A Dundee mum has relived her “crazy” night out with Lewis Capaldi before the singer hit it big time.
Nicole Borthwick will never forget the evening she watched The View perform live at the The Doghouse on Brown Street in 2013.
It saw her and a friend bond with a couple of lads in the crowd over their shared love of Kyle Falconer’s band.
But it wasn’t until Nicole read an interview with Capaldi in The Courier – which revealed he came to Dundee to see The View at the old Doghouse aged 15 and “got p*****” with his pals” – that she realised who she had partied with.
The 29-year-old was then inspired to dig through some of her old photos from the concert.
And she says she couldn’t believe it when she discovered a selfie with the Bathgate-born superstar, who headlines Radio 1’s Big Weekend at Camperdown on Sunday.
The mum-of-one said: “I was on the phone to my mum this morning and I noticed the story about Lewis Capaldi at The View gig, and I said, ‘Mum, I think I know which one he is talking about because I think I was there’.
“I went through my photos from that night and I was just checking the date on it to see what year it was, and I came across a photo I took with him, and I was like, ‘Mum, I’ve got a photo of him’, and she says, ‘No you’ve not’ and I said, ‘No, I actually do’.”
“I have seen the photo loads of times over the years but I just never linked that photo to him – even though he still looks exactly the same.”
‘It was a crazy night’
On the night of the concert, Nicole says she and her pal got talking to a couple of boys at the front of the crowd – who she now knows to be Capaldi and his friend.
She recalled: “Lewis Capaldi was lovely. Really, really nice, just a typical drunk boy, really rowdy.
“We had all been drinking and talking and dancing together, arms around each others shoulders and jumping all over the place
“He seemed to be really enjoying it. Afterwards, everyone sat in one big circle on the floor singing Same Jeans and hitting their hands on the ground.
“It was a bit of a crazy night.”
She also remembers that Capaldi’s companion – the boy pictured with them – had brought a red marker pen.
She added: “We were all writing on each other with this red marker pen – all over each other.
“We just went a bit crazy with this red marker. One of them wrote up my arm, ‘Kyle, Kyle’.
“I couldn’t get it off for days – I am cringing at the thought of it now.”
Nicole, who has a ticket for BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend this Sunday, is excited to see the Someone You Loved singer-songwriter for the first time.
She said: “I am actually a really big fan of his, which is a bit strange now, come to think of it.
“My little girl loves him too – she actually thought she was called Lewis for the first few years of her life.”
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