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Kyle Falconer: ‘You hear stories about Oasis and The Libertines – they haven’t got a touch on us’

A reformed man: Kyle Falconer
A reformed man: Kyle Falconer

On a day that already seems a very long time ago for fans of certain home nation teams, Scotland are playing their opening European Championships 2020 match against the Czech Republic. In the hours before kick-off, Kyle Falconer – last seen fronting indie tearaways The View – is in Manchester, performing at a football fan zone.

Wielding an acoustic guitar that seems bigger than him and rocking luscious Cavalier King Charles Spaniel hair, Falconer’s pocket-dynamo dimensions are accentuated by knee-length denim shorts. They are less suggestive of an astonishing musical comeback than a teenager on a lads holiday. But despite the casualness, and in startling counterpoint to the rackety rock’n’roll charge of his old band, the solo Falconer reveals himself to be quite the pop craftsman.

He does an unplugged version of recent single Stress Ball, a Sixties Brit-beat stomper, despite it containing “the highest notes I’ve ever written”, he laughingly admits to the room. His throatily soulful voice performs similar wonders on Double Yellow Lines, a melodically rich deep cut from Which Bitch?, 2009’s unfortunately titled second album by The View. New song Laura is an ode to the wife that the 34-year-old credits with helping him turn his life around after a dozen years of mayhem and indulgence that also took three stints in rehab to exorcise.

That, he says, is why his new solo album is called No Love Songs for Laura.

“They’re all love songs for her,” Falconer attempts to explain in a thickly-accented voice that even I, as a fellow native of Dundee, often struggle to follow. The 13 songs, all of them daytime radio-friendly belters, roam the emotional hinterland. The spartan acoustic lament Mother is about his mum, who he lost when he was 21. The lilting Don’t Call Me Baby began life as a song for a “dark” musical about rape that he co-wrote with Laura.

Kyle Falconer performing as part of The View in 2015 - Redferns
Kyle Falconer performing as part of The View in 2015 - Redferns

“But that’s the point,” he concludes, “love comes from the craziest places.”

Love and the accompanying focus have also helped push this one-time party monster in interesting directions. Now a serious jogger, Falconer eats up 20 kilometres a day. Sometimes he takes a day or so off. “But then I go: it’s time for a marathon.” So he runs from his home in Broughty Ferry, just outside Dundee, to Arbroath and back, which is 42.5 kilometres. “My next thing is an ultra-marathon – 100k.”

That would be incredible for anyone, but Falconer spent years, frankly, caning it.

“It took me a while to build up the fitness. But I’m always into challenging myself. And it did make me focus mentally, because I’ve got mental health issues...Pretty much every night when I go to bed, I have to tell myself to shut up, ‘no, no, stop thinking’ – but always a song comes in. And if I don’t write that down, that could be a million-pound tune for me.”

All of which is even more impressive given the murky road Kyle Falconer travelled to get here. The View took off in 2006 with the one-two-three punch of their opening trio of singles. Wasted Little DJs, Superstar Tradesman and Same Jeans, ramshackle rabble-rousers all, teed up debut album Hats Off to the Buskers, which entered the charts at Number One in January 2007.

As their fans were wont to chant at their chaotically thrilling gigs, The View were on fire. But for Falconer, 18 when things started taking off for the band of schoolmates, he felt like a kid in a sweetshop, taking to drink and drugs like a duck to vodka.

“It felt like it was what I was supposed to do,” he tells me over a post-gig and post-match pint. “I felt like that was my job. It felt like every day was a party. Then great things kept happening – we’re Number One, we’re the most played band on the radio, NME’s presenting us with an award. I thought: that’s cool, that’s supposed to happen to me because I deserve it because I’m good. But because you’re a kid, you don’t realise the damage it’s going to do to you.

“And even to this day I can’t shift being tarred with the brush of being the crazy guy from The View. I feel like everyone’s got a story about me.”

To be fair, he has enough stories about himself.

Falconer tells hair-raising tales of “loads of gigs I didn’t turn up for”, “blood on the lifts in hotels” and, after an all-nighter in a recording studio, paddling down a river in a canoe to the nearest pub. They got so cold that they decided that the best way to survive was to wet themselves. “Then we realised that the water was only shin-deep. Then this farmer turns up with a shotgun and I’m sitting in this canoe in my boxers in my own [urine] and he’s like: ‘What yous doing on my land?’”

He shakes his head. “Mate, the s--- we done… You hear stories about Oasis and The Libertines and all these mad bands – they haven’t got a touch on us. [A certain big pop star] was in the other studio at the time. At the time he wasn’t doing any gear but he said he’d try it. The next minute he’s a gear-head, hanging off the rafters.”

But back then, it was expected and, he says, encouraged by the music industry. “You’d turn up for shows and someone would be like: ‘Do you want a line [of cocaine]? You cannae play without a line, get a line.’”

All of this was partly why he wanted to always do a solo record, with The View going their separate ways after five albums in 2017. He was fed up with the intra-band drama and, he says, with not being able to flex his pure pop songwriting muscles.

