Fritz radio interview

Frannie chats...

"I went to art school to become a painter. I wanted to paint. I never once thought about music at all, like up until the point when I joined the band. I'd farted about in a couple of other bands that'd more or less been a hobby, though. And it was still going to be a hobby when I joined this band, Glass Onion. I went for two years of art school, and as the band developed and as art school dwindled, I realised that I didn't want to paint anymore. I wanted to do this seriously, do songwriting more seriously. So I left art school, and that's when I decided to basically change the name of the band from Glass Onion to Travis, which is taken from a character of a Wim Wenders movie called Paris, Texas and I decided that it would be me that wrote the songs because it seemed that I was better than anyone in the band at doing that at that point and we'd been working for two years on the basis of a kind of democracy. There were five people in the band originally. And there's bass, drums, guitar, voice and keyboards. And then I decided that I'd just sort of say, 'Right, everyone, take your hands off the steering wheel because we're going round in circles." And we'd start somewhere and find ourselves going round and find ourselves back at the point we started out a year later. And it was like, 'Where are we going? We're going nowhere." So one person took over, and that person was me."

"There's this thing in the press pack that says it's 'All I Wanna Do Is Fuck,' and that was the first mistake we made in the press: never try to be funny or ironic in the press because it doesn't look good in print. So it's not 'All I Wanna Do Is Fuck.' It could easily be 'All I Wanna Do Is Fuck,' but for me, the song is about exactly what you're talking about. It's about a point in my life where, suddenly, a massive definition came into what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go, and whether this lot wanted to follow was another question. We had a choice to do that, and we ended up in London."

"Yes, strangely enough, when the song was written, I had no idea about this kind of thing at all. The first time it happened was when we went on tour with the Longpigs in Liverpool and they chased us through the streets of Liverpool. There were about seven or eight of them. And they didn't catch us. Which was good, because we ran faster than them."

"Indie music is elitist, enjoyed by a minority and I've always been quite into the mass. I'm a real consumer - I love things that everyone's got and everyone can take part in. I hate all this elitism. It's like contemporary art. If you went into the street and showed someone a piece of contemporary art and asked them if they understood it, they don't understand it. Part of it, art is so self-important these days. And they've always been self-important. And if anything, I think art only serves as a backdrop, a soundtrack or something that reaches people."

"The first person that ever made me awake the idea that a song can go through you and leave something of it behind in you was Joni Mitchell, in the Blue album. She's still, to me, one of the greatest. It wasn't so much, 'Oh, I can do that.' It's that it makes you want to do it, y'know. It makes you actually want to pick up a guitar and do it. And she was the first person that made me actually want to write songs, not particularly to want to pick up a guitar. But to try to emulate it some way, the songs that she produces, especially on Blue are so much--they're almost impersonal. They're almost not from her or from anyone. They just exist. And when I heard that, I thought, 'That's just great.' So as soon as you listen to Joni Mitchell, you read a few interviews by Joni Mitchell, and she says, 'Bob Dylan,' so you go and listen to Bob Dylan and then he talks about Woody Guthrie, and so you go and listen to Woody Guthrie and then all he talks about is the Band, and so you watch The Last Waltz, the Martin Scorsese film, and so that gets you into Neil Young, and it gets you into Eric Clapton. It gets you into a lot of old-school kind of songwriting. The thing is, that was a golden age for songwriters and it was also around the time of people like Carole King, you know, Golfing (??) and King. It was a massive golden age and it was a real renaissance. I don't think there's been anything since then."

"I'd say I wanted to sell about 10 million albums. Because, if you think about it, like a fisherman who spends a year, two years making a net, doesn't go out into the sea, throw the net and expect to catch three fish. He expects to catch more than three fish. It's exactly the same principle. Just because we believe in what we do. We're not saying it's the best thing since sliced bread. All we know is that the music and the songs are just, by luck, honest and true. Not a lot of things these days are like that."

"There's a band in Scotland called Belle & Sebastian. I know Stuart very well, and he's a very good songwriter. He doesn't understand that thing, and I have a lot of respect for him and the fact that he doesn't want to...He's got the Steven Pastel thing, where he just wants to be small and also bands on the level like Oasis, you can't talk nowadays without mentioning Oasis. And they're a band that I've got a lot of respect for cos I think Noel's a very, very clever, clever songwriter."

...and don't forget Dougie!

"We are making music to be heard by as many people as possible. It's not that we want to sell millions of records to make lots of money. But to sell millions of records to have the music heard, played. You know, to get our music heard by as many people as possible. 'Indie' doesn't really exist anymore. But even if it did, there's no great thing about being a hero among 1,000 people worldwide. Yeah, if you're making great music, you don't want it to be a ghetto thing. You want it to be heard by as many people as possible."

"Three crocodiles walk into a bar. They go up to the bar, and the head crocodile says, 'Can I get three pints of lager, three of your meat pies, a packet of nuts and twenty Silk Cut?' He gets the drinks, gets the pies, the nuts and the fags. So they're all sitting there, having their drinks and eating their pies, the nuts, and the fags. And the barman comes up to them and asks, 'How are your pints? Are they OK?' 'Yeah, they're good.' 'How are your pies? They're not stale?' 'No, they're fantastic! They're magic.' 'The nuts are fine?' 'Yeah, they're brilliant.' 'How are the fags?' 'They're good.' 'Then why the long faces, lads?'"

--evidence of why Dougie didn't make it as a stand-up comic?

He-ey!

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