Deep within the lofty, imposing exhibition halls at London's
Tate Gallery, Travis frontman Fran Healy looks admiringly at J.M.W. Turner's early
maritime-themed painting Millbank, Moonlight. Letting out a gasp of appreciation, he
turns to his
neighbour: "Isn't that fucking beautiful." But instead of guitarist Andy Dunlop--who was at the
singer's shoulder a second earlier--an astonished Fran finds himself delivering his appreciation
directly in the face of Des Lynam of Dada, Lord Melvyn Bragg. Melv says nothing, but moves
smartly away, guiding his young female companion out of this particular artistic arena.
Hours later, at chucking-out time on the streets of North London's Chalk Farm, Travis find
themselves in less rarified surroundings.
"Buckfast is fucking disgusting," Fran assures us as he steps unsteadily away from the boozer. By
way of confirmation, the band then open their lungs for a traditional Caledonian chant about the
particular qualities of Scotland's favourite tonic wine: "Buckfast, it makes you fuck fast, it makes
you come quick, it makes your ma sick."
Across the road, a gentleman of the street claps along and then breaks into a wheezing a cappella
take on "Horny" by Mousse T vs. Hot 'N' Juicy.
Pop is often subject to a kind of aesthetic apartheid, a segregation that says high art and serious
intent shall never mingle with the earthly pleasures of the lowbrow. On the one side of the divide,
we have Stereolab and Shiraz Rochelle 1974. On the other hand, Liam and lager.
Travis, however, are plainly a band for all seasons. A band who can launch an erudite discussion
of op-art one minute and confidently fill an Oasis arena support slot the next. This duality was
apparent on their debut album Good Feeling, which lurched from the teeth-bared, power-chord anthemics of "All I Want To Do Is Rock" and the hyper-dumbness of "Happy" to the
fragile introspection of "Funny Thing" and "More Than Us."
As was made clear in their first full Select feature in July '97, here was a band who
simultaneously championed British art schools and deft, heartfelt rock, as well as getting drunk
and climbing up drainpipes. They were Radiohead joining the Monkees after an eight-hour lock-
in.
And now they're about to re-enter the fray with the chiming, wounded, big-league balladry of
comeback single "Writing to Reach You." But not before they negotiate their exit from this
alcohol-marinated evening.
"The puggies, the puggies, it's great to win on the puggies!" Andy and bassist Dougie Payne have
enjoyed a rewarding night on the pub's fruit machines. Saluting these miraculous cash-spouting
mechanisms with their traditional Gaelic title, the pair strut towards their waiting cab.
"Aye, aye, Sir Edwin Landseer, the Stone Roses of big 19th century animal paintings." Back at
the Tate, Travis stand in front of the giant Landseer panorama, The Death of the Stag In Glen
Tilt. The Second Coming of its era, it took six years to compete.
Heading up an impromptu guided tour of the gallery's well-stocked permanent collection, Travis
offer information both artistic and carnal.
Pointing out a modestly scaled work by the Pre-Raphaelite painter, William Holman Hunt, Fran
explains how the Pre-Raphaelites were keen on filling their canvasses with covert phallic symbols:
a protruding salt cellar here, a judiciously placed cucumber there. Suitably, the painting in
quiestion shows a young woman settling into the lap of a mustachioed Victorian gallant. Her face
is full of the wide-eyed surprise more normally produced by a bum-pinching Benny Hill. The
painting is called The Awakening Conscience.
On a perhaps more elevated note, Fran then points 20 metres across a room toward the huge
multicoloured Matisse cut-out, The Snail. Learnedly, he details how this was one of
Matisse's last ever creations, a piece he could only actually realise by instructing assistants to cut
out and position the collage's component sections of fabric. Sure enough, a walk across the room
and inspection of the gallery information plaque reveals that Fran is correct on all points.
