View frontman talks life, songwriting, musicals – and growing up
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It’s a wonder The View’s Kyle Falconer has time to fit in a few Highland dates this weekend when he talks you through his current projects.
“Honestly my life is just crazy right now!” he says on Friday as he packs up the car to head North, with his kids heard in the background.
He explained last month on Facebook announcing this tour – with solo songs and View songs – that it is something different.
He said: “This tour is all about taking a moment to connect through rich storytelling on how these songs came to be, songwriting inspiration, answering some audience Q&A and perhaps even sharing some mad tales that we insist stay off the record…”
Some of the gigs will also feature Billy Mitchell, Frantics and Dovv, some he has got to know at his songwriting camp in Spain.
“Me and my friend Michael Ward run a songwriting camp in Spain and we thought it would be good to do a kind of QnA tour in small venues and to tell people more about writing songs. And to look at the more in-depth side of songs.”
It is also an antidote to everything else that is filling up his life.
Earlier this year a BBC documentary, Kyle Falconer: Love And Chaos, shared the story of Kyle and his fiancée, writer Laura Wilde, and their relationship and their struggle to cope when Laura developed post-natal depression and Kyle had to spend time away on tour with The View.
Insightful and honest, it shows the couple’s life with their three children, and both are very open about the difficulties. It also revealed the way two creative people shared the experience – they created musical No Love Songs.
Kyle’s music from his second solo album No Love Songs For Laura is at the core of the musical’s sound, Laura put her own story on the page, later developed for the stage with Dundee Rep.
The documentary took the story up to the musical’s first night at Dundee Rep’s theatre in what is now the couple’s hometown.
“We did that week in Dundee and a month at the Fringe and another week in Dundee in September,” Kyle tells you.
“Right now we are talking about taking it on tour, maybe to other countries. We're just taking it as it comes. But there is so much going on right now that the musical is something someone else is looking at for me and I'm just waiting to hear back.”
How is it having two people living with family life while juggling their creative work too?
“It’s great, man. We’ve always tried to balance that and Laura is settling to going and doing things herself.
“With me being away all the time, it’s funny because when we were in lockdown, I couldn’t wait to get out and get recording again but with the albums, you forget you have to go out and tour all the time.”
He finds leaving the kids to tour is difficult.
“I had done it before when the kids were a bit younger and didn’t understand, but now it’s me! The kids don’t mind, but I’m like ‘I miss my kids!',” he says with a strangled yowl of pain.
Then he laughs: “When I was younger, I thought ‘I’ll be like Paul McCartney and just take the kids on tour!’.
“But it doesn’t work that way! They are settled here.”
The onstage bust-up at the start of The View’s Exorcism Of Youth tour seems to be resolved with the band members working on songs.
Kyle lists all the things that fill his life at the moment – from songwriting camps to promoting The View’s Exorcism Of Youth (which sadly doesn’t include an Inverness date on the next section of the UK tour!).
“Everything is a bonus at the minute. It’s funny cos when the pandemic took over it was all about wanting to get out,” Kyle says. “And then, trying everything, like the songwriting camp in Spain, the musical.
“We were working on the documentary for a couple of years. I've got an album coming out, and working on another one. It’s just chaos!
“I'm doing five or six songwriting camps a year, it's just crazy and I never get a second.
“But whenever something great happens, I'm like, ‘Oh yes, that’s brilliant!’.”
Exorcism Of Youth includes a sense of a once-crazy young band growing up.
Moving from the early days of packed-out Raigmore Motel gigs with fans scrambling over themselves to get to the front of the stage to now sharing with them the experience of having kids, making relationships work, making a living to pay for things a family needs, the latest songs reflect that – and support that maturing audience going through it all too.
“I think back when we first started and nothing really mattered, we had the carefree spirit that people liked and why people really related to us and kept following us. That was what the labels back then were wanting us to be as well.
“We never really noticed and we never really knew what we were getting paid for shows or anything. We just had our heads totally in the sand, just like robotic, playing.
