The Kooks in Philly: A conversation about debuts, growing up, and never knowing

Luke Pritchard and Hugh Harris from The Kooks dropped by WXPN just hours before their sold-out show at The Fillmore on May 30th. The British indie rockers looked relaxed after a day of Philadelphia tourism, posing at the Love statue, checking out the Barnes Foundation (“that’s the first thing I did,” Luke said), and attempting to snag a table at the legendary Saloon restaurant. When that didn’t work out, they took to the streets, handing out roses to strangers as part of a social media campaign. “It’s the beauty and the danger, you know, with the thorns,” Pritchard said. “Some instances went well, others…people just had no idea.” Hugh added.

WXPN’s midday host, Mike Vasilikos, had the band kick off the session with “Naïve” from their 2006 breakthrough Inside In/Inside Out. “It just keeps rolling,” Pritchard noted while discussing how new generations keep discovering the album. He seemed almost surprised by its staying power: “All the kids are picking it up now, like the teenagers. It’s that kind of cycle, isn’t it? It’s 20 years coming up.”

This led to a discussion about what Pritchard calls “debutism,” where fans become focused on a band’s first record and never quite let them move on. “It’s the battle for an artist,” he explained, “to try and get back to that initial point when you first started making music and you’re just free and didn’t quite know what you were doing but you were having fun.”

“There’s a bit of snobbiness, you kind of turn your your nose away from like the mainstream and the big hitting songs,” Harris added. “You do your utmost to run away from the thing that you’ve created in order to bury yourself in other kind of ideas and influences, but we must know where we come from. A tree goes nowhere without its roots.”

That philosophy directly shaped their seventh album, Never Know. Rather than chase trends or overthink their approach, The Kooks deliberately stripped everything back. “We kind of just tried to approach it like our first album,” Pritchard said. The band self-produced the record, avoiding outside influence that might have pushed them toward whatever was currently popular. “We didn’t really have any conception of what was going on in the music scene now,” he admitted, “which I think was good.”

The conversation naturally turned to David Bowie, a shared obsession for both the band and Mike. The Kooks took their name from Bowie’s tender song about the birth of his first child, and Mike revealed he similarly named his third child after Bowie. Luke described their connection to Bowie as almost paternal: “He is kind of the father figure for art and music and all arts.” For Never Know, they consciously returned to those early influences, Bowie, The Police, Bob Dylan, that had inspired them from the beginning.

To demonstrate their renewed focus on stripped down melody, the band performed “Sunny Baby,” a bright, 50s rock-inspired tune that Luke described as “moorish.” The song’s infectious hook and romantic sentiment felt like classic Kooks, but with the understanding and confidence that comes from two decades of making music.