- Music
- 29 Aug 12
See Here Now
They were tipped to be the new Oasis, but The View decided they’d rather party ‘til they dropped than sell millions of records. Five years later they’re somehow still standing. Singer Kyle Falconer tells Ed Power how they’ve not only survived but prospered.
Kyle Falconer has a confession – when he told journalists he’d knocked the fast living on the head a few years ago, he wasn’t being entirely truthful. In fact, The View frontman was partying as hard as ever. But the band’s record company – from whom they’ve since parted ways – wanted people to believe otherwise.
“They were trying to get us to say we’d calmed down,” says the Dundee singer, with a schoolboy-ish giggle. “So we went around saying to everyone in the press that we’d grown up a bit. We were lying through our teeth. We were saying stuff like ‘Oh, we’ve chilled... blah, blah blah...’ Actually we were drinking away.”
At 25, Falconer is at the age when most musicians, if not quite ready to calm down, are at least open to the possibility there might be more to life than pints, kebabs and sundry backstage high-jinks. But for The View – four Scottish ragamuffins with a loose-hipped Britrock sound – the Andrew WK credo of ‘party hard, party often’ remains a guiding light.
“It’s what you do,” Falconer says. “If anything, as you get older you start to appreciate it more. We’ve always enjoyed a beer. You meet these bands backstage and they’re there with their laptops. You say ‘fancy a pint?’, and they’re too cool to go to the pub with you. You only live once – and you’re in the rock ‘n’ roll business. You want to get the most out of it.”
Still, there’s a dark side to the fast lane, he acknowledges. Falconer had to leave Dundee because it was impossible for him to go on the rip without being hassled. Actually, it was getting to be impossible for him to walk down the street without being hassled.
“There was one incident at a snooker hall. I thought ‘fuck this!’ I’m out of here man. You had people who were so fucking jealous of you ‘cos you’d be on telly. It was like, ‘What have I done to you, man? I’ve not seen you before in me life.’ You couldn’t go out. Well, you could, but you had to have a big crew with you. Otherwise it was dangerous.”
The View’s fourth album is called Cheeky For A Reason. The title is an acknowledgment of their media caricature as four raffish ne’er-do-wells, real life Beano characters with scruffy hair and an impish twinkle in the eye.
“We’ve been described as ‘cheeky’ and I could never work out if that was a good or bad thing,” says the singer. “I suppose it sums us up. We were sat around suggesting possible record titles. Jokingly I suggested that and it stuck.”
Not everyone buys into the caricature of The View as harmless scamps. Which Bitch? attracted a fair amount of feminist ire, with the title widely perceived as nasty and misogynist.
They’ll have done little to boost their credentials with the Andrew Dworkin set with the recent video to single ‘Hold On Now’, in which actor Martin Compston plays a rampaging sex pest.
It’s a pretty horrific promo, with Compston – the Scottish actor best known for appearing in Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen – strangling and sexually abusing women. Imagine an even more tasteless take on The Prodigy’s ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, recorded on one-fiftieth of the budget.
“Music videos don’t get played any more, unless you’re Coldplay. We thought ‘right let’s do a nuts video’,” says Falconer. “We have all these women’s rights people on our case. We thought the video was humorous. It’s got a man with pink underwear in it. It’s funny. The character Martin plays.. he knows he’s wrong but he cannae stop.”
Cheeky For A Reason gets a live airing when The View play the Limelight, Belfast (September 7); Cyprus Avenue, Cork (8) and Whelan’s, Dublin (9).
