Though we can hardly expect the View to remember it, there was a time when indie music was primarily an outsider’s idiom. Class didn’t come into it. The flurry of what John Peel once termed “shambling bands” on account of their preference for tunes over technique straddled social boundaries. At one extreme, you had the likes of Talulah Gosh, sultans of scrawn, whose militant feyness assumed an almost political significance. At the other were the Wedding Present and the La’s, plain-speaking tunesmiths whose retro outlook was enough to marginalise them in an era when the incidental music from Miami Vice could be heard on Radio 1.

Twenty years ago you simply wouldn’t have heard an indie band declare that “we’re working-class people and we’re a working-class band...a band for people to hold on to, (who) lead the lives they lead”. That wasn’t what this sort of music was for.

But, in 2007, you can read these quotes and correctly guess what the Dundonian four-piece who uttered them sound like. With the Libertines for a mum and Oasis for a dad, the View don’t lack spirit. You’ll find tons of it shoehorned into the heads-down punk opener Comin’ Down, filling the vacuum where one might hope to find a melody. Listening to The Don and Gran’s for Tea, you realise that the frontman, Kyle Falconer, must be the only person on the planet who remains more in thrall to Pete Doherty than Kate Moss. It’s a debt made uncomfortably explicit on The Wasteland, the sort of ska-shaped amphetamine sprint that made up the numbers on Babyshambles’s Down in Albion.

But Falconer is no metaphysician — and in a post-Arctic Monkeys climate he knows that he doesn’t need to be. Swinging to a giro-day pimp roll, Don’t Tell Me sees him imploring someone not to ruin a good night retrospectively by telling him what he did. If there’s any intended ambivalence about the life described in the current hit Same Jeans, it’s probably of no use to the fans at their shows who proudly jab the words back at him.

Only when this outlook is tempered by tenderness do you get a glimpse of the songwriters that the View could strive to become. The recent single Wasted Little DJs is pregnant with an unquenchable optimism peculiar to young men who spend most of their days together in a Transit van.

It does no harm either that they’ve enlisted Owen Morris to smudge the sonic tableau by whacking the recording levels into the red. It’s a trick, of course, that Morris first perfected when he presided over Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, so when he’s given a song worthy of that album — Streetlights is another case in point — it’s hard to resist the View.

Still, a nagging problem remains. As long as they style themselves as a card-carrying everyband for the everyman, it’s hard to imagine them evolving into anything other than their own tribute group. And considering that they barely sounded like themselves in the first place, that’s hardly something to aspire to.

(1965)

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