It's clear that Fran, Andy, and Dougie have maintained their interest in visual aesthetics since they
left Glasgow School of Art. After all, Fran's first date with his German girlfriend did find the pair
visiting Sensation, the Royal Academy's hugely successful exhibition of "Brit Art." Drummer Neil
Primrose may not have been to art college, but he knows what he likes. "I like Picasso, I like
Bacon, and I like that Duchamp. He was a cheeky c***." To many, the infamous French Dada-ist
creeator of a signed urinal was indeed a cheeky c***.
Exiting the Tate with fond farewell glances at Dali's
Lobster Telephone and Edgar Degas's
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, Travis head off to complete their afternoon of art with a
visit to Camden Waterstones.
After lingering over the inviting art books, 1000 Nudes and Araki Tokyo Handy
Hole (the latter featuring an enigmatic photo of a naked Japanese woman on the cover), the
band purchase a book each. Andy chooses Moon Palace by metaphysical New Jersey
novelist Paul Auster, while Neil opts for Peter Carey's Dickens pastiche Jack Maggs.
Dougie goes for J.D. Salinger collection For Esme--With Love and Squalor, whlie Fran
plumps for Ian Kershaw's weighty recent biography, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris.
No takers for Jeffrey Archer then...
"I can't wait to get on the puggies. I've just been in America--three weeks without a puggy."
Dougie is just back from a holiday in San Francisco and is keen to get back on his beloved fruit
machines. But first, Travis are enjoying a pre-pub feed at Chalk Farm's Belgian-themed restaurant,
Belgo. Over the moules mariniere and Hoegaarden, talk turns not to Belgium, but to its neighbor
France.
It was here, after watching Scotland's valiant efforst against Brazil in the World Cup, that Travis
began recording their as-yet-untitled second album with Mike Hedges at his Normandy chateau-
cum-studio. The sessions with Hedges produced two songs ("Why Does It Always Rain on Me"
and "She's So Strange"), then the band moved on to work with Nigel Godrich of Radiohead fame.
Given that Radiohead was the standard press reference point when Travis first emerged, to some
this may seem a slightly ill-advised move.
"Aw, well, y'know..." shrugs Fran over his steak. "The thing is, I'm not really interested in music
as such. I belive more in the...relationship you have with people. We met Mike and he was a
lovely man, so we worked with him.
"We'd met Nigel a year and a half previously when we played at the benefit gig for Leo Finlay
[the music journalist who tragically died at the end of 1996]. Nigel and Colin from
Radiohead were at the gig, and I'd never met either of them at that point. This guy sidled up to me
at the bar afterwards and says [takes on precise, slightly camp Oxfordshire tones], 'I really
liked your gig, it was really good.' I just said, 'Thanks, man.' Then we got talking and I was like,
'What do you do then?' And he goes, 'Oh, I play bass guitar.' So I'm like, 'Would I know your
band?' And he goes, 'Oh, it's Radiohead.' So I was like, 'Aw, fuck, no! Pleased to meet you!' Then
later I met Nigel, and we got drunk. So when it came to doing the new album, he was one of the
names that came up straight away."
 |
|
A swig of fine Belgian wheat beer and he returns to the theme.
"So, yeah, Nigel Godrich. It is suicide to some extent, because we do undoubtedly sometimes
sound like Radiohead. I was out once, and this song came on the jukebox, and I was just sitting
there thinking, 'Yeah, nice Radiohead tune.' Two seconds later, I realised it wasn't Radiohead. It
was us! I was just like, 'Oh no...' And yes, the song titles on our new album do include 'Okey
Dokey ZX81' and 'Alright Pocket Calculator'."
Nigel Godrich clearly isn't the only element of intrigue on the album. "Writing to Reach You" has
an intro extremely similar to a certain Oasis song. It also includes the lines, "The radio's playing all
the usual/And what's a wonderwall anyway?"
"Well," begins Fran, "it was written when 'Wonderwall' was on the radio very minute of the
day--the versions by Oasis and Mike Flowers. I was just sitting there playing the chords to it: E
minor,
G, D. I started playing those, changed the rhythm, and turned it into 'Writing to Reach You.'
