AT Greenwich’s Old Royal Naval College, the British indie stalwarts, The Kooks, revisited the album that defined a generation and discovered that its appeal now stretches far beyond it.
There are few opening chords more capable of returning a certain generation to the mid-2000s than those belonging to The Kooks’ debut album, Inside In/Inside Out. Released in 2006, the record arrived at the height of British indie’s cultural dominance and produced songs that have remained fixtures of festival fields, student nights and carefully guarded adolescent memories ever since.
Twenty years later, however, The Kooks are no longer sustained by nostalgia alone. Performing to 10,000 people at London’s Old Royal Naval College as part of Labyrinth on the Thames, the band were met by a crowd spanning both the listeners who encountered them the first time around and a new generation discovering their music through social media.
The Kooks at Old Royal Naval College
Following a communal rendition of “Sweet Caroline”, the band opened with the restless momentum of “Sofa Song”. “Eddie’s Gun” and “She Moves in Her Own Way” quickly followed, with the latter provoking the kind of mass singalong that rendered Luke Pritchard’s own vocals almost unnecessary. Against Greenwich’s historic architecture and the darkening Thames, songs once associated with cramped indie clubs assumed a scale that felt both celebratory and strangely moving.
The evening was framed as an anniversary, but the set avoided becoming a straightforward exercise in looking backwards. “Always Where I Need to Be”, “Junk of the Heart” and “Bad Habit” demonstrated the depth of the band’s catalogue, while recent single “Sunny Baby” offered evidence that their instinct for buoyant, immediate songwriting has survived the passing decades.
Still, the concert’s most affecting moments came when its scale temporarily fell away. Taking his place at the piano, Pritchard reflected upon growing up nearby in Forest Hill and losing his father at the age of three. He recalled being left a box of records and a Gibson Les Paul, objects that would eventually shape his reasons for making music, before dedicating “See Me Now” to anyone missing somebody or feeling lost. As thousands of phone lights illuminated the grounds, the performance became quieter, more vulnerable and markedly removed from the youthful bravado often associated with the band’s earliest work.
The Kooks at Old Royal Naval College
A stripped-back rendition of “Seaside” created a similar intimacy. Introducing it, Pritchard remembered the band’s formative period in Brighton, when they rehearsed in an old bread factory and began assembling the songs that would become their debut. Played two decades later before one of the largest audiences of their career, its simplicity remained intact.
That durability is central to The Kooks’ continued appeal. Inside In/Inside Out sold more than two million copies, but its significance cannot be measured through sales alone. Its songs captured the romantic confusion and casual optimism of youth without overcomplicating either. What once sounded specifically tethered to 2006 now appears remarkably transferable. The crowd’s younger members claimed “You Don’t Love Me” and “Ooh La” with the same conviction as those who had lived alongside them for 20 years.
The encore brought the evening to its inevitable conclusion. As “Naive” travelled across the grounds, fireworks erupted above the Thames, offering a suitably extravagant backdrop to one of British indie’s most enduring songs. It could easily have felt engineered for nostalgia. Instead, the sight of two generations singing together suggested something more alive.
The Kooks at Old Royal Naval College
Support came from Circa Waves, whose performances of “T-Shirt Weather” and “Movies” proved particularly well suited to the open-air setting. Frontman Kieran Shuddall jokingly admitted that half of the band’s set had been “ripped off The Kooks”, a light-hearted acknowledgement of the headliners’ influence on the bands that followed them.
Twenty years after The Kooks helped define the sound of British adolescence, their songs have found another audience approaching adulthood. At Greenwich, the band did more than commemorate the album that made them. They demonstrated why it has never entirely left.
by Adina Ilie