Album Review: The Kooks – ‘Inside In/Inside Out’

First released in January 2006 by Virgin Records, the album was a great success for the new indie-rock band, The Kooks, reaching number 2 in the UK album charts, and selling over 2,000,000 copies worldwide since it’s release eight years ago. The album flows seamlessly from song to song and yet still ranges from softer love ballads such as ‘Seaside’ to more roudy tracks such as ‘matchbox’, describing the evens of a ‘lad’s nigh out on the town’. However, my personal favorite song on the album has to be ‘Sofa Song’ – just a small peek inside the mind of your average, British lad.

The Brighton boys write everyone of their songs based on their own experiences and thought processes, making the music accessible to everybody who had been through, or is in, the young adult stage of life. The events they sing about are pretty bog standard as far as day to day life goes, but this is what makes their lyrics so relateable, and I’m sure that any Kooks fan such as myself would tell you, this is what makes the band so lovable and curiously charming.

Eric Clapton – Layla

This song definitely makes it into the “Jazzmin Fotherby Top 10 Greatest Songs of all Time” awards, if not for it’s flawless craftsmanship, for it’s sheer awesomeness alone. The song was written by the well known Eric Clapton and, the not so well known at the time, Jim Gordon. However, on it’s release in 1971, the song wasn’t well received compared to it’s popularity over a year later, and even still today. ‘Layla’ is widely recognised as one of the greatest rock songs of all time and gained a reputable number 27 in The Rolling Stones Magazines “Top 500”, and then won a Grammy award in 1993 for Clapton’s re-mastered acoustic version, but then who could argue with that when Clapton’s and Duane Allman’s godly opening riff seems to stop time it’s self and takes every rock fan back to the release of this classic Derek and the Dominos album all those years ago.

It is said that “Layla” was inspired by Nizami Ganjavi’s story “The Story of Layla and Majnun, a book that was given to Clapton by his friend Ian Dallas. It was a story of a young man who fell deeply in love with “Layla” and went crazy because he could not marry her; hence “Layla, I’m begging darling, please!” However, it could be argued that this song was written about one of Clapton’s love affairs, similar to his well known song “Wonderful tonight”… But that’s another story.

All in all, I think it’s safe to say that “Layla” is a timeless record with a timeless melody, a song attribute that isn’t commonly found in todays world of popular music.

First four bars of the song.