Point of view

It's all happened so fast for hot Scottish outfit The View. Tipped as Dundee's answer to the Arctic Monkeys, the lads seem to be riding their newfound fame very well, writes Brian Boyd.

VEN a near impenetrable Scottish accent and a violent coughing fit can't disguise the message emanating from The View camp. The Dundee four-piece, tipped by most everyone as the indie band most likely to in 2007, are still trying to get to grips with their sudden acceleration.

"We just flew back in from Los Angeles this morning," says guitarist Pete Reilly in between coughing splurts. "We played a few showcases out there and signed a record deal, so it all went really well for us. Before that we were touring in Japan and they treated us like we were The Beatles or something. And today we are on the front cover of the NME. The album is due out in a few days' time, we're on the NME Brats tour soon . . . everything is happening very quickly for us."

The View members, who have all just turned 20, graduated from being a teenage covers band to a scuzzy and acclaimed indie outfit. They owe it all, in part, to blagging themselves a support slot to Babyshambles when the Pete Doherty-led outfit played a gig in Dundee.

"What happened was, Babyshambles are with the Rough Trade label and the A&R guy at the label, James Endeacott, was at the gig," says Reilly. "We managed to push a demo tape into his hands. As a result of that we got ourselves on to the nationwide Babyshambles tour. The more gigs we played - and we later went on the Primal Scream tour as well - the more we found a real following was building up. And then last year we found ourselves in a position where we were involved in a bidding war, with loads of record companies expressing an interest in us."

It's not difficult to see why. The View are an incendiary live band, powered, it seems, by the national grid. The songs fit perfectly into the post-Libertines, Arctic Monkeys-adoring musical landscape celebrating, as they do, rough street life in Dundee.

"Dundee is important to us as most of the songs on the debut album are about the place or people from there. I like to think we have a really full-on sound and other people have said that the music is really raw and energetic and has a lot of good vibes about it. We can do mellow also - it's not all so full on."

Despite numerous solicitations from the major labels, The View decided to stay loyal to their initial point of contact, James Endeacott, helped greatly by the fact that Endeacott had just left Rough Trade to set up his own label called 1965.

"We turned down big-money offers from elsewhere to sign to 1965," says Reilly. "With the big labels, they were all sort of going 'we can make you huge', but we just found that James was totally enthusiastic about our music. He'd be the one, in the early days, who'd be down at the front at our gigs jumping up and down.

"The other consideration for us was that on 1965 we are the centre of all the attention, but if we signed to a major we wouldn't have been such a priority. As it turns out 1965 is linked up with Sony, so we like to think of it as being a bit like the Creation label was during the 1990s."

Upon signing, the first decision to be made was the choice of producer for the debut album. In the end they went with Oasis producer Owen Morris.

"We're all really big fans of Oasis. In fact, we used to play lots of their songs when we were a covers band. A few people were put out by the decision because of Owen's reputation as a bit of a party person, but we're all a bit mental ourselves, so if anything we complemented each other. One of things we heard later from James was that people were saying 'Why do you send The View off to work with Owen Morris, he's mental', and the reply was just 'Maybe Owen is mental, but The View are totally insane so it should work out OK.'

"Whenever things weren't working out in the studio, Owen would just take us out to a club. One time when we were in the studio he found out that our singer, Kyle, had never drank champagne so he immediately stopped the session and dragged us out to a Chinese restaurant and told the waiter to give Kyle as much champagne as he could drink."

In advance of the album, a single called Superstar Tradesman was released last October and became a top 20 hit. "Superstar Tradesman is about the advice we used to get that it was always better to learn a good trade than to be messing around with rock music," Reilly he says. "I suppose the song is about living your dream and going against all the advice given to you."

For the moment, all thoughts are on the NME Brats tour, when the band will play alongside The Automatic.

"It should go really well," Reilly says, "but I wonder if the NME is attempting to repeat what happened last year when Maximo Park were the headliners and the Arctic Monkeys were the support act. The Automatic are the headline act on the tour and we're playing before them.

"Maybe there's a bit of mischief at play here, but we're not really bothered. In fact, we're very relaxed about the album being released and the tour starting. It's like we're at the centre of the storm and can't feel anything . . . "

The View's Hats Off to the Buskers album is released today. The View and The Automatic play Dublin's Ambassador Theatre on January 30th as part of the NME Brats tour