Forgive & Forget

Album: Listen (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • After bonding with Inflo while traveling in America, Kooks frontman Luke Pritchard headed to Los Angeles with the hip-hop producer to pen some tunes. This story of a couple breaking up in a bar was the first song they wrote together. The singer explained to Q magazine that the "magic" first take vocal demo for this song in LA was later sewn into the band's London sessions.
  • The song's performance-based video was directed by Ivana Bobic, who is known for the movies The Priest and Frankie Teardrop (both 2009) and In the Night (2012). The clip finds The Kooks performing the song 'in the round', surrounded by dancers. Bibic told Promo News: "Forgive & Forget is such a fun, big track that I wanted to have an all-singing-all-dancing approach to it - the whole lot - band, dancers and a giant human zoetrope."

    "The title suggested a kind of tongue-in-cheek love amnesia and constant repetition, so I wondered if I could make the whole video circular - constantly spinning around and around," she added. "I wanted the dancers to multiply into the band performance as the track progresses, they're like space-babes with an Alexander Wang twist, appearing from the dark. The dance builds and builds to the big middle eight drums where the whole spinning circus accelerates to a giant zoetrope and the dancers turn into one. It's a bit of a visual pun on the 'forgetting.'"

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