When you listen to a Studio Milwaukee Session — whether live on the air, on demand here on the website or in person — it’s tempting to assume these gifted artists can roll up, belt out a few tunes, give us a wave and disappear down Pittsburgh Avenue.
When you’re lucky enough to be upstairs in the Radio Milwaukee offices before one of these sessions, you’re reminded that it isn’t only about being gifted. It’s about being professional, which The Kooks’ Luke Pritchard put on display before heading downstairs for a Tuesday afternoon performance ahead of the band’s show at Turner Hall Ballroom.
While a few of us discussed Summerfest ticket giveaways, Pritchard’s powerful tenor burst from the green room as he ran through his scales. It was the most basic of vocal exercises, but everyone’s eyebrows reflexively raised as he climbed higher and higher in preparation for the set to come.
The warmup served him well on stage with fellow Kook Hugh Harris, particularly on “Junk of the Heart (Happy),” which includes a couple emphatically punctuated moments of Pritchard sing-shouting “mine” before launching into the chorus. At those points, a whole room full of eyebrows went up while we took in the pitch-perfect performance.
Pritchard and Harris treated us to four selections from their illustrious career: three you’ll hear in the broadcast version and one runthrough of “She Moves in Her Own Way” that was a special off-air request from an audience who deserved the extra attention. As the weather gets warmer, our performance space packs in more and more people for these sessions, and the capacity crowd that showed up for The Kooks was in as bright and playful a mood as the guys on stage.
Picking up on those vibes, 88Nine’s Carolann Grzybowski didn’t wait long before deploying her hardest-hitting question: “What is the secret to playing on a hot, sunny day in tight pants.” Pritchard, leaning into the moment, simply replied, “There is no secret. You just have to suffer for your art.”
The very game duo also talked about bringing as much positivity and optimism as they could muster to new album Never/Know, never losing sight of the fact that there are “still really good people out there” and how third spaces like music venues are more important than ever.
You can listen to The Kooks perform in our space via the player at the top of the page, and then visit our membership page to book yourself a spot at our next Studio Milwaukee Session.
Studio MKE: The Kooks set list
- “Sunny Baby”
- “Junk of the Heart (Happy)”
- “Naïve”
- “She Moves in Her Own Way” (non-broadcast performance)