“But just recently I’ve started to discover what publishing means and what my management gets paid, taking heed of these things.
“Now I’m taking everything into account and being kind of accountable for my own decisions.
“Back then I was like ‘What’s going on?’, you know what I mean? But now it’s like, I’ve got it, it’s all fine.”
Developing the songwriting camps and a recording studio has been a dream of Kyle’s.
“I’ve always taken it as it comes, and lived – money in, money out. It’s the way I’ve always been.
“I think by investing in this whole business, doing the recording studio – I’ve actually got a full-blown recording studio in Spain and am recording with other bands – it’s like a haven over there, it’s absolutely unreal!
“It’s funny, when you say ‘I’ve got a studio in Spain’, I think until people see it, they don’t know and then they go ‘Holy sh*t!’
“It’s like dreamland, we’ve worked on this for years, it’s not like we’ve rushed into it, me and my friend have gone carefully and systematically planned it and it has come together – it’s exciting times, man, it’s great.
“That’s what I was wanting, creating some place to start our own wee world, starting at our own level, and have everyone wanting to come to us, but it’s already started.
“We’re just getting all these young artists in and becoming like family, and everyone wants to keep coming back and making songs by the dozen-load. It’s just a great time for everyone.”
The songs keep coming for Kyle, but the camp adds to his inspiration.
“I think when I’m in the house, I just wait till it comes for writing.and never sit down and think ‘I need to write a song’.
“But when you are there, you wake up there and everyone is sitting in groups or working on stuff and you wake up and feel like writing songs.
“I don’t get a minute with the kids and stuff.
“But when I’m away, that is the time to actually do it, so you sit down there, and some of the young lads, they are so enthusiastic.
“There’s a guy Frankie Dobson I’m working with and Ben Walker and a guy called Dovv.
“They are really enthusiastic and it’s what I was like when I was 20 years old. So it’s good to see that and inspiring to think that – and after the camps everyone keeps in touch, so I’m still post writing with all these guys who’ve been at the camps and it’s just non-stop, it’s great, man, they’ve got bees in their bonnet!”
But inspiration can come at any time, though Kyle says he has tried the ‘working at it’ method too.
“Sometimes it does work when you sit down. I’ve been to a lot of sessions in America where there are like four people in the room and it is very systematical and you come out and say ‘I’m glad I stuck by that’.
“But it doesn’t feel good that way because you can’t wait for a break and wonder ‘What time’s lunch?’. It’s like a job.”
But songs also ambush him too …
“I always get it when I’m on a run and suddenly it’s ‘Oh my God, I’ve got this great idea!’ and I rush to get back. And that’s when you know it’s a good one.
“Or if I’m sleeping, sometimes I dream them up as well and I wake up and think ‘Is that another song?’and I’ll hum it into my phone and maybe a month later, I’ll go to the voice recorder and think ‘What’s that?’ And there’s some crazy voicemail I’ve done half-dreaming and I’ll go ‘That’s brilliant!’ or ‘It’s just a load of sh*te!.
“It just depends!” he laughs.
Stumbling across the 2021 video for Wait Around, an almost soul/RnB-flavoured song about supporting someone who is depressed, from his second solo album No More Love Songs For Laura, you see Kyle giving it his all as he learns how to dance.
Has dance become a new creative outlet for the musician?
“Not really! I wish I was a dancer. No, I’m not a very good dancer. My niece Daisy Falconer is a dance teacher, and in the video. I did dance lessons for two or three months before the video – and before I was even slightly able to do it!
“It was quite out of my comfort zone, but it was fun.”
As we’re in Strictly season, you have to ask, is he a likely future competitor?
"Maybe one day!” he laughs. But so busy with his music, should we hold our breath for Kyle the dancer?
An Intimate Audience With Kyle Falconer comes to The Gellions, Inverness on Sunday (October 8), from 2.30-5pm. TICKETS:
Later, from 7pm that night, the event arrives at The Old Bridge Inn, Aviemore. TICKETS: But now on waiting list ...
