Travis
Travis, The Invisible Band 1999 - 2001 (Article excerpt: travisonline.com)
It's Christmas time. There's no need to be afraid
But Fran Healy was worried. He was sat in his London flat, with
the phone off the hook, the door locked, the telly off,
his mum up in Glasgow, wondering why he wasn't coming home
for the holidays, his girlfriend through in the kitchen,
banging pots and pans in frustration. Across London, this
scene was being repeated in the homes of Dougie Payne, Neil
Primrose and Andy Dunlop. Healy was sitting in his pants
(no festive holly attached), not speaking, not even playing
his guitar, torn-faced. What's wrong with me? Get a grip!
C'mon!
He'd been OK in October, when Travis
finally stopped touring and began recording their new album
in Los Angeles. But he'd been like this for most of November
'00, too, when Travis had a month off - their first break
since before the release The Man Who in spring '99. In the
18 months since, they hadn't stopped.
February 2000, Travis win Best Album and Best British Group
at the Brit Awards; Fran Healy wears a mud-coloured kilt.
Dougie Payne: 'We didn't drink until the awards were over and we
got back to the hotel because we wanted to enjoy it. Then
we had a race to see who could get pished quickest. It was
a dead heat.'
Fran Healy: 'The day after the Brits, we were at our guitar
tech's wedding in Nottingham. The table we were sitting
at was exactly the same as at The Brits - same size, same
people, same order. Except it was lighter in the room, darker
at The Brits. It was weird.'
Travis played 237 gigs in pursuit of the The Man Who, travelling
the world, trying to catch up with the album's long, drawn-out
success. They supported Oasis in America, having previously
done so in Britain on the "Be Here Now"tour. 'Every
single night's been totally bizarre,' Healy reported from
Chicago last spring. 'We're getting standing ovations!'
Their first album, Good Feeling, had done some spadework,
establishing the Glaswegian foursome as NME Brat-winning,
post-Britpop young shouters. They were Noel Gallagher's
favourite new band. With their second album, the earth moved.
By word of mouth and power of radio, The Man Who grew and
grew. 'Writing To Reach You'. 'Driftwood'. 'Why Does It
Always Rain On Me?' 'Turn'. Travis' singles were instant
modern pop standards. 'Why Does It Always Rain On Me?' became
the anthem of festival Britain in summer '99. At V99 that
August, the band announced from the stage that The Man Who
had just made Number One, 13 weeks after its release. Then
they sparked up 'Why Does It Always Rain On Me?' Just then,
the skies opened. The crowd roared and grinned.
Fran Healy went on Ali G's show with his guitar, and the band
heard 'Why Does It Always Rain On Me?' receive a juddering
ruffneck rrrrrrrewind.
They released a new, non-album-track single, 'Coming Around'.
It dated from a pivotal moment in the band's career, when
they decided to finally leave Glasgow for London.
Healy: 'It's about that doubt. You know something's coming
and all you need to do is move in its general direction. But
it's a tough move.'
On 31st May 1996, Travis had finally moved to London, to live
together in a house in North London. Four years later, the
song of the moment would enter the charts at Number 10. The
Man Who, meanwhile, kept selling. In he UK it was the biggest
selling album by a British band in 1999. To date, it has sold
2.4 million copies.
ANYWAY. It's still Christmas 2000, Travis are still trying
to finish their new album, and Fran Healy is still in his
pants. The band weren't suffering from emotional constipation,
paradise syndrome, a crisis of creativity, or any of that
rock star cobblers. Healy wasn't Kid Angst. He just wanted
to stop being a dick in a band, on stage, and start being
Franny again. By Boxing Day, the band had turned a corner,
and Healy had changed his pants. It was nothing major; they
were just glad Christmas was over. Who isn't?
Healy, Payne, Primrose and Dunlop decided there was only one
thing for it. A New Year spent partying in Glasgow washed
The Man Who right out of their hair.
Come New Year, Travis would fly to Los Angeles again.
The band reunited with producer Nigel Godrich in the Ocean
Way studio where they had begun work on their third album
the previous October.
