: Brilliant.
LP: Just eating a burger. Amazing
HH: Reply to it.
LP: I think it's amazing. I think there's something really interesting. In a way, the thing with TikTok is that your song is the background to someone else's sort of creative output, right? So it's kind of cool. Or even if it's the secondary thought. So it's like your soundtracking stuff, which I think is really cool. We didn't really think about it, did we? It just kind of all of a sudden popped up all these very different types of videos. So funny, you know?
HH: What's really funny, because we've been spending a bit of time building a presence on TikTok - nothing was really happening for us. And then of course, as soon as you just forget about it and stop trying, it happens. So it's in tune with something I think that is aligning for us quite nicely at the minute. It's cool.
Now, what can you hint about the, the new music that will be coming? An album this year, if I'm correct?
LP: It's rock and roll really. It's a guitar record and we have female vocals, which is really cool. Really fun, we've not really done that before - like a proper soul vibe. It's sunshine, it's positive, which I like. Again, with what's going on you are just bombarded with everything in the world right now. I think part of the job of music is to allow to try and provide some positivity. I think we can do that. I think it's a really positive record about romance, love and anxiety [laughs].
HH: I don't know whether you'd agree, but I always just feel like it's our Back to Black record. You know, Amy Winehouse when she just made something with Mark Ronson that just felt very in tune and just was doing what she wanted to do. It's got that sound to it. It's got that soft, kind of creating sounds within our band of the reference records that we really love. That we share collectively and adore. Like production is just gorgeous and it's something we can be proud of for sure.
Well, I can't wait to hear. It sounds so good.
LP: Thank you so much. Yeah, we've really built it up now, so it better be good [laughs].
To finish off, like I said, you've been playing shows in Australia for about sixteen, seventeen years now. What keeps you coming back to Australia and what's your go-to thing to do when you arrive? I'm presuming after all these years you've built your own connections here, and probably shying away from the tourist attractions.
HH: I have a routine that I do. I basically go down to Double Bay and take a boat across either like the Harbour or up to Manly or whatever, and then kind of circle back around. I was a kid when we used to spend Christmases in Sydney, so there's loads of places that I kind of geotag. Just like where my grandma lived, where I had my first legal drink down in the docks or like the Lord Dudley where I used to drink with my dad and his friends.We're going to a footy game definitely this time round, for sure.
LP: It's gotta happen, never been. It is so nice like for Hugh because he has got all that. But for me, I think you are right. We have friends there and stuff now, so you end up being a bit more chill, not trying to cram too much in. It's just good, you know, Australia's laid back. It's like you want to enjoy the nature and the good food. The coffee is exceptional. I always look forward to the coffee. I think that you guys created the flat white.
I did not know that, good on us.
LP: Apparently that's a fact. The baristas in London, they say that.
Genie is out now!
THE KOOKS AUSTRALIAN TOUR 2025
With special guest Briston Maroney Also appearing at Party In The Paddock and Yours and Owls.
Friday 7 February
Party In The Paddock
Carrick TAS
Thursday 20 February
Hordern Pavilion
Sydney NSW
Saturday 22 February
Electric Avenue
Auckland NZ
Thursday 27 February
Palace Foreshore
Melbourne VIC
Saturday 1 March
Fortitude Music Hall
Brisbane QLD
Sunday 2 March
Yours and Owls Festival
Wollongong NSW
Tuesday 4 March
Hindley Street Music Hall
Adelaide SA
Thursday 6 March
Red Hill Auditorium
Perth WA
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