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The Kooks

THE KOOKS FRONTMAN UNCOVERS THEIR TOURING 'FREAK SHOW' AND EXPLAINS TO STEVEN MacKENZIE WHY BASSIST MAX RAFFERTY WAS BEYOND THE BAND'S HELP

Forget the so-called 'difficult' second album, Luke Pritchard's mind is already on what's next: "We can record any kind of music. We're not held down by anything, for the next record we could do whatever we want basically."

He checks himself, as if worried his foresaid adverb might be interpreted as an adjective, but if his tone is awash with arrogance - who can blame him? Just turned 23, the singing, songwriting frontman of The Kooks is already living the rock 'n' roll dream.

Currently touring their newly released follow-up album to 2006's million-plus seller Inside In/Inside Out, I wonder if he felt the pressure to deliver another runaway success. "We wanted to make a great record, but it's music. It's what we like doing so we weren't really fretting, we knew we had some great tunes and went and did it, it's not rocket science really." Whatever science they did use obviously worked, as Konk shot straight to number one in the album charts last month. "Topping the charts is brilliant but it's not really something that turns me on anymore. When I was a kid it used to mean a lot," he muses about the pre-download days when the Top 40 show was the be all and end all of musical achievement. "Dr Fox, he was a big deal!"

Pritchard acknowledges that the demand of a record label hoping its new cash cow keeps on milking is something to guard against. "They try and wrap you up and shove you out. There's not enough time, everything has to be very quick, get signed and bang out an album," he says . "We've got a lot of ideas about how we could go about the third record but it has to be natural. We're not going to sit around and plot it but I definitely think we'll be doing something quite different, we're going to have a different bass player."

On the subject of the recent departure of bassist Max Rafferty, who left due to a reported drugs problem, Pritchard admits: "Of course the dynamic in the band has completely changed.

"It's frustrating in lots of ways. He had a lot of problems and we could be there to a degree, but it's not helpful for anyone." In the end, Pritchard suggests that his former bandmate was taking something different out of their touring experience, which brings him back to their current tour and how the audiences' reactions have changed in such a short time.

"When you start out, you have to give everything to the crowd and they give nothing back, now it's the opposite!" And what about their reception north of the border? "Scottish fans are kind of known for being quite manic, everyone's up for it from the first song. You have to warm up the crowd more the further south you get."

This summer promises to be another season with a soundtrack provided by The Kooks' spikey anthems, and Pritchard hopes they'll be spending it on the road. He describes the appeal of touring as lying in before "you can cause a bit of havoc and then wake up in a different town the next day.

"It's like the buzz of being on some f***ing weird trip, like some travelling freak show," he adds.

The Kooks' videos often offer an apparently realistic glimpse into this glamorous life. Their most recent, for single 'Always Where I Need To Be', shows "just what we do in New York, in an apartment with our friends". But it's not always like that, you're not always in New York or places like that," he assures us. "I mean, we're in Hull today."

The Kooks latest album, Konk, is out now.