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Songs in the Key of Life | |
They don't offend, they won't posture, they make a virtue of anonymity. Why do people like Travis so much? Keith Cameron discovers that they're the perfect band for Blairite times--proud to provide escapism, hard working, comfortable in a world that finds radicalism in rock an irrelevance.
If there is one thing you can be completely sure of, it is this: at some point today, a U.K. radio station will play a song by a band called Travis. At roughly the same time again, it will do so again. Then the day after and the day after that. In fact, in the unlikely event of a bookmaker offering viable odds, one could lay hard cash on Travis being played on the radio every day of every week this year.
The nation's radio programmers soon realised that Travis had plenty more where that came from: "Driftwood" and "Writing To Reach You" and "Turn," all singles taken from The Man Who, the band's second album, which had been released earlier that year to curiously muted critical fanfares. High streets across the land began to reverberate to this new--though hardly unprecedented--sound, as Travis tunes drifted from cafes, hairdressers, and taxis as well as from building sites and school playgrounds. The songs were catchy in an insidious sort of way, evincing both vulnerability and power, always building from seemingly unprepossessing verses to choruses that dared you not to join in. Suddenly, Travis as with the Beatles and Oasis before them, exemplified the notion that a "pop" song is only such if a milkman is heard to whistle the refrain.
And thus Travis became part of the national subconsciousness by offending the least possible number of people at all times. Impelled by constant airplay--on Radios 1 and 2 and right across the commercial sector--sales of The Man Who began to soar. It seemed the only way to silence the nagging echoes of that song about the rain they'd overheard briefly in the newsagent's the other day was to buy it and listen properly for them selves. Thirteen weeks after its release, The Man Who went to No. 1--and that was just the start. The most popular album in the U.K. by a British band in 1999, it has now sold 2.5 million copies, bought by the sort of people who buy only a handful of records a year--in other words, most people. And now we see the process repeat itself: a new Travis song called "Sing" has just annexed a transistor near you.
This is the story of a most self-effacing, very British, revolution. Were the four young men primarily responsible for the Travis phenomenon to walk down through the thoroughfares of Britain and mingle with the people who hum their tunes, the chances are they could do so without fear of molestation. Unlike Oasis, with whom they have shared stages as well as an entrenched faith in the traditional values of honest songcraft, Travis shuns the conspicuous trappings of success. "There is a status for the band and the music, but we don't necessarily have any status," says guitarist Andy Dunlop. "I don't think anyone in the band deserves any status. People don't generally know who we are. But if you sing to someone in the street 'Why Does It Always Rain On Me,' they'll go, 'Ah! That song!' That's what's so cool about Travis. God knows what'll happen down the line. At the moment, the songs are still way ahead of us."
We meet at the South Bank Studios where they make CD:UK, the musical adjunct to the hugely successful SM:TV, hosted by Ant & Dec and their accomplice Cat Deeley. Shown on Saturday mornings, it's seen as a key route to the hearts and piggy banks of the nation's youth. Travis are here for a live interview with Deeley, then after lunch they'll be recorded playing four songs, for broadcast the following week.
CD:UK's base currency is pop, preferably with a shiny capital P and a barrage of exclamation marks. ("Geri's in the building," the in-house photographer advises conspiratorially.) Occasionally though, a "proper" band slips through the net. Several months ago, it was the Manic Street Preachers, mumbling and squirming in the face of their bright- eyed inquisitors, clearly mortified to be there at all. By way of contrast, Travis are garrulous naturals. Healy and bassist Dougie Payne play the game, sign autographs, smile for pictures, and generally accept their role of token scruffs with far more grace then it warrants.
Later on, as they run through "Sing" several times for the benefit of cameras and live sound technicians, Travis put a collective brave face in the manufactured hysteria. Likewise neither Healy or Payne so much as blink at Cat Deeley's mention of their new album's "great reviews"--at this point, the album hasn't been reviewed anywhere. When plenty of others would have delighted in pointing out her gaffe, Travis happily accept the artifice of such situations. True, they have insisted on actually playing their music--the Manic Street Preachers mimed--but there's never any danger that they might to choose to somehow subvert proceedings, to use their position to sow the seeds of sedition in these impressionable minds. You could never imagine those tortured existentialists Radiohead, a band whom Travis have often been compared, complying with the CD:UK treatment. But then, despite some common musical bonds--most significantly, their employment of producer Nigel Godrich--Travis aren't really very like Radiohead at all. Travis have never been cool, were never enthusiastically championed by the opinion-forming media, did not get where they are today by being difficult and saying no.
"The thing to understand is that there is a machinery that is involved in this while business," says Healy. "And part of that machinery, as much as the radio stations, the songwriting, the whole thing, is interviews and promotion. And you have to do it. It's like if you take one little cog out of the clock, it'll tick slower or it'll start fucking up. And press is a little cog, just like the band is, in the whole big thing. You've got to do it. You're doing it for the song. If you were to turn round and go, 'No,I'm not doing that,' then that's you being selfish, instead of selfless. And I'd rather be selfless than selfish. Just because I think the songs are worth it...Because it's harmless. And it makes people happy."
"So you're constantly contradicting yourself, and you can't help it," Payne nods. "You do put up with the stuff that you maybe wouldn't choose to do, purely to get the songs out there. It's a part and parcel of the whole thing, part of getting the songs out to people." The waiter brings a tray of drinks to our table: one beer, two mineral waters. "It would be really nice just to sit and drink beer," says Payne staring enviously. "Aw, yeah!" Healy looks like he's about to start crying. "But," intones the Payne melodramatically, with a mock thespian flourish, "we must play."
Healy and Payne do most of the talking in Travis, not because they have a monopoly of wisdom--Dunlop and drummer Neil Primrose, the group's best musicians, have as much to say themselves--but because the consensus maintains, they are better at it. The two junior members (all four were born during 1972-73), Healy and Payne were also the last to join the present incarnation of Travis.
They met at Glasgow School of Art in 1991; Healy was studying fine art (he dropped out), Payne sculpture (he got a first). "When I first set eyes on Dougie, I was like, I fucking love you, you're brilliant," says Healy, "and he was the same about me." Dunlop, a drinking pal of Payne's, aside from making jewellery, played guitar in a band called Glass Onion, a by all accounts merit-free pop outfit also featuring a female singer, brothers Chris and David Martyn on bass and keyboards, plus drummer Primrose, who happened to be a friend of Healy's. In between serving pints one afternoon in the Horseshoe Bar where he worked part-time, Primrose told Healy about Glass Onion, about how they weren't going anywhere especially quick, and maybe he'd like to come and check them out, see what he thought?
Healy having hitherto only dabbled in music, thought he should be the singer and quickly assumed control of the band. He proceeded to hustle around Glasgow, looking for gigs, opportunities to get noticed, but without much success. No one in their hometown seemed to like them. The fact that they were, in the words of Dunlop, "shit, fucking rubbish and cheesy" may have been a factor. Glass Onion did win a talent contest, organised by the Music In Scotland Trust, then saw their £2,000 winnings diverted at the last minute to help pay for the Trust's Directory, an industry contacts book with details of hundreds of Scottish bands--from which they were omitted. Unsurprisingly, Healy has felt little affinity with anything purporting to be a Scottish music scene ever since.
Quitting art school forced Healy to focus exclusively on the band, by now renamed Travis after Harry Dean Stanton's spooked nomad in Paris, Texas. He hid himself away and wrote and wrote a string of great songs, one of which, "All I Wanna Do Is Rock, would become their first single, the recording paid for with a loan from Healy's mum. But the measure of his ambition for the band became apparent early in 1996 when Healy finally sacked the Martyn brothers, whose presence had never convinced him. The keyboardist would not be replaced, he decided, and the new bassist would be his best friend Payne-despite the fact that Payne had never played bass in his life. His sole qualification appeared to be that the foppishly extrovert sculptor was more of a natural pop star than the rest put together.
Suddenly, after years of constant underachievement, the band that had been formed by Dunlop and Primrose, ruthlessly honed by Healy, and topped off by Payne, could apparently do no wrong. They moved to London, living together in a Haringey flat, and within six months had got themselves a pair of major-league managers, secured a record deal, and gone to Woodstock to make their debut album with Steve Lillywhite, the producer who helped propel U2 to world renown. Admittedly, there followed a good many misfires on the way to where they sit now, before the huge artistic leap of The Man Who, but the wheels were in motion.
They might not "do" difficult, but Travis will, it seems, do everything the industry machine demands of a viable commodity. They played 237 gigs in support of The Man Who--most spectacularly, the Saturday headline at last years Glastonbury Festival--and gave many hundred more interviews along the way, most of them a good deal less entertaining than Healy's celebrated grilling on Da Ali G Show ("So, Travis--why is you so fucking depressed?").
When Travis walked off the stage at the Universal Amphitheatre in Hollywood last October 5th, it was the end of a-year-and-a-half-long campaign. A normal group might have taken a substantial break, to pause, reflect, and generally stoke their creative juices. Travis waited a couple of days for their heads to clear, then walked into Ocean Way Studios and began recording their next album. By April of this year, it was finished, and the four principals prepared to sign themselves up for yet another 18-month tour of duty.
Travis are a curious mix of pragmatic and idealistic: hard-headed in their approach to business imperatives of being a successful group yet apparently motivated by an evangelical belief in the power of song. No wonder some people find this combination hard to accept at face value. The music industry is powered by the endlessly convergent waves of avarice and ego--yet Travis appear devoid of either.
The stakes are high, for sure: Good Feeling, the 1997 debut album, shifted a respectable but hardly seismic 40,000 units. The Man Who, by contrast, was a multiplatinum-selling aural virus. Being what they are, corporate record companies--Travis are signed globally to Sony, though their U.K. label is the autonomous Independiente--like to extrapolate such growth to frequently illogical conclusions. So album x sells 3 million, without anyone really expecting it to; the market is this time fully geared up for the album y (x+1), ergo it should sell 6 million. In calling the new album The Invisible Band, Travis are aspiring to personal anonymity in defence to their music, as well making an ironic acknowledgment of their omnipresence.
"I thought that the best band was the invisible band," explains Healy. "We all want our band to be the best band, not necessarily the biggest, but the best. And the definition of the best band is a band that put their music in front of them and carried the song, rather the song being the vehicle for the star. Like for instance, Jennifer Lopez. So be it, man, she's a damn good at it, great to watch on television, and she's a nice lassie. But the vehicle for her is the song. The stars use these songs to get themselves out there. Whereas we are used by songs to get the songs out there." Which is either rank disingenuity or heroic naivety.
"I just think as long as there's songs to be sung and played, then there's no point in stopping," says Healy. "Robert Johnson talked about selling his soul to the devil. Whether it's the devil or it's god, your duty is to the people, to play the songs, and to get the people singing and dancing. A pretty old-fashioned way of looking at it. We've got a Protestant work ethic, even though I'm a Catholic--and it galls me to say that! It's good to work, it's good to do something for your community. I have a trade--like the bread maker, and I'm going to supply you with bread. And there's a fishmonger and there's the singer, there's the comedian, and you all do your little bit. But you only do it if you've got something to sing or if you've got bread to sell."
Healy's fondness for such folksy homilies, as well as his arch populism--he happily admits to being one of the 90 percent of the population who don't avidly buy records, who don't read many books, who don't care very much about politics--have ensured Travis pariah status among those who believe music ought to represent something more than a sop to the masses, be it pushing the frontiers of art or maybe just upsetting the status quo a little bit. Travis don't regard what they do as anything other than soundtrack for the fundamentals of human existence.
"The thing that I think galls all of us about the times we're living in is the lack of quality," says Payne. "In everything." He gestures at St Paul's Cathedral and other remnants of Wren's London, struggling to maintain their presence amid the modern skyline's adhoc postmodern hotch-potch. "We're looking at these fantastic buildings right now, over the water, and those skills have been lost. And now you get things like that!" He points to the LWT tower. "For fuck's sake, that's an ugly, nasty thing--but it's functional. It's functionality that crushes the human spirit. Look at it--were living in a time where things are pretty fucking desperate. There's massive environmental and global issues that effect every single one of us, yet there's just blandness everywhere. If you try and acknowledge these things, then it's like, 'Shhh. Everything's fine.' Anything that questions that gets belittled and diminished to the point where it's seen as a joke."
Healy and Payne delightedly cite The Prescott Punch as a rare breach in the dyke of the technologically mediated stupor that is modern life. ("Fucking well in. If someone came up and smacked you with an egg, you'd hook 'em, wouldn't you?") Of course, it could be argued that Travis, consensual rather than confrontational, the band that once claimed their "nice, good songs" were destined to be heard through the sound system at Pizza Express ("where all the best music ends up"), are merely a soothing balm for the pain--and part of the process against which Prescott, in loosing his long-suppressed temper--was symbolically railing.
"That's what music is," says Healy. "I'm sorry, but that's what music is. Music is escapism. It's a balm from consciousness. I just get fed up with being aware and conscious. I'd like nothing more than to be asleep. I hate being woken up. If I could sleep forever, I would be happy. Being conscious, you judge, you do all the things you fight against; whether you do it outwardly or inwardly, you're still doing it. You expend a lot of energy trying to be civil and trying to be civilised. And I think that's fair enough, because otherwise we'd all be running about, shagging and killing people in the streets. In that order. But that's the world we're living in. Resisting is pointless. And if were a balm to all that, then great."
