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Healy Saying Something | |
After their recent remarks on drug-taking and a brief dalliance with tabloid infamy, a combative Travis tells NME why they're happy to be less rock'n'roll than S Club 7.
Ten fifteen on an icy Friday night and Travis are playing their biggest ever headline gig. Onstage in front of 11,000 fans at Birmingham's National Indoor Arena, they're incendiary: the hits sound even bigger than their sales figures. And the band seem as thrilled as their audience.
Between songs, Fran Healy tells an anecdote about last night. Sharing a hotel with S Club 7, he'd been forced at 4am to tell "the black kid and the little blond guy" (Bradley Mcintosh and Jon Lee) to keep the noise down. "S Club 7!" he exclaims with a shrug. The joke here is that Travis were out-partied by a pop band, except in reality, it's not much of a joke.
Three hours earlier and the band are entertaining NME in their dressing room amid the standard baskets of fruit and bottles of water. Fran's pawing through photos in the band's new tour programme. "Ooh! We look quite Manic Street Preachers in that one!" While Neil reclines on one sofa, Dougie chomps on a Vocalsone throat lozenge (he's become hooked since giving up smoking), and Andy makes us tea. Motley Crue they are not. As they discuss the events that have brought them and these 11,000 fans together: the 12 years and hundreds of live shows. The uncertainty of what any of it actually means.
"You never know what you are," Fran offers. "What you've done is always in your wake. You can watch an aeroplane going across the sky. But the people inside don't see the let streams at all. It's left behind them."
What Travis have behind them--though they hate the idea--is any possibility of touring small venues. You don't get many multiplatinumselling artists down the Bull & Gate. "These big giant sheds are something we've stopped ourselves from doing until now," Fran explains, "because the intimacy goes. Also we felt that we needed more than one album to perform. A lot of bands do them after only one album. S Club 7 were in here last night doing their thing."
Which explains the hotel incident. S Club 7 have actually released as many albums as Travis, and The Strokes might be a better example of a band put in the awkward position of having a status that dwarves the size of their back catalogue. But the point Fran makes is a good one: that Travis have accumulated an entry in the Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles that accurately reflects tonight's 11,000-strong audience. Yet if one were to strip the progressively more impressive chart positions from their entry and mix the singles up, it'd be difficult to reassemble them in date order. The Travis sound has hardly changed. Indeed, when NME asks what the fourth Travis album might sound like, Fran gets his knickers in a bit of a twist.
"To be honest," he begins, "I hate the idea of the sound of something. It's silly, I've never really cared what things sound like--it can sound like whatever it fucking wants to sound like. The sound on its own is like clothes without a person in them."
No new directions on the horizon for Travis, then.
"We just stay true to the songs, I suppose," Fran shrugs. "That's all you can do."
There are two words most kids are told not to use at primary school. One of them is unprintable. The other is nice. There are better, more exciting adjectives in the English language.
We're told nice is a cop-out. And then there's Travis. They're funny, among themselves. They're welcoming, sure. Genuine, warm, and--when Fran's not nicking your Marlboro Lights--generous. Literally, nobody has a bad word to say about them. But, in a cliche worthy of inclusion in one of their own lyric sheets, Travis are also a bit too nice.
Except a few weeks ago, it looked as if they might be--the horror--a bit edgy, with Fran declaring that the band had "sampled everything. Apart from heroin. And glue." Inevitably the parents of Leah Betts--the girl who died from drinking too much water after taking ecstasy--were wheeled out to be horrified, and suddenly Travis were bad role models.
"Listen," Fran begins when NME mentions the hoo-ha. "I'm sorry, but I'm not going to comment. I'm not going to comment on it."
It's not just Fran. There are blank faces all round. NME wonders whether this means he's standing by his comments, or...
"You're a grown-up journalist, you know what no comment means. No comment. I think that's all we want to say at this point in time."
And Fran is of course quite right to say nothing, because it's a hole that's impossible to dig oneself out of. But while the controversy may move on, Travis's image might not and perhaps not for the negative reasons they suspect. It's a slightly tragic fact, and one that would undoubtedly horrify Travis, but the thought of these guys loved upon ecstasy, or bent over a toilet seat snorting fat lines of coke, or falling backwards into a ditch on a mental Ketamine experience, or dropping liquid acid into their eyeballs and spit-roasting minor indie celebrities, presents a brief flicker of the possibility that in some parallel universe, they're a bonafide rock'n'roll band. That they're more than sensitive songwriters who sit at home drinking tea, making beautiful music.
