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Kyle Falconer: Love and Chaos

The View frontman and fiancée share their wild ride into parenthood as they prepare to bring their new stage show on postnatal depression to the world.

Kyle Falconer, frontman of chart-topping band The View, and his fiancĂ©e Laura Wilde have navigated a whirlwind romance filled with euphoric highs and devastating lows. From touring the world and the arrival of three beautiful children to postnatal depression and Kyle’s turbulent battles with substance abuse, they have spent eight dramatic years together.

Through the lens of their collaborative semi-autobiographical musical No Love Songs – which previewed at Dundee Rep Theatre in May - this documentary shares Kyle and Laura’s raw, personal journey, exploring how the challenges and sacrifices of parenthood continue to shape them as a couple.

Having met one night in a gay club in Dundee - one of the only places Kyle wasn’t banned from in the city at the time - the pair connected immediately over music, Stanley Kubrick and a shared love of musicals. Laura, an aspiring writer, showed Kyle her work on the night they met, cementing their connection even further.

Fast forward two years and Laura found herself far from the glamour of a rock-star lifestyle with her career dreams on hold. Instead, she became a stay-at-home mum without a support network, friends or family nearby. Meanwhile, Kyle continued to tour with The View.

This difficult transition, however, wasn’t the first time the pair had faced huge challenges in their relationship together. In 2016, the year before their first child arrived, Kyle faced legal charges and public humiliation following a drunken incident on a plane home from Spain, resulting in him checking into a Thailand rehab clinic for help with substance abuse. It was during this rehab stay, that their lives took an even more dramatic turn: Laura unexpectedly fell pregnant with their first daughter.

Happy in their new-born bubble, trouble returned as the family’s main source of income - The View - the only job Kyle had ever known since he was a teen - came to an end. Suddenly, Kyle and Laura’s relationship was being pulled apart again, as Kyle was forced back on the road this time as a solo artist.

Kyle’s effort to provide for his family resulted in long trips away from home and, in turn, meant that Laura’s world became smaller with her own dreams of writing becoming even more out of reach. Laura suffered crippling anxiety where she found it hard to even leave the house. It wasn’t until later that Laura understood her condition to be postnatal depression.

Opening up to Kyle for the first time was like a “pressure cooker”, which allowed Laura to begin her healing journey. It was this period that would form the foundation for their first collaborative project, with Kyle writing about Laura’s struggles in his second solo album ‘No Love Songs for Laura’. With Kyle’s encouragement, Laura also began her own therapeutic, creative journey by putting pen to paper again.

Then finally, using Kyle’s record, they teamed up with Dundee Rep Theatre and a talented team to create their musical, No Love Songs. Their semi-autobiographical production takes the couple’s real lived experience of parenthood and postnatal depression, with Laura as the show’s co-writer and Kyle’s music throughout.

In this highly emotive documentary, we relive Kyle and Laura’s dramatic love story so far - giving a front row seat to the launch of the show’s first preview in Dundee. Following the action as they prepare to share their work in front of a live audience for the first time, Laura dissects some of the hardest parts of her writing journey which involved hearing about her own mother’s traumatic experience of postnatal depression, which resulted in attempted suicide. Brought to light in the stage show, this difficult and often taboo subject becomes one of Laura’s key drivers of raising awareness of mental health issues.

44 minutes

Last on

Mon 13 May 2024 23:00

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