Speaking to The Times last month, the Brit School’s most successful export, Leona Lewis, confided a fond memory of an impromptu little show she once played with fellow alumni Katie Melua and Luke Pritchard. “Katie did Crazy Little Thing Called Love. Luke played guitar and I played piano.” You may not have much sympathy to spare for Pritchard, who has a million-seller under his belt, but with every new triumph that comes out of Croydon’s fame academy, his own history at the school casts him further as an indie imposter.

It’s bad enough for artists when critics bash them over the head with their own past, but when other artists start joining in, that must really hurt. Since the release of Inside In/Inside Out two years ago, Lily Allen, Kasabian, Foals and Arctic Monkeys have all had a go at the Kooks for reasons ranging from Pritchard’s rock star attire to the band’s route to success.

Coolness continues to evade the Kooks. What they do appear to have, though, are the keys to the playlists of Radio 1 and Radio 2. At a stroke, their current single, Always Where I Need to Be, has ensured that Konk is fated to emulate the sales of its predecessor. In three happy-clappy minutes, the song reassured their fans that there would be no tune-jettisoning attempts to be taken seriously.

With the bombastic exceptions of Sway and Do You Wanna, Konk is a promise kept. When the charts are done with the current hit, they’ll embrace the bouncing boom-thump of Stormy Weather.

The beat-pop journalese of Mr Maker suggests an effort to write a song in the vein of the Strawbs’ How Everyone But Sam Was a Hypocrite and – with the guitarist Hugh Harris channelling a young Johnny Marr – it’s rather fantastic.

If, in the words of Kasabian, the Kooks make “music for girls”, that probably has something to do with a serenading quality that suggests Pritchard has, at some point in his life, stared a woman in the eyes and compared her to the Moon. “We were lovers in every way, left school together,” he sings on One Last Time, before lamenting the fact that “now I can hardly remember her face”.

Writing catchy tunes that sound like the work of nice young men is no more rock’n’roll than attending rock’n’roll school itself. But if modesty is a trait you look for in music as much as you look for it in people, you’ll get a good few turntable miles out of Konk.

(Virgin, TMS £12.99)

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