I think we're possibly not arty enough to be interesting to all the critics,' says Kooks drummer Paul Garred. 'They like real weird s***.'
The Brighton pop-rock outfit are not 'real weird s***' - their bread and butter is Britpop-sanctioned jangly guitars, cheerful homages to elderly Brit-bands of the 1960s and smartly turned-out lyrics about 'love, love, love'. Call them a boy band for the scruffy-haired indie massive and it doesn't even get a rise out of Garred.
'It's probably a little different. Only girls like boy bands, but what we do - a pop act - is for everybody, you know,' he muses. 'I don't like the word 'indie' - it seems a lazy term for a guitar band. We're a rock'n'roll pop band.'
Although seven tracks from their triple-platinum 2006 debut album, Inside In/Inside Out, hit the British top 40, critical reception has been decidedly mixed. They're all right by Oasis' Noel Gallagher but accused of making 'girls' music' by Kasabian; The Guardian thinks they're all 'vibrant melodies and finely tuned choruses' while Pitchfork Media hails the band as purveyors of banal pop with little personality.
'Of course I'll say yeah, I think that's unfair. A lot of the stuff we talk about is very personal,' says Garred. 'I think to understand us a bit more, it's a case of waiting to see what we do next to realise what we did before.'
In April, the band released Konk, the follow-up to Inside In/Inside Out, and have been touring the world in support since. Well, two of them have. Bassist Max Rafferty left the band in January (in an interview with Orange World, frontman Luke Pritchard put it down to 'various issues including his anxieties and taking drugs probably more than he should have') and Garred is home in Brighton, nursing a pulled arm muscle, leaving Pritchard and guitarist Hugh Harris flying the Kooks' flag with Rafferty's temporary replacement, Dan Logan.