As The View prepare for the March 14 release of their third album, Bread and Circuses, The Courier’s Alan Wilson talks to lead singer Kyle Falconer to get the inside track on a hugely important release for the band.
5:Life”Life is another song we had for years it was about when my dad died and I didn’t want my mum to meet another partner. It’s funny how they end up on the album because we had loads of other songs but Youth loved it and told us to work on it and it made it.
“When my mum died I did a new chorus and it really worked at the end. It’s like two songs in one, really.”
6: Friend”Friend is just about giving up your faith a girl I was going out with started going out with one of my mates and I just gave up my faith.”
7: BeautifulOne of fellow songwriter Kieren Webster’s songs, it benefited from a bit of help from one of their friends from the Dundee music scene, Stuart Purvey from The Law, says Kyle.
“Kieren wrote this. He was writing loads of dark songs that were really sad and he had a long conversation with Stuart, who told him to just try putting in some major chords and turn it round. So he did it and especially in the chorus, and, when he gave it to me to sing, it gave me the chance to be really soulful.
“We also got Primal Scream’s backing singers in for this and it was amazing.”
8: BlondieNext track Blondie is just about girls in general. “It started out sounding like a Blondie track and it was the title we used for it when we were working on the song. It’s about when things are great they always turn out wrong, like when your girlfriend cooks you a meal but it’s not good, when you’re happy one minute, the next minute you’re sad. It’s like there are always questions rather than answers.”
9: SundayIt’s the first single from the album and was given away as a free download back in November via the band’s website theviewareonfire.com. Again with a big singalong chorus, it promises to be a live favourite.
10: Walls”This is another song Kieren wrote. He started writing it on the bass. Youth loved it and really liked the timpani drums. He wrote all the words but we never had a chorus for it. It took us ages to get it but I didn’t want to step on his toes.”
11: Happy”This was the first song I had after Which Bitch? I was down in London and me and my brother Ronnie were singing it he was doing all the backing vocals on the demo and we had loads of pals there as well. When I came back to Dundee I just said to the boys, ‘I’ve got this song’, and they liked it.”
12: The Best Lasts ForeverOriginally the title track, this is the song the fans will be singing all the way home after the gigs in April.
“Kieren got a new piano and he had a riff but he wasn’t too confident on piano at the time but just kept playing it over and over again. It’s just simple we worked on it and it was about finding the bass note and going on to the next note from that.
“It’s not about any one thing it’s about anything that’s the best lasting forever. It wasn’t always going to be on the album but once the strings were added at the end we thought it was beautiful.”
What Kyle didn’t say was it’s also a wry but confident poke at people who scoff at his lifestyle. Check out the verse: ‘I’ve been on my knees in so many streets, and not just the ones in Dundee; I’ve fell on my face, been a legless disgrace, had ten thousand laughing at me, still the best lasts forever…’
Brilliant.Grace hits the shops on Monday, followed a week later by Bread and Circuses. Buy them you won’t be disappointed.If they went away with confidence dented after the relatively poor performance of its predecessor, Which Bitch?, then they’ve come back with the perfect response to critics who proclaimed “career suicide” at the time.
Two years of hard graft at home, in the rehearsal rooms and the studio yielded stacks of new material, from which they’ve chosen 12 belting tracks which make this a stunning album that could take them back to the top of the charts.
Produced by Martin Glover, aka Youth (Killing Joke, The Verve, The Orb), the album casts aside the youthful innocence of first album, Hats Off To The Buskers, while retaining all the bouncy, catchy melodies of their early material, allied to the more expansive sounds of Which Bitch? to create what is their most rounded album to date.
Under Youth’s guidance, the band also famously cast aside their drink-fuelled binges to record the album sober.
Lead singer Kyle Falconer and fellow songwriter Kieren Webster have also progressed lyrically but their earthy poetry is still grounded in everyday experiences: new love, love lost, domestic rifts, the death of loved ones, petty theft, playing gigs, drinking, fighting, drug-taking and so on. In short, it’s The View doing what they do best: reflecting their own lives in song.
The title ‘Bread and Circuses’ comes from Roman political sleight of hand, where you artificially appeased the populace by keeping them fed and entertained, according to Kyle. If that comes across as the band getting all political on us, worry not Kyle says it just made sense of what they were doing and how other people just saw them as entertainers and not real people.
And the real issue is, Kyle, Kieren, drummer Steven Morrison and guitarist Pete Reilly have pulled off a brilliant record, rammed with potential singles, clever lyrics, gloriously melodic choruses and tight yet still raucous riff-driven pop rock.
Taking a break from rehearsals in London before their Album Chart Show gig on Tuesday, Kyle was refusing to make any predictions for how the album will fare when it comes out a week on Monday.
“It would be great to get to No. 1 again obviously we think it’s good enough but Adele’s been there for weeks now and she’s sweeping everything up. We just can’t wait for it to come out. It’s been ages since we finished the album and it’s great to get it out at last.
“I think all our albums are great, they’re all different and they all hold up.”
So, with Kyle’s help, here’s a track-by-track tour of what you can expect:
1: GraceThis is the perfect album opener, a throwback to Hats Off To The Buskers, developed to provide the soundtrack of 2011. It announces the album’s arrival with The View at their most raucous, as jagged guitars intertwine with thunderous drums and an irresistible, singalong chorus which is sure to soundtrack both indie clubs up and down the country and the UK festivals come summer.
The lyrics are about setting aside your differences and just sorting things out, not living your life in conflict with other people. And it contains the significant lyric, “A minor little headache can be cured by a little resolve.”
Kyle explains, “I got the idea from something that was happening. Iit’s inspired by a bit of a domestic rift that got out of hand but it’s about more than that. It’s about me being a sober boy too.”
2: Underneath The LightsKyle says this is “a track we’ve had since 2006. We’ve always had it and it’s one of the songs we sang at campfires. It never really clicked though and it was put on the back burner but we showed it to Youth he thought it was great and told us to work on it. He never let it rest.
“It never had a chorus before and we just got it: ‘And now we’ve kissed, let’s make the most of this’. It just lifted the whole thing up.”
3: Tragic MagicThe title speaks for itself it’s an anti-drugs warning about the highs and lows and the all-too evident consequences of substance abuse.
Starting off with optimistic, chiming guitars, the upbeat music is contradicted by the lyric, ‘And it’s just a case of tragic magic, when you can’t recall feeling fantastic, just another case of tragic magic, the dealer remembers more than the man’.
4: Girl”Girl is about a girl who used to live next door to my mate in London,” says Kyle. “She was from Argentina she was absolutely beautiful. We used to have these parties and stuff would go missing, guitars and everything.
“One day we chapped on her door and she opened it, looking hotter than ever. We asked her if she took our stuff and she got really annoyed but my mate burst in the door and there was the guitar just sitting there.”
Which leads on to the adorably catchy chorus, ‘Don’t let the girl come in…’ A sure-fire hit single of the future.
Continued…