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The Men Who Are... | |
Emerging in 1996, the band debuted with an EP and had its first brush of notoriety a year later with its first long-player, Good Feeling. Several high-profile tours with superstar entities such as Oasis and Catatonia ensued. Like its contemporaries, Travis absorbed the brilliance of the Beatles, Kinks, and Small Faces, but also learned a hard-edged lesson or two by listening to latter-day heroes such as the Stone Roses and Manic Street Preachers. Rathen than stick to formula, The Man Who was a complete about-face. Originally released in their native contintent in 1999, this sophomore efort is a decidedly introspective and almost quite affair, understated with acoustic guitars and subtle grooves. However, the songwriting has matured in leaps and bounds. Though Fran Healy is the heart and soul of Travis, it is the other three members that bring his vision to life. With the unavoidably infectious "Why Does It Always Rain on Me?" leading the barrage, The Man Who spawned no fewer than five charting singles.
And bassist Dougie Payne is the luckiest man on earth. Jovial, quick-witted, and very appreciative of all the things that have gone right for he and his Glasgow mates, Payne has realized his dream of coming to America. On their first tour of the United States, opening for Ben Folds Five, Payne recalls "a tremendous feeling of euphoria that was all-encompassing. I remember reading Jack Kerouac and thinking, 'Oh my God, I'm doing it!'" Travis are doing it on the road this spring in support of Oasis. Most would think it very tough to begin all over again. "Not at all, I believe the start of anything is the most exhilarating part," Payne responds.
The end of another long press day, you must be exhausted.
My girlfriend was enamored with Travis's image on a famous European rock magazine cover...be honest, they're touched up, right?
What have you been listening to?
And they've all been featured in Amplifier magazine...
Fame in the U.K. has been good to you.
Pink Floyd and Yes had that philosophy, to the point where they never used band pictures on their later releases.
Have you seen anyone famous in New York City?
What about music videos, which create celebrity?
How do the directors feel about the freedom?
Bowie is going to hire actors who will portray him in future videos.
Is The Man Who, in essence, a collection of songs or an album?
And Nigel Godrich, your producer, had a strong hand in all this.
Does Fran demo the songs ahead of time?
How does the American version of The Man Who different from the U.K. issue?
Success--what does it all mean?
Now you just put the tabloids out of business.
Amplifier
They don't want to be recognized, yet their pictures are splashed across publications in Europe and, now, the United States. Critics' accolades are not important to them, but they pocketed the two most prestigious Brit Awards (the overseas equivalent to a Grammy) for Best Album of the Year and Best British Group. And fame is not their ultimate goal, but for the record, they were the U.K.'s biggest-selling band last year. The men who are Travis are quite nonchalant about their meteoric rise to the top of the pop heaps across the Atlantic. The Scottish quartet of singer/songwriter Fran Healy, along with Andy Dunlop (guitar), Dougie Payne (bass), and Neil Primrose (drums) has purposely chosen to eschew rock stardom in favor of craftsmanship. And in the long run, it may just be the single element that bestows them worldwide success.
Nah, I never tire of talking about myself!
No, absolutely not. That's how we look. We use a lot of moisturizer.
I like the new Flaming Lips album, The Soft Bulletin. I think it's one of the best records I've heard in years. Some older stuff like the Who's Live at Leeds. I think because we're on tour, I've been listening to a lot of live albums. Bob Dylan Live at the Albert Hall, especially the electric side of it. The last Pavement record I really enjoyed, as well. Jason Faulkner's album is fantastic, just wonderful pop songs.
Really! You all have great taste.
Yes, everything's gone the way we ideally would've liked it, which is weird. Few things in life ever work out that way. The way we see it, at the moment, bands, artists, and singers get in the way of what is important, which is the song itself. Or not even the song, but the emotional direction of where the song is coming from. The power to mkae people feel is important. Rather than getting in the way of all that, we stand behind the work, which is the songs, and push them out. Not like a painter who exhibits his work and spends the whole time jumping about, saying, "Look at me! I did this, I'm fantastic!" And you're like, "Get out of the way, I can't see what you've done!" So with us really, the songs get famous, and we don't, which is excellent.
Yes, and REM too. For the first five or six years of their recording career, nobody really knew who they were. At home, everyone knows our songs, but we can walk about quite happily on our day-to-day business. It's backwards but a really cool way to do it. But it means the songs stand on their own rather than having to be supported by a fantastic video or imagery. We're not about fame.
Yeah, I saw Lou Reed cycling on his bike down in the Village.
I think the video medium is grossly misused. Everyone should do it the way we do. Basically, we find artists whose work we like, people like John Hardwick, and we let them take over. If they want us in it, then fine, but if not, they can go off and do whatever they want. And our record company, lucky for us, allows us to do that. It's not at all like, "We have to have a pretty girl over here and the band looking great over there" and so forth.
At first, they're confused. We just want them to make good art. Good art should make good art.
Excellent idea, I think. People presume we're actors in ours! Which means it's a convincing three-and-a-half-minute film.
A collection of songs. We don't make albums, we make songs. And we treat each song individually. The fact that it's an album is almost accidental when you begin to see how the songs fit together. Bear with me on this one. Albums are kind of like a party. You have all these people in a room, and you see how they get on. We had loads of different versions of The Man Who before we settled on this one. Some of the tracks actually ended up as B-sides. But we put them together and saw that, "Oh, this one's not getting along with the other," so we'd take one out and put another one in to see how the chemistry works.
Yes. All this activity was going on right up until the last minute, when we were going to master the disc! Nigel really acted as our engineer more than a producer. He's probably the best in the world at this moment, if you ask me. He records things better than anybody I've ever met. You can be playing something great in the studio, then you go into the control room, and through all the mesh of wires, booths, amps, and consoles, something gets lost. Nigel's great talent is capturing things exactly the way they are supposed to sound. It's like you're in the studio right along with us. And the great thing about it is he's like us! He doesn't know what he's doing! When we we remixing "Driftwood," I'd ask him what was going on, and he'd say, "I don't know, I'm just making it amazing."
No, we never demo. He comes in with a song, and we all through it together and try and touch it as little as possible. We want to maintain the purity and emotional direction that the song came from in the first place. Keeping things as untouched as possible is important. We record the first thoughts in the studio in order to keep things fresh.
There are no remixes, but I think the first 100,000 copies are going to have a couple of extra B-sides. It's the same material that went out on singles in Britain.
Success, if it happens to you, you don't have to be its victim. You can work out ways to deal with it. It's not like this big monster. It doesn't have to change you...you can keep your head on straight. You can be normal and not act like an asshole.
Right! Good! You know, success doesn't necessarily mean celebrity. We don't want to be famous. We want our songs to be famous. Being big stars in the tabloids is of no interest to us. But people will still maintain that success equals fame, which is rubbish.
Issue #19
By: Tom Semiolia
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