That's why I say, 'What's a wonderwall anyway?' It's me tipping my cap to Noel Gallagher, who I
think is a brilliant songwriter.
"To me, the song has quite a few levels. but the initial idea came when someone gave me this
collection of Franz Kafka's letters called Letters to Felice, which are all to this one woman
he's hardly ever met. Now I don't read a lot, but these letters are amazing."
Fascinating stuff. But it's now time to leave such enlightened climes. Onward to a realm that has
little Kafka, but much puggies, Fosters, and other such indicators of the joyously lowbrow.
"I'll be Alan 'The Ice Man' Warriner, and you can be Andy 'The Viking' Fordham." Half past seven
in a pub on London's Haverstock Hill, and Fran and Dougie move toward the oche, apparently
bent on emulating two of the biggest names in championship darts today.
The ale house offers a suitably manful environment. Bruce
Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark"
plays on the jukebox, while a clearly male-only clientele loiter in shellsuits and surreptitious
expressions. On the wall sits a huge painting of a race horse bearing the simple legend, "The
Turf." Within minutes, Fran has joined in animated conversation with a Scouser who bears a
remarkable resemblance to Paul Whitehouse's pony-tailed petty thief from The Fast Show.
The subject is the recent Embassy World Professional Darts Championship.
"Did you see the Mason/Adams match?" demand Fran exuberantly. "Only the best fucking match
ever! And it's great 'cos that isn't a matter of opinion. The statistics themselves say it was the best
fucking match of all time!"
A later call to the British Darts Organisation reveals that Fran is once again correct. Not only did
Chris Mason come back from 4-1 sets down to win the match, but Adams scored 16 maximum
180s--a record for a nine-set game. And the match also featured a record 29 maximums. Sing ye
from the hillsides!
Several drafts of quality lager later, Andy and Dougie are rounding on the pub's resident puggy. It
doesn't stand a chance. In a blur of bars, cherries, unlimited nudges, and expert deployment of the
Fun and Games button, the pair extract a profit of £15 each.
"Marvellous," exhales Andy. "That's the best thing about being on a cross-channel ferry. The
puggies. You always get a puggy dad and puggy kid. In matching shellsuits. The puggy dad will
use up all his money, then get the kid to put in his pocket money. 'Go on, son, it'll hold those
features.' Then it doesn't hold, and he'll walk away going, 'Bad luck son, but I told you not to do
it'."
Impressive knowledge of pub Olympics, then. Yet Travis did once meet their match in the heroic
field of pub sports. While recording at Mike Hedges's studio, they found the in-house pinball
machine bore the legend of an earlier studio guest. One name occupied the top three places on the
machine's memory of record scores: James Dean Bradfield.
"He must have a mean flipper hand," observes Andy. "The best we could do was knock him off
the second spot."
Having displayed prodiguous darting and fruit-machine skills, soaked up the lager and vodka and
bitter lemon, and enjoyed a lively discussion of the optimum qualities of the mixed grill, Travis sit
round, trying to ignore the barmaid's call to drink up. Face beaming, gait noticeably more
animated than when he entered the pub four hours earlier, Fran returns from the toilet and sits
down.
Picking up the darts, his eyes alight on something new. He zeroes in on the dart's flights.
Somewhat coincidentally, it features a cartoon of a man doing a painting and using a dart board as
his palette. Underneath, it says, "The Dartist." Beer-enhanced mind homing in on the happy,
cosmic synchronnicity of the drawing, he cracks a wide smile.
"That's fucking brilliant," he finally decides. "That is so nice." You can see what's flickering across
his brain. Travis: dartists to a man.
Select
March 1999
story by Roy Wilkinson
photos by Scarlet Page
They know their Matisse. And they know their darts. They
read lofty books. And they
spend just as much time on fruit machines. They're "art." And they're also evil, card-carrying piss
artists. Welcome to a day in the schizo world of TRAVIS...
