Music > Live Reviews

The Kooks

The Nick Rayns LCR, UEA

12/05/17

Hailing from Brighton and touted as Brighton’s buzziest band, Radio 1 favourites Fickle Friends have been around since 2013 and are a decent enough outfit with their dance soul pop grooves, if a little dull and repetitive. However they prove to be a decent enough and more than capable warm up act for the other band that is on tonight from the same seaside resort. The kids in the mosh pit seem to like them anyway.

In anticipation of the main act, the crowd are buzzing for The Kooks. They seem to always be in Norwich on tour - maybe they just like playing here? 11 years on since the release of their debut album Inside In Inside Out, they are due to release The Best Of…So Far on the 19th May. It will include two new tracks Be Who You Are and Broken Vow, alongside, you guessed it, their best of from the past 11 years. Both the new tracks get played tonight and slot comfortably into the 1 hour 45 minute, and very impressive, set.

There is a real Friday night feel to this evening even if it is a Monday and a school night at that! And looking around the perimeter at some of the merriment in the room, there will be some very sore heads tomorrow. The stage set is very impressively set up as a curtain comes down at the front of the stage prior to the bands arrival. As they walk on and the first song of the evening kicks in (Eddie’s Gun), the band's silhouettes glisten through the curtain, and it looks great. It's chaos from the off, with the energy and enthusiasm of the band and crowd bouncing off of each other and it continues throughout the entire evening.

The last time that they were in this very same room for the Hello, What’s Your Name tour, they lacked energy and swagger, but this is certainly not the case tonight. They do tone it down for a couple of songs, for Eskimo Kiss with Luke Pritchard and Hugh Harris respectively on the acoustic guitar and piano, then Pritchard on his own at the piano for See Me Now. It’s a beautiful moment.

But it's soon back on, full pelt. You Don’t Love Me, Sofa Song, Shine On, Bad Habit, Around Town, She Moves In Her Own Way, Ooh La, Junk Of The Heart and Sway and everything else bar the kitchen sink get a blasting, but it’s the material from their debut album that gets the biggest cheers of the night.

It really is all here tonight, it’s raucous and got it all going on, and it’s great to see that after 10 years the band's fire is still burning. The Kooks are out and boy don’t we know it? They are in top form and I reckon that there is plenty more to come from them in the next ten years.