Asted-way Ittle-ay Eejays-day

The View 21st November, Astoria
It's easy to get complacent after a swift rise to fame. In a difficult music industry to crack, Scottish rascals The View, under 1965’s James Endeacott, went from drinking in bus stops to sold-out tours in what seemed like barely a few months. However, the band’s transformation from underground darlings of the fourteen year old Doherty-alike tribe to drug-addled, Radio 1 brown-nosers has given the quartet a frustrating arrogance of the kind that usually precedes a fall.
It is rare to find a crowd as excitable as dedicated fans of The View. The space in front of the stage is packed to the brim with sweaty teenagers, soaked from flying beer cans, (slightly annoying until someone catches a band member square on his head) they are literally dribbling with excitement. And for the first three songs, the band acknowledge this, for a brief moment it is clear why they garnered such a dedicated following. Their relentless energy on two new songs and old favourite ‘Wasted Little DJ’s’ creates a squirming mess of crowd surfing, fights, more airborne beer cans and strewn items of clothing. The band’s thick accents render their banter incomprehensible to the Southern crowd but to no matter; the teenagers have got their heroes back.
After this brief spurt of energy however, the two front men seem to give up. They stop engaging with the crowd, new songs have clearly borrowed chords from old ones, obscenities are shouted to get the rise out of the audience that their music no longer can. The band stumble on with their well known tunes becoming less and less coherent to the disdain of the crowd desperately trying to sing along. Suddenly after barely fifty minutes and an unrecognizable ‘Superstar Tradesman’ they mumble their goodbyes and slope off stage, leaving the crowd chanting for an encore that never comes.
Most exasperating about the experience is that it was clear from their opening that The View could have achieved the gig of their life. Halfway through a near sold out tour, with an audience of die hard fans filling the prestigious London Astoria and they just couldn’t be bothered. Well, unfortunately for The View, they return to a music world with a very different face than the one they left just over a year ago. The fast-paced, internet driven industry has only got worse, and the fickleness of fans, due to a plethora of free music has augmented tenfold. The View were lucky in that they already had a fan base to come back to, but several more gigs like this one and the Dryburgh boys are in for a rude awakening.