Travis - NME, September 27, 1997

How the West Was Won Over

They were booked to appear on Later... before they'd released a record, landed a major-label deal only two months after moving to London, and are currently supporting Oasis at Noel's personal request. But that's not enough for TRAVIS, oh no! They want more.

Reluctantly, the gate creaks open and the van slowly slides through. We crawl up a narrow road past a group of men whispering nervously into radio headsets.And then we see it: the silver shed. Last week, it was full of cows. Today, on September 13, who knows? Judging by the security, it's probably top-secret alien experiments. Then again, maybe not...
"Your IDs and business, please," barks a man with the demeanour of an articulated lorry.
"Er, we're the support band," answers our driver, brandishing a crumpled fax.
"Hmm," growls the guard suspiciously. "Over there, and wait for instructions."
Welcome to the first date of the Oasis tour. We have just pierced the ultimate "ring of steel" (copyright Exeter Express & Echo), and things are running very smoothly.

Our companions in the van are Travis. The band who were signed a mere two months after moving to London in 1996, who were booked to appear on Later... before they'd released a record, and who recorded their debut album in New York with one of the most famous producers of the '80s (Steve Lillywhite) are here at the request of Noel Gallagher.
Leaping from the van in a hail of "fucking hells," the "luckiest band in Britain" gingerly approach the venue and peer around the door. Inside, it's mayhem: onstage, a platoon of cleaners is furiously buffing the Rolls-Royce that makes up part of Oasis's stage set, to their right a man the size of Liechtenstein furiously abuses a drumkit, while next to him two roadies stand nose-to-nose screaming at each other, as blinding lights flash on and off at random.
Travis open and shut their mouths, but remain speechless. Thirty seconds later they're surrounded by a buzzing swarm of canary-shirted security operatives. It's no use, the game's up, we've been captured and without a word, we're led off into a labyrinthine series of corridors to be shot in a small back room.
The woman with the Polaroid camera apologises for our inconvenience, it's just everyone's got to have a photo-laminate if they're to enter the portals of the backstage area. Travis eagerly concur. The NME, however, is asked to leave: this area is strictly forbidden to the press, and any members found loitering will be dealt with accordingly (i.e., death and stuff). Someone calls us a cab.
Still, as we speed back into town, leaving the band to begin their brief soundcheck, there's another story to be told. And it concerns just how we ended up here with Travis in the first place.
At 10 a.m. the same day, you find us waiting outside the Hammersmith Apollo in west London. Without warning, a bus suddenly slides to a halt in front of us and a flustered face leans out of the side window.
"Are you Zachariah and Joseph?" the face demands.
"Er, no. Are you Travis?"
"No."
"Oh well."
"Have you seen Tommy or Joseph?" the face enquires hopefully.
"We've no idea what you're talking about."
"Oh, OK then."
The face disappears and the luxurious bus glides off around the comer. We, meanwhile, carry on waiting.
Half an hour later, just as terminal boredom and the freezing winds of autumn are threatening to render us temporarily disabled, we hear the sound of a distant horn. We can't see a sparkling bus anywhere, though. In fact, the only thing we can see at this moment is a battered blue Transit van on the other side of the road. Hang on, we're not driving to Exeter in that surely?
Before we've had time to argue, our bags have been slung in the back and we're squashed against four strangers. In the far corner is vocalist Fran Healey. Group songwriter and willful anti-icon, he's smoking a cigarette and demanding to know when the next stop is going to be. To his right is bassist Dougie Payne, clicking his fingers to the sound of Buffalo Springfield and occasionally flicking paper at drummer Neil Primrose. Guitarist Andy Dunlop, meanwhile, is torching a portable plastic fan with his lighter.

"My background is a real populist one--News of the World, The Sun, Jeremy Beadle, that sort of thing."--Fran

This is Travis: four Glaswegian outcasts who grew up listening to Simple Minds and not The Pastels, and who (with the exception of Dougie) have been playing together since 1991 (when they called themselves The Glass Onion). Their story is one of incredible self-confidence and good fortune, and over the past year it has accelerated at a colossal rate.
Before we tell you about that though, here's the first of many service stations--coming a full ten minutes after we first stepped foot in the van. One steaming coffee incident later, we're back on the motorway fully stocked with Tom & Jerry Funpacks (a banana chew and a plastic toy for only 99p!) and enough cigarettes to choke an entire subcontinent of Amazonian health freaks.
While the rest of the band suck banana chews and throw miniature pan pipes each other, Fran settles back to explain the background to the band's ascent. After all, it's his energy and determination that has been largely responsible for getting them this far.