“The rest of the band were into Nirvana, Iggy Pop and Jesus and Mary Chain. That wasn’t my cup of tea at all. I was into Del Amitri, Alanis Morrissette, Crowded House – that’s what changed my life. And then I also loved actual pop music. But I’d never have said I was into pop music, because you weren’t allowed to. It wasn't cool. But now it’s cool as f---!" he yelps. "ABBA are my favourite band.”

All that said, “I miss the gigs and the big huge shows. The biggest show I did solo was 1200 capacity at QMU,” he says of Glasgow University’s Queen Margaret Union. “And that took a while to sell out. Whereas The View would sell out gigs like that,” he says with a snap of his fingers. “And hearing the roar of ‘The View are on fire!’ – oof, it’s like taking a line of cocaine. And that first chord of [2011 single] Grace, crazy!” he says, sticking his finger in his mouth to make a popping noise out of his cheek, something this effervescent Artful Dodger does regularly.

Things ended ignominiously for The View, after a 10th anniversary tour. They were assured by their old manager it would be a get-rich-quick scheme, with each member promised £80,000. But at the end, “he got somebody else to tell us that we hadn’t paid any tax so all the money from the touring for a year went to pay the tax. We were left with no money at all and that’s where we all started fighting. It was horrible. I had not a penny.”

Still, truthful to a fault (and, arguably, to his own detriment), Falconer isn’t about to start casting stones.

He admits he’s always been a manic character, recalling how in childhood his mum took him to the doctor “a few times – I was on beta blockers since I was about 13, but it wasn’t working. She always used to say I had a glass a--. I was hyperactive, just mad,” he says, clapping his hands together as rapidly as he speaks. “I was always just looking for the next project. When I was a kid I’d be phoning up theatres, or phoning up record labels aged 14, saying: ‘Will you sign me?’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’ve got this song, f--- sign me!’ Always annoying people, that’s the way I am.”

That past, and that antic energy, are two reasons he’s formed such a close connection with his new manager, Alan McGee, who used to run Oasis’s label. He describes the former Creation boss as one of his best friends, always there to calm him down, talk him down and reassure him that “I’ve done worse sh-- than you, Kyle, you’re a good guy”.

McGee is clearly something of a father figure to Falconer, who’s also lost his dad. The 60-year-old fellow Scot “is just a dude. And it’s funny, ’cause I always thought McGee was a bit of a dick. We were having lunch in London the other day and he said: ‘Everyone thought I was a dick back in the day, because I was! I was on a lot of Valium back then so I can’t remember my life. But I’m not a dick anymore.’ I think that’s how we connected.

“I was a dick,” he continues, speedily, “with no thought for anybody else, it was all about me. But having kids changed all that.”

He and Laura, who he met in a gay bar in Dundee in 2015, have two young children, with a third on the way this November (“he’s going to be called Jet”). He credits with her the success of his third attempt to get clean, in 2016, at Lanna Rehab in Thailand.

“I was pretty lost,” he admits. “My head was all over the place – I was smoking 60 fags a day, which is horrible because both my parents died from smoking. But then it was almost like I was in self-destruct mode, but it was the only way I could [wean off] the drugs. That’s when I started running, on a treadmill.

“It’s a crazy place because it’s almost like they’re trying to get something out of you that’s not there – ‘you must have a serious issue…’ And I know I’ve been in three rehabs but I only went there ’cause they were free.”

How were they free?

“Cause I’m the guy from The View.”

What he means is, as a relatively famous musician, he’s an advertisement for these establishments (he gave several media interviews from Lanna).

“It’s 20 grand a month normally, and I’ve been there for three months, so I’ve had 60 grand’s worth of sh--. The first two places I went were horrible. And they started accusing of me smoking a joint – I haven’t smoked weed since I was 12! I hate weed. But I never took rehab seriously the first couple of times. But the last time I went in, because of Laura, I took it seriously.”

These days, father of (almost) three Kyle Falconer finds his highs in other ways. There’s his family, and the glorious pop peaks of No Love Songs for Laura. And there’s what he describes as naked cliff diving, as practised with one of his friends on the Scottish east coast and on the River Tay near his home.

“Anything extreme, I f--- love it. We do it in the winter because that makes it more extreme. It’s freezing and it wakes you up. I started off with cold showers but that wasn’t enough. I needed to jump in a pool and get hit by frozen ice. I’ve always been like that. When we were kids we used to do a thing called Jumps – you’d find sheds and try to jump off them over big fences with spikes on the top, see if you could make it.

“That’s always been my thrill. I just love anything that’s gonna kill you. That’s why I loved drugs – and jaggy fences!”

Would the old indie-kid Kyle Falconer think he’d gone to similar extremes with his boldly commercial new album?

“Aye, maybe,” he replies, “if I thought in depth about it.” Certainly, though, Kyle Falconer would like his newfound pop rebrand to take hold.

“Outsiders used to say: ‘These Same Jeans bastards, they cannae play their instruments, they cannae right songs.’ That’s not me – I’m a better muso than anyone I know. I’m not a rock star, I’m a musician. But that got lost along the way.”