"We haven't given anybody an image they can play with," Fran shrugs when asked why people think Travis are boring. "We are what we are, we wear what we wear, and we come across as...frankly normal. And that's what we are. And that's just because we haven't given you anything to play with."
"We're a blank canvas," Andy announces.
"I think what we are is the furthest thing from boring," decides Fran. "We're human. And we've never tried to hide our inadequacies or insecurities. The attacks are always from people who are afraid. 'Oh my god! I'm ordinary! I'm just another number!' Listen. You get 70 years to live. You can fool yourself into thinking you're a big show-off who's got all these cool interesting facets to your personality, and basically you're not, you're just wrong. So under the eye of the media, we're boring. Well, I'm here to fucking CELEBRATE being boring. If I'm boring, right, then... Well, fucking roll on being boring!"
Dougie nods. "There's nothing more boring than cool people, I mean where's the fucking warmth?"
Fran: "At art school, you'd see all the cool gangs who couldn't paint to save their lives but looked good in their paint-splashed jeans..."
Do you ever look at purportedly exciting bands and feel jealous, or think 'I wish I was in that band'?
"The Strokes were pretty fucking cool at the Brits," Fran admits. "That's the thing--they just look so good. I was like (adopts starstruck, dreamy expression), 'Awww.' It's one of those things, being cool--it's like being funny like Ali G. You get people who are just very attractive-looking people, and it's like, 'Whoah.' They're naturally like that."'
"Who would I fancy in The Strokes?" Fran ponders, before correctly identifying, amid murmurs of agreement from his bandmates, "The drummer, Fab. He's a good-looking wee lad."
"I like Albert," Neil chips in.
"No," decides Fran. "Definitely the drummer..."
Fortunately, and as Fran points out, the media have so far been happy to accommodate the band on their own terms. "Whenever we've been in any tabloids, it's been about this gig or that gig, or our album. It's not been about Travis coming out of the Met Bar."
The fact that Fran still cites the Met Bar as the place to be is a convincing gauge of how happily out of touch he is with celebrity and the zeitgeist in general. But are those pictures not printed because Travis haven't been coming out of the Met Bat or because the papers just aren't interested?
"Because we haven't been doing it! When we get back off tour, the last thing we're going to do is go out and party hard, we want to sit down and have a cup of tea or watch some comedy or see some good movies... and make art 'cos that's the thing we do. And that's not interesting to write about, really. Celebrity is valueless, worthless. But it's eating itself. It's going to collapse. I hate the TV, and I don't read the papers or magazines."
So where do you get your news from?
"I don't care! If there's a flood somewhere on the other side of the planet, that's not news to me. I want to know if there's a flood on my street, I want to know how my neighbours are. That's news to me." Fran pauses, probably aware that one disaster is enough for this month, and changes his argument a little. "September 11, that was news. News, real news, is when it affects the world at large, and when it affects the world at large you'll hear about it--you don't need to buy a fucking newspaper. Everything else is just 'What happened today?'"
In case you're wondering, Travis see the promo videos made to advertise their singles across the media as "pieces of art made to accompany other pieces of art," Fran continues. "The saddest thing was How The Twin Towers Collapsed on Channel 4. When it came to the ad break, there were seven minutes of adverts. That's why the twin towers bloody collapsed! Capitalism, greed, money, buy buy, sell sell. People have forgotten community, discussion. If you look at the rise of TV against a scale of community, as TVs went up, the value of community went down. Anyway, it's all a big crock of shit and I'm so glad I'm in a band playing music."
All in all, Travis are fairly clueless pop celebrities. They don't go shopping where paparazzi lurk, they celebrate normality, their musical direction is entirely unhindered by ideas of progression, they tantalise us with the possibility that behind the scenes they're party animals and then refuse, however wisely, to complete the picture. In terms of gossip, Travis literally are the invisible band. They don't understand how to be pop stars, nor do they want to understand. They've blagged it this far on the strength of their music--not as easy as naive purists might imagine--and will continue to blag it, without needing to compromise, for as long as they knock out the tunes.
"I'm quite happy being as I am," Fran adds, speaking for the whole band. "And regardless of whether you like us or not, at the moment we're defining you. OK, some people want pop stars who can leap over tall buildings, but I'll tell you what, those people don't exist, I can't leap tall buildings, I can only manage..."
"Bungalows," suggests Dougie.
"Yeah," Fran smiles contentedly. "Bungalows."
NME
"Melody is all that matters," Neil summarises.
Do you fancy any of them?
March 23, 2002
Words: Peter Robinson
Photos: Tom SHeehan
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