11-05-2025
‘Labels should pay for therapy' — the Kooks' frontman on teen fame
Back in the early 2000s, three teenage friends from BIMM music college in Brighton formed a band as an end-of-term project, writing the kind of songs teenage boys will write along the way. A year later, they were famous. That's when the problems started.
'People love Jackie Big Tits,' says Luke Pritchard of the Kooks, defending a notoriously puerile early song that was named after a character in Sexy Beast. Jackie Big Tits is actually about the songwriter, svengali and Wombles creator Mike Batt, whose wife, Julianne White, played Jackie in the British comedy crime classic. When Pritchard was 16 and attending the Brit School in Croydon, Batt discovered Katie Melua, Pritchard's then girlfriend and a fellow pupil. Batt signed her to his Dramatico
