The group’s 20-year-old frontman and songwriter Luke Pritchard explains: You come off stage and
The group’s 20-year-old frontman and songwriter, Luke Pritchard, explains: “You come off stage and get smashed to avoid that sense of anticlimax. But we’re sorting ourselves out now – for the sake of the music, we’ve got to.”The singer and I have met in a nondescript Bristol pub. Frazzled by his on-the-road excesses, the bassist, Max Rafferty, is recuperating at home. His group’s debut album, Inside In / Inside Out, has just charted at No 9, and if The Kooks are to avoid losing momentum, the show must go on. You have to be extraordinarily good to impress them.” When Jal tours this month with Amadou and Mariam and Souad Massi, as African Soul Rebels, that should not be a problem.The African Soul Rebels tour starts at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, on 17 February and continues to 4 March. Four days into their current UK tour, the Brighton based upstarts The Kooks are a man down.
“They’re not as hard as African audiences.”Why so? “In Africa almost everyone can sing. I got a group together, and we performed in churches with piano and drums. We asked people who came to our concerts to bring a packet of flour, as many people in Kenya needed food.”His first recorded song, “Praise the Lord”, became a hit, and his second, “Gua”, in which he rapped in Arabic, English, Dinka and his native Nuer, topped the charts in Kenya for eight weeks. When it was licensed for the Rough Guide to the Music of Sudan, together with a song by the 58-year-old singer and oud player Abdel Gadir Salim (a Muslim from the north), the idea germinated for their joint album, Ceasefire.Appearing for Live8 in Cornwall last year, Jal got into a famous row with Sir Bob Geldof over that pointed piece of marginalisation He has no hard feelings now “English audiences are very supportive,” he says. She died when he was seven, and he was evacuated to “safety” in Ethiopia where, when the aid agencies weren’t looking, the SPLA gave him an AK47 and sent him into battle.When the SPLA split into warring factions, Jal and several hundred boys fled across the desert.
After fighting, starvation, animal attacks and suicides, only a handful of them made it to a rival camp.There, his luck turned: a British aid worker, Emma McCune, adopted him and put him on a flight to Nairobi. Civil war had raged in Sudan since the Fifties, but when the Muslim government in the north imposed sharia law, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in the south mobilised against it. Jal’s father, a policeman, joined the insurgency, while Jal and his mother moved from village to village to evade hostilities. We don’t have to kill each other.”
His voice is light, sincere and boyish as he talks about his short but eventful life.