Songfacts®:

• The single that catapulted The Kooks to stardom, vocalist Luke Pritchard wrote "Naïve" when he was just 16 years old. He admitted to Q magazine in a 2020 interview that it surprised him when it became a hit.
  
  "I didn't see the potential in that song at all even though I thought the lyric was interesting. If you asked me, that was the last thing I thought would be the big song and it was the big song. If that song hadn't happened, things would have been quite different. It's a song that bridged the gap between pop and rock and roll and has a special place in the world now but at the time I just thought, we've got way better songs."
• The song finds Pritchard addressing his girlfriend. He wants to know if she's the "naïve," innocent girl he originally thought she was. Or is she using him by pretending to be a "smiling sweetheart" but in reality is cheating on him?
• The Kooks released this as the fourth single from their debut album, Inside In / Inside Out. Much of the record was written by Pritchard about his relationship with singer Katie Melua when both were students at the BRIT School in Croydon.
• The song featured on the soundtrack for the 2009 film 17 Again and the One Tree Hill episode "Resolve," which was first broadcast on January 24, 2007.
• Former Sugarbabes member Mutya Buena covered this for the B-side of her 2007 debut solo single "Real Girl."
• When Luke Pritchard wrote "Naïve" he was a fairly unconfident, paranoid teen in a relationship with a girl who was getting into a world he didn't understand. "The song is about the fear of someone doing something bad to you," he explained to The Guardian. "The lyrics are real in some ways, but I was too young to have actually experienced that situation, so it was more me projecting my teenage fears. I've found myself in that situation since – it's become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy."