Travis - GQ, October 2000

GQ Men of the Year

Why do they always reign at awards ceremonies? It's a mixture of the music and the attitude, say this multimillion-selling Glaswegian gang.

Six months ago, when Liam and Noel Gallagher wandered the streets of Camden, north London after a GQ photo shoot, not one passer-by turned to gawp, mistaking them for two of the many clones that have become part of NW1's landscape. With the less striking Travis, whose success is partly thanks to Oasis's support, things are very different.
Venturing outside photographer Matthew Donaldson's studio, Fran Healy and the rest of Travis are suddenly accosted by three teenage girls. They want autographs. Healy obliges, asking them what they're up to out of school.
"We've been at the zoo!" they chorus, shaking with pleasure.
"Aye? What did you think? The elephants are a wee bit sad, aren't they?" says Healy, spelling out his name beneath his scribble.
The girls' eyes widen in disbelief. Who cares about the zoo at a moment like this? "Cool! You're really cool," one shouts, as they scurry back to their group.
Being "cool" is not something the four members of Travis care for, despite the phenomenal sales of their second album. Since its release last year, The Man Who has stubbornly refused to leave the Top 20, selling over two million copies in Britain alone, earning them Brit awards (Best Band, Best Album), Ivor Novello awards for songwriting, and countless covers from the NME to the Telegraph's Saturday magazine.
Artfully simple torchsongs such as "Writing To Reach You," "Driftwood," and "Turn" have become singalong anthems so familiar that one broadsheet headlined a story about Prince Charles' wet Parry In The Park concert: "Why Does It Always Rain On One?" The Man Who, it seems, isn't just an album--it's a virus. No need for hype or fashion.
Their secret has been patience and blatant commercialism. Pop-savvy enough to embrace Bob Dylan, Madonna, and the Backstreet Boys, Travis have stood by for the parting of the waves, with the personality clashes of Britpop on one side and the image-driven vacuities of prefabricated pop on the other. After the demise of the Verve last year and disappointing sales for key bands such as Blur and Kula Shaker, the equally earnest Stereophonics made up the advance party, selling a whopping 1.5 million copies of Performance And Cocktails in Britain. But Travis's heart-on-their-sleeves nature soon saw them charge ahead. Now, green-eyed Stereophonics frontman Kelly Jones refers to his rivals only as "the T-word."
These unlikely anti-glam heroes, all 27 or 28, make up a Glaswegian gang so tight-knit that each greets the other with a lingering bear hug. The group consists of three mild-mannered, soft-spoken, sensitive types and Fran Healy, who's more vocally belligerent and fanciful. Dunlop is a jewelry graduate who, according to Healy, "doesn't say a word but when he does speak, is always funny." He arrives in a navy stretch Saab with drummer and computer graduate Neil Primrose, "the loner and most affectionate drunk." They bite their nails in unison and rush off to find a coffee.
Camp and lanky bass player, Dougie Payne, is the most recent and glamorous member, recruited from his sculpture degree course even though he'd never picked up a bass. "He's a bridging person," says Healy. "He brings opposites together. I don't know anyone who doesn't like him." At home, this second-most popular Travister shares a bed with minx actress Kelly "Trainspotting" MacDonald, who says he's more important to her than work.
Manga-like singer, songwriter, and rhythm guitarist Healy is the youngest, smallest, steeliest, and most talkative of the band by far. "I'm full of anger and a loudmouth," he offers, "with an opinion on everything. But, as we say, 'Opinions are like arseholes...'"
The group has remained true to Healy's all-encompassing ambition--"Most people read Hello, not NME," he said in 1997, "that's where I'm coming from. I'm interested in the 95 percent, not the 5 percent."
Having conquered the country with their soaring, euphoric melancholy, wouldn't Travis like to be cool and approved of by that 5 percent?
"No way," says Payne. "Cool is too transient."
Cool Travis are not. It turns out someone forgot to tell them they were invited to a party at the Playboy Mansion, but they didn't mind--they wouldn't have gone anyway. They are more or less settled domestically. Healy sometimes refers to his German make-up artist girlfriend, Nora, as his wife. Primrose has just become a father. They have bought houses in north London ("You won't catch us moving to Notting Hill") and have recently splashed out on a jeep Cherokee (Healy), a set of golf clubs (Primrose), clothes from Harvey Nichols instead of charity shops (Dunlop), and a pair of shades from Oliver Peoples (Payne). As befits their public image, the arrivistes prefer contemplation, ten-pin bowling, or darts to flashing about.
How Travis got to the top of their field at a time when recording studios were so full of bland Britpoppers that you could barely swing a Strat, oddly belies their basic ideals. In 1991, Dunlop and Primrose asked Healy to join their band Glass Onion, a "terrible Starship for the Nineties." Healy took control, renaming the band, dropping out of the Glasgow School Of Art ("I could finish songs but not paintings"), sacking their first manager and, later, two of the original members in favour of Payne. "Sometimes I've got to be the cunt," he reckons. "It's to do with being the youngest."
They abandoned gigging and spent a year working in an upstairs room at the Horseshoe Bar in Glasgow whose "canny wee rock" landlord has since erected a plaque boasting of the fact. Healy would write songs there from noon till seven, then the others would join him to rehearse until midnight. His mother took out a Ł600 loan to finance some studio time, which led to a publishing deal in 1995. Guitars over their shoulders and handkerchiefs full of plectrums, they upped sticks to a house in north London. "It's been legendary ever since," says Healy.
They were soon snapped up as the first band on Independiente. "Their tape was so intriguing," says MD Andy MacDonald, "a full-on feedback-rock anthem followed by this lovely emotional ballad, a great mixture of humour and passion. I immediately thought they could play anywhere and be brilliant."
A reputation as one of the "next big things" was consolidated by their first album, Good Feeling, a mix of rowdiness and regret which one magazine called "the most heart-stoppingly exciting debut album since Oasis's Definitely Maybe." It sold a respectable 100,000 copies.
For their second, more mature album, Travis stripped away the fuzz and fun and turned up the emotional intensity. Healy's voice, once compared to the "bellow of a birthing buffalo," had become plaintive, expressive, full of wonder. What the singer called "belief on magnetic tape" was initially shunned by critics as a boring, slow disappointment, but radio stations picked up on it, and at this and last year's Glastonbury festivals, Healy had the crowd singing every word with him.
In the video for the single "Coming Around", which features a man-sized egg walking the streets, Dougie Payne is filmed chatting to Cybil Shepherd's daughter. "Are you waiting for someone?" he asks her. "Yeah, he's very fragile," she answers. "Aye, so's our singer," ad-libs Payne, unwittingly confirming the band's unthreatening everyman charm.
"Actually," Payne says now, "he's probably more robust than the rest of us put together."
For his part, Healy refuses to accept that he isn't totally normal, even though his band's schedules are so full they've only had three days off in the last three months and everyone from the cast of EastEnders to Paul McCartney and Elton John is a fan.
"What's extraordinary is the fact that we're all floating in space at a million miles per hour," he insists, "or that a leaf changes colour or that a bird can sing a tune."
He is now in full philosophical flow: "The songwriter is like a postman. You open your letter box and pull out bills, and then you get this little postcard from somewhere unknown, but someone you know has been there and you feel as though you have too. That's what songs do and I think bands should realise that it's not them, it's maybe not even the songs, it's the effect they have on people.
"London is like the penalty spot," Healy says, embarking upon another of his many colourful analogies, "with the rest of the country midfield, and that's where you take your shot. If you miss the penalty, everyone sees it and they go, 'Oh, you fucking dick!' and then you go back and the game continues. You might get another chance to go on the penalty spot, and so you make sure you know enough for the ball to go straight into the net."
London, he points out without encouragement, is particularly screwed up. Isn't that a bit patronising, considering what it's done for them?
"How can that be patronising?" he blurts. "If you're an artist, you're neutral and you can say anything you fucking like. We've moved away from that in these penalty spots, 'cos all the people in London think about is scoring a goal."
As part of their fervent mission to warm up the world--well, 95 percent of it anyway--Travis plan to move to New York and take shots from the edge of a bigger penalty area: "I want to make it harder to score, and the goals are smaller there." Should their evangelical leader trip up on a creative block, "that's when we'll become Travvist monks, get our brown kecks on and make our own home-brew." Now that would be a travesty.
GQ
October 2000
by Murphy Williams
photos by Matthew Donaldson

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