It's worth remembering it was Fran who phoned Sony and got the band a publishing deal before anyone from a major label had even seen them; Fran who pestered his mum into taking out a loan so that the band could record "the best song (he'd) ever written" (a version of "All I Wanna Do Is Rock" that appeared as their debut single on their own Red Telephone label late last year), and Fran who sacked two of the original members, recruited Dougie, and forced the whole band to move to London.
"The reason Travis are so strong as a band," he attempts to explain as Neil spits a mouthful of beef crisps into a polythene bag, "is because we've been through so much fucking shite. My mum always used to tell me, 'You've got to have a boxer's attitude.' You've always got to get up again, and that's what Travis are like.
"I mean, there have been points when I've been in total despair, when I just wanted to escape from it all because I knew things1 weren't right with the band. But by sitting and talking you never get anywhere, you've got to get out there and do it. That's why we moved to London, I just knew we needed to do three things: get ourselves a manager, a record deal and a place to live."
That they achieved all three so quick inevitably aroused suspicions, and for many people the assumption remains that Travis are merely a carefully conceived product of the times: a band with nothing original to contribute, one designed solely to appeal to the baser instincts of the record-buying public.
In that respect, their enthusiastic (but terribly earnest) comments in early interviews did them no favours at all. They talked about the band as if it were a job, and made themselves sound like countless other nondescript Britpop chancers. It made you wonder why the world needed a Travis.
"We are different from other bands, though," insists Dougie after about 30 seconds' thought. "It's the difference between having sex with a hooker and falling in love."
"The problem is that we're just modest people," protests Fran. "We're from Glasgow and we've been brought up to be this way. I've never been into bands, I've never bought records, I've never read NME, I've never read books. When I was young we were really poor, we didn't have a record player or any books lying around the house. My mum just read the Daily Mirror."
Why are you in a band, then?
"I fell into it. I don't know why I'm doing it."
You mean to say that you could lust as easily have fallen into banking?
"No. Look, the thing about this band is that everything is strange. The first time I met them, they were rubbish: Dougie wasn't in it, the songs were shit, we were all too young, but there was something about it, it was like a bug.
"Music to me is this thing you can't chop down or bum or anything. You can take a painting off a wall and make it go away forever. You just can't do that with music and that's why I like it.
"We're just shite at selling ourselves. Travis' one and only difficulty is answering the question, 'Why?' It's just too close to us, and the thing is that most normal people don't relate to any of that 'how we feel' stuff anyway.
"They read Hello!, not NME, and that's where I'm coming from. I'm interested in the 95 percent, not the 5 percent who know everything about music. My background is a real populist one--News of The World, The Sun, Jeremy Beadle, that sort of thing--and I know that 95 percent of people donnae give a fuck about why I'm doing this."

"We are different from other bands, though. It's the difference between having sex with a hooker and falling in love."--Dougie

And in many ways, that's the real heart of Travis and why they're the perfect choice of support for Oasis; a band of inherent commercialism who never wanted to be arty or difficult and whose only real ambition was to appeal to as many people as possible (when Fran was writing these songs he didn't play them to friends for a reaction, he always let his mum hear them first). No wonder, then, that Noel eventually chose them for this tour: perhaps he saw something of himself in these men and their songs?
It's only as Exeter finally approaches that Travis begin to realise the enormity of what's happening to them. Before they have even glimpsed the Westpoint Arena, the evidence of the amazing importance of the next two weeks is strewn before them at every turn.
In the foyer of their hotel, sprawling groups of lads huddle around trays of beer bottles swearing and shouting "mad for it," outside the window, crowds of Weller T-shirts practise a few impromptu choruses for later that evening, while others wait by the bus stops.
Meanwhile, the local papers are brimming with Oasis stories, salivating at the prospect of this "rock 'n' roll invasion" Fans, landlords and every pig farmer for 25 miles have been asked for an opinion. No-one, it seems, will be able to escape this tour--or the hype that surrounds it.
For Travis, it's all vaguely bemusing: the culmination of everything they ever wanted hurtling towards them at dizzying speed. Still, having just changed clothes, they make ready to travel to the soundcheck (which, as we've explained, is where the band and NME part company for a short while).
The next time we see them, they're 100 yards away, separated from us by approximately 4,000 people. Centre stage there's Fran, windmilling his way through a reverberating "All I Wanna Do Is Rock," while Andy rips at his guitar strings to rapturous applause. Any doubts they might have harboured about this whole venture visibly disintegrate in the space of a few seconds.
Travis' set is received with the waves of euphoria normally reserved for Oasis: guitar solos are greeted with screaming hysteria, hands are raised repeatedly above heads and when--two hours later--Noel demands a round of applause for the support band, the response is deafening.
Understandably, then, when we finally meet up with the band again at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, their faces are full of shocked jubilation. They can't believe it, from somewhere beneath an ocean of vodka and bitter lemon, a voice emerges:

"What about that?" shouts Dougie. "Did you see us? It was fucking magic."
"I shook hands with Meg," smiles Fran nonchalantly, "and I walked into our dressing room, and there was Liam sitting having a chat with everyone. It was dead fucking surreal. I've seen him in two dimensions for five years, and there he is telling my band that 'All I Wanna Do...' is a 'top fucking tune'."
"Out of his nut though," confides Neil with an air of great secrecy, "his hands just wouldn't stop shaking and he couldn't sit still."
"It was amazing though," urges Fran, "there were people out there who didn't know 'Live Forever.' I was out the front and I clocked a load of people in the audience with that dumb look on their face, thinking, 'That's not on (What's The Story)...,' what is it?'
"I want that to happen with Travis. I can't wait for people to hear our third album and think it's our debut, like when REM released Out Of Time. That'll be fucking amazing, that'll be when we finally know that we've made it."
What? You don't feel like that now? "Och, no," protests Fran. "We're only just starting, there's so much more to do yet."
"Yeah," concludes Dougie, "but it's still brilliant, isn't it?"
The others nod their heads in silent agreement. They knew it would end this way. After all, right now, how else could it feel to be the luckiest band in Britain?
New Musical Express
September 27, 1997
by James Oldham
pictures by Steve Gullick

Conversions Discography Quotables Mailing List

Comments go in here.


*"My background is a real populist one--News of the World, The Sun,* Jeremy Beadle, that sort of thing."--Fran**


"We are different from other bands, though. It's the difference between having sex with a hooker and falling in love."--Dougie