Rock 'n' roll is well into its middle age, and the strain is beginning to show. No one seriously expects a mere pop group to reinvent the wheel at this late stage of the game, but a little more effort wouldn't go amiss. Recent months have seen both U2 and REM, bands whose heroic mantle Travis seemed poised to inherit, reap wide acclaim for albums that are little more than tame retreads of the records that made them stars in the first place. So you like the old records better? Then go and listen to them, they're still around. If rock is now merely a job, there's still no excuse for rewarding artistic redundancy.
The common man deserves better than this, better than song to sing, which is what Travis are all about: the honest makers of decent bread, delivering quality gear for everyday use. The success of Travis is emblematic of the increasing irrelevance of rock 'n' roll as a radical cultural force. These days, most people regard music as just another lifestyle option, no more fundamental to their existence than a favourite cheese or a particular brand of jeans. They may have been to art school, but collectively the four members of Travis are artisans rather than artists, and they do happen to be extremely good at what they do, making music that is, by their own unrepentant assessment, "happy" and "harmless."
"I don't think we take for granted anything that we've got," says Dunlop. "And I don't think you can. Y'know, Travis are Fran's songs. Without that, all the rest of it wouldn't mean anything. It's not us. It's not even him--it's the songs. That's the whole invisible band thing--these songs'll be around long after we're dust. And hopefully they'll last. It's not about us, it's not about what haircuts we've got, what clothes we wear, what we even say about it. It's an emotional thing, way, way under the surface. I'm damned if I can understand it, but it seems like we've got something nice."
The Guardian Weekend
It's been like this ever since the summer of 1999, with the release of a single called "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?" That was the moment the airwaves of Britain fell in love with Travis. The people charged with deciding what music we hear realised this amiable combination of melodious self-loathing, metaphysics, and the weather could sit happily next to just about anything else in the pop spectrum, be it Boyzone or Blur, REM or R. Kelly. Here, they exulted, was a band with universal musical pedigree of, say, Oasis, but without the bad attitude, the humble hangover after Britpop's hedonistic binge.
Eighteen months ago, Travis's singer, guitarist, and songwriter Fran Healy walked in to a coffee shop near his home in North London and ordered a cappuccino. Almost inevitably, the radio was playing one of his songs, but as Healy had spent much of the previous year abroad, this was still a novel experience for him. "That's our group!" he blurted. The girl behind the counter smiled and nodded distractedly, as one might indulge an uppity child. "No!" Healy insisted. "That really is our group!" This time the girl stopped her work, listened to the radio and gave the wan urchin before her a proper look before scoffing, "Yeah, right!"
Healy is the youngest member of Travis, yet he looks the oldest with his prematurely graying temples and erstwhile Tintin "style" converted into a crudely bleached mohawk. He is also tired as he sits here with Payne on the balcony of the Oxo Tower's eight-floor restaurant. The next day, they head for Scandinavia and the start of a European tour. Their promotional schedule will just be as intense but with the compensation of a show at the end of each day. "The things that I like about the job are playing and being part of a big giant room where everyone's singing," says Healy. "I love it. I think it's the best, best job in the world. The part I don't like is continually being asked my opinion, which changes constantly..."
Asked to name the pivotal point in their change of fortunes, each elects the first time they rehearsed with Payne, in a room two floors above the Horseshoe Bar. The debut of the current version of Travis, it was their epiphany; the time, they say, when the "magic" appeared. "We did 'All I Wanna Do Is Rock'," remembers Dunlop. "And it was pretty rotten, I'm sure if you heard it, it would sound awful. But it gave us this feeling, this wee buzz. And if it does that to you, you think, 'Maybe we can do this to other people.' And our job is to get it to as many ears as possible."
Fear, as opposed to greed, seems a likelier explanation for their willing submission to the self-perpetuating promotional grind: a fear of their little bubble bursting, a fear of the dread hand of complacency, a fear that ego might start to eat away at their solidly established working/lower-middle-class values were they to sit back and wallow in their accomplishments. Healy says he has visions of himself after this madness has ended, back in Glasgow, signing on at his former local dole office. Payne recalls reading that Paul McCartney believed the beginning of the end of the Beatles was in 1966, when they took four months off after finishing touring and essentially swanned around London being told how fantastic they were ("and you know that you're really, really not"). Work, claim Travis, is the only way to maintain a perspective.
But then again, all great bands hold up a mirror to the environment form which they spring, and with their lovely melodies and simple entreaties to "follow the light and don't be afraid of the dark," Travis seem very much a band of this spiritually confused age. This could be New Labour set to music--inclusive, well behaved, bereft of ideological axes to grind. Yet just because they're not the solution isn't to say they're blind to the existence of the problem.
23 June 2001
Text: Keith Cameron
Photography: Kevin Davies
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