The View / The Law- Night & Day Manchester - 15.9.06

It's only minutes before the View take to the stage that the audience really starts to fill up and it's possibly the biggest travesty as the support band The Law are everything the View should be and more. Not since we saw the band Switches earlier in the year has a band came along and embodied everything that is great about the last 50 years of modern music and The Law have the swagger to go with it. The devotees at the front are going mental while at the back of the venue a group prop up the bar in-between dancing across the top of the merch table. If you want every single great rockstar from Buddy Holly through to the Jam distilled into one band that sound like the embodiment of rock'n'roll and still sound relevant then you must see the Law now!

Sadly the same can't be said for the View who have one zeitgeist defining song in their collection and little else. Designer Magazine first saw the band at the Carling Tent of Leeds Festival where we had to make the decision between Jet and the Dundee boys and on reflection it was the sort of unenviable choice between a rock and a hard place. The main problem is to all extents and purposes The View are nothing more than a pub band who shouldn't have stepped out of Dundee and unlike Oasis who manage to take classic riffs and turn them into something new or the Libertines who were for many the spearhead in a sizematic change in the music scene, The View really are a plodding pub rock band, a meat and potato band.

That said "Wasted Little DJ's" is probably one of the singles of the year purely cos of the fact it takes a healthy does of The Libertines early singles and manages to fuse it with such a hook that embraces everything from the Smiths to the Jam. You get the sense that it's not really the View's fault as they've not had the chance to develop and build up a set list which could eventually make up for a lacklustre album.

The View have managed to capture the hearts of the nation in such as way it makes the rise of the Libertines and Arctic Monkeys look tame. Constant chants of "The View Are On Fire" fill every audience they play to and it's clear that we wont be able to escape the View once the album drops, but is this all a celebration of the mundane and the downright predictable made for an audience who have bought Razorlight and Kooks albums in abundance.

Alex McCann

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