Rock bands love hotel lobbies. The first time I see the Kooks is when they assemble by the bar of London's K West, an anonymous glass and chrome hotel in Shepherds Bush. It is noon and they emerge one by one in states of spectacular dishevelment. For the most part, they're barely out of their teens, and they have been on tour for two years straight. In that time, they have perfected the louche entrance from a hotel elevator.
Hugh Harris, the lead guitarist, is the first to step out. He is wearing a slept-in silken shirt with only a couple of its buttons holed. His red hair is a profound shock. He is strumming a small acoustic, and every pore of him is crying out espresso. He is followed by Pete Denton, the fill-in bassist, in outsize Ray-Bans and a criminally battered Panama hat; Pete is apparently being held together by a striking young woman with a slash of red lipstick and a beret. They find a bar stool, and drape.
The hotel lobby is full of tourists in pastel polo shirts checking in and out, patting their chinos for their wallets. The band has a lyric, "The Kooks are out in the street . . . we're gonna walk all over your cars," and somehow these people know it.
The tableau at the bar is eventually completed by the band's dark-eyed drummer, Paul Garred, and its iconically boyish front man, Luke Pritchard, in a string of beads and a leather jacket, singing snatches of pitch-perfect Neil Young to himself in his limpid and broken voice ("She's so fine/She's in my mind/I hear her calling. . ."). The tourists, fussing with their wives, edge toward darker corners. Two teenage girls sidle over, trembling slightly with lust. They get autographs, and 3:00 a.m. smiles, and their parents call them back before they are swallowed into a tour bus. I've never got the urgency of the phrase "Lock up your daughters," but now I do.
And then I sidle over to say hello myself: "Er, hi, I'm the chap who will be joining you on tour for a few days." Whatever I imagined before this introduction, during it and thereafter I have a powerful sense of being terminally more tourist than Kook. I feel like a rubberneck to both their innocence and their experience. I feel for the first time what for the few months since my last birthday I'd believed I'd escaped from feeling. I feel forty.
The Kooks' Inside In/Inside Out has been the crucial soundtrack of the English summer of 2006. Their million-selling debut album, which has just been released in the U.S., has spent months near the top of the charts; they have had three anthemic singles, and sales numbers that give their label hope they'll surpass other recent British imports, like the Arctic Monkeys. They have been playing rave sell-out shows in seaside resorts and at festivals in the U.K. and in Europe. MySpace buzzes with them and global success beckons. Part of me can't understand how all of this managed to pass me by. I've been away, I tell myself (and, I half-confess, I've been listening quite a lot to early Van Morrison and Bach cantatas). The sounds of my own teenage summers—the Jam and the B-52's and the Smiths—were always firmly in place by the beginning of May and played for sunny months on a loop. The Kooks didn't cross my consciousness until the last knockings of August. Even so, I have, in short order, become their biggest fan. Lisa, my wife, has cruelly pointed out that because I listen to so little new music these days, all of it comes to me with the force of revelation. I protest, but she's right. I only properly caught up with Nirvana after Kurt died, the Libertines disbanded before I bought their first album, and I still haven't got the Strokes.