On Friday 23rd March 2001, Godrich would finish his final
mixing and mastering. The Invisible Band was complete. The
Invisible Band...Travis are: not important. They are good
with children (the webcam they installed in the studio during
the making of the record allowed for all manner of chat-room
patter with young fans; if only the 13-year-old Fran and
Dougie could have done the same with Simple Minds). They
are great on the radio ('Why Does It Always Rain On Me?'
is still on every day). Never lost with a crowd (100,000
Glastonbury 2000 backing vocalists can't be wrong). Happy
when it rains. But Travis are not important. It doesn't
matter. Hence The Invisible Band.
The first single from The Invisible Band is called 'Sing'.
It is about how Healy's fiancee won't sing in front
of him. She's happy to holler along to Nirvana or Dre in
the car, but she's mortified to do it in front of him. This
is annoying. If you love someone, you shouldn't be so inhibited.
You should just sing. The love you bring won't mean a thing
unless you sing.
'Flowers In The Window' was the last song to be completed
for the album. Long, long ago, it was slated to be the first
single from The Man Who. This is the fifth time they have
recorded the track, but the first time it has worked. Now
it might finally be the feelgood hit of the summer it was
born to be.
'Safe' is also old, written when Healy was 19. 'When he
was young, things didn't last, my only care stemmed to the
price of sweets.' This portrait of the artist as a young
man has been updated. Now it's man and boy, reflective but
reassuring. 'A dolly mixed up man with rotten teeth.' 'Pipe
Dreams', previously known as 'Shut The Folk Up', says wise
up, but don't give up.
Neil Primrose: 'A good song should leave you defenceless,
naked and vulnerable.' These
are tunes you can hang your coat on. Songs to make you sing.
Vocally, Fran Healy has grown wings. Sonically, Nigel Godrich
has underlined his position as the best young producer in
the business. Travis songs, intrinsically, are built to
make you happy. That's their job. Neil Primrose doesn't
know any songs that make him sad, or any music that is negative.
Dougie Payne has written a song, 'Ring Out The Bells', that
was inspired by the sound of angels getting their wings
in It's A Wonderful Life. Guitarist Andy Dunlop has penned
a song too ("You Don't Know What I'm Like") -
Andy sings it as well; he brings to mind a young Ray Davies.
The last song written for the album, 'Dear Diary', is about
reading between the furrowed lines. Sad songs do say so
much. But they still make you feel euphoric. If they're
doing their job properly. You should hear Travis' version
of 'Killer Queen'. Andy Dunlop: 'There's no ego here, man. If freaks me out sometimes.'
Travis have made two albums since The Man Who. The first was with
Suzie Hug, who used to be singer in a band called The Katydids.
The band knows Suzie through her husband, Adam Seymour,
of The Pretenders. He helped Travis record some of the demos
that got them a record deal in 1996. The band have always
liked Hug's songs, and marvelled that she couldn't find
a record company to release them. So last summer, in a two
week gap in their touring schedule, Travis went into RAK
studios in London. The band played Suzie's songs, Healy
produced them.
Coincidentally, Nigel Godrich was next door, working on
The Divine Comedy's Regeneration. Having never produced
anything before, Healy would nip next door in a wee panic
and ask for a bit of advice from the man who'd survived
Kid A and Amnesiac. His advice? Just move ahead, don't go
back or stop. Always keep moving ahead...
So he did, and they are, and this new Travis music is.
Fran Healy's girlfriend sings in front of him now.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Travis 99' - The Man Who
TRAVIS, The Men Who...
since their emergence in 1996, have proved as impossible to
pin down as mercury.
In the wake of their '97 debut album,
"Good Feeling", the quartet - Fran Healy (singer, songwriter),
Andy Dunlop (guitar), Dougie Payne (bass), Neil Primrose (drums)
- were variously labeled as cerebral art school rockers, irrepressibly
happy-go-lucky pop freaks and laconic balladeers to skim but
the surface.
