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Hats off to Love in the Asylum and Sound of Guns, they both put on admirable performances, the first Kings of Leon-esque Londoners on their first UK support tour, and the latter veterans of Radio 1’s Big Weekend. If our favourite Dundee quartet hadn’t been on the best of form, it wouldn’t be remotely difficult to bang on about them. But let’s face it. Saturday night was all about The View.
Opening with the frantically syncopated ‘Waistband’, soon followed by bouncy debut single ‘Wasted Little DJs’, the room was alive, crowd-surfing and all; York was certainly up for it. As the next few songs were played through, there was a tangible sense of an irrefutable spring being wound in the (albeit few) members of the audience hanging around the periphery, and as the opening few notes of anthem to the unemployed ‘Superstar Tradesman’ came over the PA, it well and truly snapped.
This weekend The View proved that the best way to experience them is undoubtedly live: on record the up-tempo energy to their particular brand of indie rock ‘n’ roll is obvious, but in a packed basement it certainly goes up a notch in crunch and raucous abandon.
As the hour and a quarter set hit the home stretch, an audience-led rendition of the softer ‘Face for the Radio’ provided a few minutes of welcome relief for the sweat-soaked throng getting packed into a progressively smaller area towards the front half of the room, before the scrum of the evening ensued while the band blitzed through ‘Shock Horror’ to the finish, rounding off a sweaty, beer-drenched, muscle-aching, but in no way wearying night.
All in all, full marks all round; to the bands, the audience, and even to the leniency of the bouncers. As the chants at almost every plausible opportunity quite rightly stated, “The View, The View, The View are on fire!”
If you’re heading off home for the festive season over the next few days, or just fancy a trip, then you can catch them as they whistle through Hull, Hartlepool, Carlisle and Dunfermline in the back end of this week, at the end of what, judging by the Facebook posts of both support bands and the headliners themselves, has been a blistering tour.
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