The
View are riding the NME Rock Tour around the country and they’re
riding it hard. The band has built up a reputation for hell raising
and, ironically, the band has been barred from the Bayview pub in Dundee
from which they take their name.
Comparing
them with Franz Ferdinand is about as apt as comparing them to Belle
& Sebastian, not least of all because of the hundred odd miles between
Dundee and Glasgow, but with a number one album under their belt, and
a second one under way The View are looking strong.
Though it was suggested
that the band was barred from the Bayview because they’d ridden
a scooter over the bar (‘It was only a micro scooter’, explains
Kyle) it had more to do with the fact that they stole a lot of beer;
“They’d leave the taps on downstairs, and we’d just
help ourselves some days, and get completely pissed.”
Beer plays a large part in the lives of The View - when a staffer wanders
by with a few bottles of spirits the boys try to blag some Jack Daniels.
‘Does booze
ever get in the way of work?’
“Nah, it helps!’ ‘We’ve had a couple of pints
before we start, and a few more by the end, we start enjoying it a bit
more!”
Even though the
gig is sold out people are queuing in the street outside, four-hours
before the doors open, and as I’m interviewing Kyle and Steve,
The Horrors drift by, eyeing up the buffet, whilst The Automatic are
doing an E4 photo shoot around the corner. Despite what’s been
reported as a public spat between The Automatic and The Horrors, them
describing each other as ‘rubbish’ and ‘incompetent’,
relationships have been amicable over the course of the tour. Kyle dismisses
the bad blood in the press, as ‘just a load of shit.’
Saying that, The
View didn’t get along with Leeds post-punkers Forward Russia quite
so well.
“We used to
read about them in NME. We were getting to play with a band that was
getting their name in magazines and that was a very big thing for us
at the time, but we’d never heard the music before. We went to
the dressing room and started having a sing song, and they said ‘Could
we have some alone time?’ and we were like ‘What? Pricks,
man.’ They were being arseholes so we ended up playing a gig in
the toilet. It got a bit out of hand, and they started ripping the urinals
out of the walls and stuff.”
Kyle explains the apparent young age of the bands on the NME Tour, saying,
‘I think it’s what appeals to the record companies nowadays,
they seem to sign younger bands, and because of bands like the Arctic
Monkeys, people say ‘If they can do it, I can do it.’ There’s
more competition nowadays.”
There’s a
fair deal of vandalism associated with The View. Aside from Kyle breaking
his ankle after jumping out of a hotel window, the band have also been
banned from the Travelodge chain, after Kyle left a bath running overnight,
allegedly with a duvet in it.
He explains, ‘Everyone
went to a party one night, and I was on my own and I was absolutely
blattered. I left to go to bed, but I left the plug in the bath and
forgot that I’d done it, and there was nobody in the other room.
I fell asleep, and woke up pissed, going ‘Where the fuck is everybody?’
and remembered that they were at the party, and just forgot to go back,
and I never went back to that room. And I completely forgot that I’d
done it.”
Confusingly, Steve
adds, “It was a publicity stunt anyway.”
This sounds oddly
like an admission of guilt, in contradiction to Kyle’s denial.
“It was a publicity stunt by Travelodge to get their name in the
papers. We genuinely didn’t mean it, but they made a big deal
of it, like we put a duvet in the bath, and that’s just a load
of shit.”
Pete Doherty took a shine to the band at the beginning of last year
and invited them on tour with Babyshambles. When Steve was arrested
with Doherty when he, rather fittingly, drove the wrong way down a one-way
road, it turned out to be a big break for the band, bringing The View
into the tabloid limelight.
Steve’s not
shy of the fact that the band’s jump into the national consciousness
was made in the ex-Libertine’s reflection; “Well it was
good. A lot of people had never heard of The View and it would have
taken ages to build up a positive sort of thing. We weren’t big
at all at the time. [Doherty] is just like any other artist. We love
the Babyshambles and the Libertines and all their music.”