Some of the reviews for the first album," notes Fran, "said
that, musically, we were a schizophrenic band." Going some
way to acknowledging this is Travis' much-anticipated second
album, the wryly-named 'The Man Who' - its title inspired
by
Oliver Sacks' book 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A
Hat', a well-thumbed compendium of schizophrenic case studies.
Perhaps ironically then, the album finds Travis more in tune
with themselves and their music than ever before. To all intents,
it's the sound of a band pushing the envelope; leapfrogging
that "difficult" second album and emerging with a classic
collection of songs.
'The Man Who' bears a melodic and atmospheric depth that will
undoubtedly set Travis apart from their contemporaries. Within
its grooves, the echoes of a host of diverse musical spirits
can be detected: from the Plastic Ono Band to Simon And Garfunkel,
Jacques Brel to John Barry, Hunky Dory-era Bowie to Ennio
Morricone. In just a handful of its tracks, it can take the
listener from the dark-clouded paranoia of "The Fear", to
the hypnotic, piano-led, slow-motion dynamics of "As You Are".
"The last album was recorded in four days with no trickery
and it became this supposedly 'schizophrenic' record," Dougie
states. "This time we've recorded it over six months in six
different studios using more instrumentation and it's turned
into this weirdly cohesive piece of work."
While three members of Travis were rooted in an art college
background, in their nascent days Fran Healy was the first
to wake up to the fact that his real passions lay in music,
when he realised that he was finishing more songs than paintings.
Dropping out, he encountered Primrose pulling pints at a Glasgow
bar and formed the group with him and Dunlop, before Payne
was recruited and the line-up of Travis was completed. In
1996, after securing a publishing deal with Sony, the group
decamped south to London.
Coasting on the waves created by their limited edition Red
Telephone Box debut release, the much-sought-after "All I
Want To Do Is Rock EP", Travis became the first major signing
to former Go! Discs boss Andy Macdonald's newly-minted Independiente
label. The ensuing two years found the band turn in a pivotal
performance on "Later With Jools Holland", perform close to
two hundred gigs - including key tours with Oasis and Catatonia
- and gradually attract legions of devotees. As a result,
when "Good Feeling" was released in September '97, it went
straight into the Top Ten of the UK charts, eventually producing
five strikingly memorable singles, including the rallying
"U16 Girls" and the achingly melancholic "More Than Us"
Preliminary sessions for 'The Man Who' - recorded and mixed
between the summer of 1998 and the beginning of 1999 - took
place in the picturesque surroundings of producer Mike Hedge's
Chateau De La Rouge Motte studio in Normandy in three weeks
of, as Andy evocatively recalls, "cheese, bread, tequila and
watching shooting stars going across the sky every night".
Back in London, work continued in a variety of studios around
the capital with Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck, R.E.M., Pavement)
at the controls, the wonderkid producer helping the band take
their sound to new extremes.
In striving to create the desired radio-in-traffic effect
of "Slide Show", the group tried to record the song in a car
cruising the mean streets of St. John's Wood, before settling
for a backdrop of street sounds recorded using Neil's car
for the final mix. Further flung, the French passages of the
lyric in the album's hypnotic swansong "Last Laugh Of The
Laughter" were translated by five Gallic hairdressers that
Fran met while on a "shite" holiday in Israel.
"This album's a wee bit more grown-up," acknowledges Fran.
"But if you were to listen to the last song on 'Good Feeling'
and then put the first track of 'The Man Who' on, it's just
a continuation really." Dougie continues: "The best way to
listen to 'Good Feeling' was watching us playing it, seeing
and feeling the whole thing." Fran adds: "This album's not
a rock album in that way, it's more of a song album. It's
an album for staying in rather than going out"
In the end, despite the huge step forward that 'The Man Who'
represents, Travis remain a band who're not in this for the
limelight and the glory. These songs are bigger than them.
Relying on a trusty artistic analogy, Dougie says, "So many
bands are like painters standing in front of their paintings
going, Look at me, I did this. It's like, Get out the way,
I can't see it."
"We don't want to play that game," Fran concludes. "When we
all disappear this music will still be here."
END
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