The Kooks

Luke Pritchard (vocals/guitar), Hugh Harris (guitar), Max Rafferty (bass), and Paul Garred (drums) generate the rubbishy garage rock sounds of the Kooks. Named after the song on David Bowie's Hunky Dory, the Kooks met while attending Brighton Music College in the mid-2000s. Each shared a liking for the Police, the Strokes, the Everly Brothers, and Funkadelic, and the bandmates began funneling such influences into their own sweet and precocious sound in 2005. Before the year's end, the British foursome was releasing singles for Virgin UK. "Eddie's Gun" and "Sofa Song" did moderately well on the U.K. singles chart; however, the romantic playfulness of "You Don't Love Me" eventually gave the band its first ever Top 20 hit.

The Kooks' debut full-length, Inside In/Inside Out, arrived in January 2006. The band's fifth single, "Naive," landed at number five by spring. Hot on the heels of their international success, the Kooks made their American performance debut at the annual South by Southwest conference in Austin, TX, in March, and the U.S. version of Inside In/Inside Out arrived on Astralwerks in October 2006. Two years later, the Kooks returned with Konk, an album they hoped had a "bigger" sound than their debut. The album's arrival coincided with the announcement that Rafferty had left the band and was replaced by former Cat the Dog bassist Dan Logan. At the end of 2010 the band returned to the recording studio with producer Tony Hoffer (Beck, Idlewild, The Thrills). Pushing them in a new direction, their third album, 2011’s Junk of the Heart, was the result.~ MacKenzie Wilson, Rovi