Travis - Select, July 1999

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"20"
B-side of "All I Wanna Do Is Rock"
June 1997
Travis's appeal, as everybody now knows, is their effortless ability to swing between sensitive artistry and hedonistic idiocy, the boho and the baboon. So on the flipside to unashamed rock anthem "All I Wanna Do Is Rock" lurks a melancholic depiction of the trials of growing up--more "All I Wanna Do Is Get My First Snog." In the frisson between the two songs, you can hear the beginnings of a mood spectrum that would embarce both the naked abandon of "U16 Girls" and the sensitive beauty of "Driftwood."

"'20' has a really nice narrative," says Fran Healy, modestly enough. "It's about sitting in your English class when you're 13, staring at the ceiling, and thinking about how crap it is. Then it goes to 14 and fancying a girl at school, then to 15 when your parents are shouting at you. The key lyric is 'You've forgotten how to be,' which is all about how the older you get, things get a bit more complicated, and you start to lose the plot a bit."
Coincidentally, "20" could also refer to the time it took Fran to write the song. "I love '20' because sometimes you can do a song in 20 minutes but it's still a great song," he reasons. "There's so much poor-quality stuff everywhere anyway. You just have to look around Sainsbury's to see that. But nothing that should get binned ever gets used as B-sides with us."
So should we be taking the trouble to put it in our sounds trolley? Fran is assuming as always. "It's just a really nice song," he says. "You should listen to it."
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July 1999

He-ey!

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