One of few survivors from the indie revival of the mid-noughties, The Kooks went back to their roots for this intimate, very short notice gig at one of the venues where it all began for them. Indeed, the manager of the Prince Albert, Brighton legend Will Moore, can feel partly responsible for giving the band a leg up. He was the one who gave a tape to Mark Nicholson – who was managing The Ordinary Boys at the time – while he was running the equally legendary Freebutt. Nicholson went to see them play, liked what he saw and heard, took them on, got them signed to Virgin after a bidding war, and The Kooks were on their way to stardom. Their debut album reached number two, followed up by a number one in the shape of Konk, both full of early-mid 60s influenced pop vignettes that displayed a firm grasp of the art of songwriting and a lyrical nous about the lives of young, adventurous men in their skinny jeans, hats and baggy vests.

Fast forward 13 years, and the queues are snaking around a couple of blocks in the heart of Brighton with fans eager to snap up tickets for their back-to-back shows, first at The Albert, and then later in the evening at The Haunt, both in effect warm-up shows for their upcoming tour, which includes a date at the rather bigger Alexandra Palace in London. They've got a career retrospective to promote soon, plus a new single. They may not be quite such young men any more, but there is a lot of love this afternoon, with frontman Luke Pritchard, and guitarist Hugh Harris still at the beating heart of this superb band.

Squeezing through the tightly-packed crowd to enter the stage, Pritchard and the rest of the band hopped up and showed straightaway that this was going to be something a little different. Opening with a solo version of 'Seaside' while the other Kooks set their instruments up, Pritchard couldn't stop grinning as they joined him for 'Eddie's Gun'. A band at their level playing a 40-minute set meant there was no room for any filler, each song was met with screams from groups of teenage girls staring adoringly at the singer. Proud of their heritage and fully appreciative of the rapturous response they were getting, he declared 'Matchbox' was "a proper Brighton song" influnced by a night out on the town with Brighton psych-garage rockers Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster.

Intimate shows allow for great audience interaction, and cries for 'Jackie Big Tits' got an immediate answer as Pritchard broke into it while his band laughed at his uncertain intro. "Is that right?" he had to ask before they helped him out. Hugh Harris' guitar became unplugged at one point and nobody seemed to notice except him. Pritchard was bouncing in and out of the crowd during each song to giggles from his bandmates. It was all perfectly chaotic and wonderfully brilliant. Along the way they pull out 'Pull Me In', a reggae-filled song that previously only saw the light of day as a fan-club release, plus one song each from their previous two albums: the title track of Junk Of The Heart and ‘Bad Habit’ from Listen. By way of enlightenment they also perform live, for the very first time, the new single 'Be Who You Are'. It’s a definite attempt at capturing the exuberant youthfulness of their early material, a pointer to the way forward. The band looking to emulate that early magic that has lost its power in recent years, epitmosed by the mixed-bag freeform style of their last album.

Closing the show triumphantly with 'Naive', the band charged straight out through the side-door before they could be mobbed. I was left wishing that more artists would give their fans this kind of experience. This set will live longer in the memory than some of the bigger arena shows that bands of this ilk will naturally play. The way that the tickets were marketed and sold, and then the gig itself, is exactly how a band keep their fanbase energised and passionate: exactly why they will always be loved in this city and beyond.
Jeff Hemmings & Jamie MacMillan

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