The band’s
old van is described as being a bit like a ‘builder’s van’,
but with the NME Tour the band has upgraded. Kyle explains, “We’ve
got a tour bus now. Playstations, TVs, bunk beds. It makes a lot of
difference. We used to have the shittest van, there was nay space on
the bus. It was a wee van, with the gear in the back and two seats facing
each other. Even when we got that, at first we were like ‘Yes!’”.
Having made headliners
when they’d barely released an album, the band has had to get
used to fame quickly.
Being star-struck
is slowly wearing off for Kyle, “With certain people its amazing,
with other people it’s just like ‘alright!’ When we
met Liam Gallagher, it was a bit like ‘woah’ a little bit
scary, but we did the Jonathan Ross radio show, and I was a bit early
so I was sleeping on the couch and when I woke up Lee Evans was like
‘Alright, mate’, and I was thinking what the fuck, I thought
I was still dreaming. I was still pissed, and he told me he had a mate
in Dundee who’d died of alcoholism, and said ‘I can still
smell the drink off you,
it’s not a good thing in Dundee, is it?’ When we’d
done the interview we came back in and Patsy Kensit had one of our albums
and said, “Can you sign this for my son?” It’s surreal.’
“We used to
prefer a northern crowd,” Kyle explains, “because when we
came down south everyone was very stand offish. They’ve just got
to get to know you and now everywhere it’s pretty much the same,
but now we’ve been on the go for a wee while, people get to know
you. When we first started out, we said, ‘Imagine what it’ll
be like when we’ve got ten songs!’ We’ve got songs
for a second album, but we’ve got no time to rehearse them on
tour.”
Before they had
their own material, The View were a cover band. “We covered bands
like Oasis, The Beatles, Stone Roses, T Rex, Squeeze, Travis. You have
to please the crowds,” says Steve. “We were playing caravan
parks.”
Kyle butts in, “We
used to play Britney Spears and ‘Baby One More Time’, on
acoustic, it’s just whatever will please people. We never expected
to get any place out of Dundee. We never really tried, we’re just
lucky. We got the local vibe there and that’s how it is. It’s
just because when we got chucked from the Bayview, we started practising
at a place called the Doghouse, in a room upstairs.”
“We started
getting good people in there. The music scene used to be dead in Dundee.
We started playing, and just because we had that many mates, so all
our gigs were getting sold-out. We did this wee shitty tour, called
the World Tour of Dundee where we played the worst pubs in Dundee you
could possibly find.
People were getting stabbed and windows were getting broken. It was
just mental.’
“When the landlord got bottled!’ ‘But it was all good
natured. We were in a really rough area of Dundee, when this guy took
seven punches to the face, and just stood there and went ‘You
didn’t want to do that,’ and punched the guy out with one
clean punch. We used to get quite a substantial amount of money, because
nobody wanted to play there. We used to go up to
the side, and just play regardless. They were great gigs. We’d
get £350 and loads of free beer. The place was going to get closed
down because other stuff had happened and there was one last gig, and
the manager says ‘Do whatever you want, trash the gaffe’
so we smashed up the pool tables, and there was not one window left
in the place, everybody just trashed the place.’
Steve adds,
“Someone pulled an electric wire out of the wall...”
‘Yeah, somebody tried to threaten someone by electrocuting them!
‘Get back, get back!’ There were these ten-year-olds, who
the bouncers would let in as they didn’t drink. We did have trouble
sometimes, but not in Dundee. In Dundee, we’re like semi-gods
now, just because we’ve never had anyone in Dundee and anyone
who has a music video on the TV, is amazing. At our school they’ve
got our exam papers under glass! You cannee go into the music shops,
you get followed in!”
The band have been
playing all over the world in the last few months, in Japan before Christmas,
in America afterwards, and to London for New Years Eve.
“Where will
the band be a year from now?”
Kyle replies, “We
don’t like to talk about where we’ll be a year from now,
we just see how it goes. We’d like a wee bit bigger venues. And
we’d like to support Oasis on their world tour. In September we’ll
go back to Dundee and play the Doghouse. You can’t get a normal
gig now though, because everyone goes mental when you’re back
in town. We’ll see how the second album goes.’
As long as they
stay in one piece, The View are going to be here stay.
Words:
Michael Simon
