star Travis Happy in Ego-Free Realm star

Fran Healy is proud to be normal.

As vocalist for melodic Scottish outfit Travis, Healy's lifestyle has the abnormalities that come with being a globe-trotting musician, but one senses there were no fantasies of larger-than-life celebrity that drove him during the band's early years on the dole.

There certainly aren't now that Travis has earned a reputation as an engaging live act without resorting to contrived showmanship.

"I always talk as if I'm talking to you on the bus," Healy said this week. "We're very unpretentious. That's one thing you can say about Travis, is we are the most unpretentious band you could possibly care to meet. "I hate pretension. People are so afraid of just being normal. Normal's good--normal's loyalty, normal's friendship. But it's not looked upon as being an asset, and that's when you get people being pretentious, people trying to be cool, and it does my head in."

Healy is as ego-free as they come--as, by all accounts, are guitarist Andy Dunlop, bassist Dougie Payne, and drummer Neil Primrose. So when Travis titled its third album The Invisible Band, people knew better than to take the obscurity undertones as fuel for another round of Radiohead comparisons. The group indulges in a game of Where's Waldo? on the album cover, camouflaged by dense woodland, but the beauty of Travis's midtempo balladry couldn't be more direct.

"All bands are invisible," Healy said. "The people--they're the singers of the songs. The band is just there to give these songs to the people."

"Sing"--the first single from The Invisible Band--could serve as a campaign song for Travis's decentralization of rock-star power, praising the redemptive power of using one's voice. There isn't much of a subtext to the tune (inspired by Healy's fiancee, who used to be painfully shy about singing); it's a reminder that simplicity and triteness don't have to be synonymous in pop.

"The school (I went to) was a Catholic school. There was a benediction every Friday afternoon, and the head teacher would say, 'He who sings prays twice,' " Healy said. "I guess things like that stick in your head and pop out in whatever you do later on. So yeah, ('Sing' is) dead simple, and there's not much else to it. Dancing, singing, laughing, crying--they're pure expressions of life (that) express far more than any words could."

Still, Healy's lyrics are often evocative and manage to be hopeful without being smarmy. Since there's more light than darkness in Travis's songs, it's effectively jarring when, in "Last Train," Healy sings, "I'm gonna write a song, gonna sing it to everyone," only to replace his innocent sentiment in the second verse with "I'm gonna buy a gun, gonna shoot everything, everyone."

"The lyrics are just talking about how...you have a choice. (Songwriting) is like a recycler. You can drop all your negative emotions into this recycling machine and out pops a song, rather than running up to someone and punching them or freaking out. Eminem says there's a Slim Shady in everyone, and I think that's true. Everyone has an equal ability to put that energy into something that's positive."

The conversation turns to the atrocities in the United States, as has pretty much every other conversation since Sept. 11. "What's been happening over there with all this madness?" Healy asked, and it wasn't morbid curiosity or superficial politeness. More than half of an interview designed to chat up the first show of Travis's North American tour was spent mulling over horrific matters that had little to do with the band. Healy's sincerity--and, yes, normalcy--prevents him from merely taking care of business.

"From an outsider's point of view, America seems like the adolescent nation, young and brash--compared to Britain, who's a stuffy old aunt with her scones and her cups of tea. And I think what's happened is almost the end of that innocence, that we-can-do-anything mentality...and I think it's knocked everyone's confidence.

"My fiancee said, 'I really don't want you to go over there,' and I can understand that. But at the same time I don't have any fear whatsoever that anything could happen to us.

"We won't be singing 'Happy' (from Travis's 1997 debut, Good Feeling), that's for sure. But music is healing, so artists and musicians have got to get out and raise the spirits a little bit."

The Gazette (Montreal)
September 20, 2001
Words: Jordan Zivitz

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