 |
The Men Who Fell to Earth | |
After their rocktastic debut album, TRAVIS's newie is an altogether more
mellow affair. We meet them at Europe's largest cinema to ask how they plead to the charge of
turning into Del Amitri.
"Five!
Four!" A crackling voice from mission control begins the countdown and the
trainees
wriggle in their seats, feeling the shudder of the charging engines in their guts. Their eyes are
wide, their stomachs churning in readiness for a G-force thrust.
"Three! Two!" Their sphincters clench tight, as sparks shoot across the base of the Space
Shuttle's engine boosters, towering 40 feet overhead. The rumbling deepens ominously, and they
reach for their seatbelt shackles for comfort.
"One!" Hang on. No seatbelts. And come to think of it, if we're supposed to be making a journey
into the cosmos, shouldn't we be in the cockpit, rather than in point-blank blasting range of two
gigantic tankers full of highly flammable rocket fuel?
Kaboom! Aaaaaarrrgh!!! The boosters fire five billion megatons of burning petrol direct into
Travis's faces. Searing ash and smoke billows out, and our eardrums explode with the momentous
roar. Then whoosh! We've broken the sound barrier, the Earth's atmosphere, and our minds.
Within minutes, we're space-walking around the Mir Space Station en route to a guided tour of
the galaxy in 60-foot-high, 3D magnificolour bloodyhellovision. We are about to be thoroughly,
stunningly, trouser-soilingly IMAXed.
Not, all told, a case for NASA. See, ex-film students and newly tourtured troubadors Travis have
somehow managed to blag their way into Britain's newest IMAX cinema, in London's
Waterloo--the biggest cinema screen in Europe, showing specially made $250,000-a-minute
mega-movies--for a preview screening of real-life astronaut epic, Destiny in Space, three
days before the doors open to the public.
Celluloid addicts to a man, they scamper into the theater with the excitement of toddlers
collecting their first puppy. Two hours later, however, they stagger out, looking as though their
puppy was born with a nail in its head. In space, it appears, no one can hear you yawn.
"I wish we'd done the whole experience," Muskateer-alike drummer Neil Primrose hufffs. "The
3D thing. When I saw it in New York, the whole thing was fucking incredible. It was a flight
through the streets of New York and stuff. It was fucking fantastic."
Fran sighs, dejected. "I wish they'd turned the lights down. It thought it would've been bigger. It's
impressive, but it takes a bit more to impress me these days. I was so excited it was unbelievable."
What would you have filmed for an IMAX screen, Fran?
"The birth of a child," he grins, "in 3D. Inside and outside, although I don't know if you could get
one of those cameras inside. It'd have to be one hell of a big lady."
Andy Dunlop, unassuming guitar überlord, laughs. "I wanna see an IMAX porno cinema. Dirty
old men with 3D glasses on!"
"That bit in the middle will be full of dirty hankies," says Fran, "and really stinkin'. I went to one
of those places in Hamburg, and it was shocking. My girlfriend and me had a look in, and it was
like a big fruit machine with an up button and a down button and big, big telly. You can go
through, like, 200 channels of videos that are playing. Disgusting. Some of it's great, but the other
stuff is like shit-eating and that. That's what'll happen next. In the future, we'll have porno
IMAX."
Widescreen poo
banquets? Womb TV? Journeys to the outer reaches of the known universe
deemed too down to earth? Can this really be Travis, the band who woke up one morning
in late 1998, denounced the evil ways of booze rock, stopped singing like they had elephantiasis
of the tonsils, and became a born-again Fairground Attraction? The Travis who now write
soft-focus, cardigan-heavy folk rock like "Writing to Reach You?" The Travis who recently
slaggged off Gay Dad from the King's College stage for being "fake shit?"
Will the defendants please be seated; there're some charges to be answered.
Eyes aflame, palms laid firm and flat in the beer circles on the table of a Carnaby Street boozer,
Fran sighs the sigh of the eternally misunderstood.
"I'll tell you right now," he states, as close to furious as the mildest-mannered man in rock is
physically capable of getting. "I'm not in the business of slagging bands off. I've not even heard
Gay Dad, I've just seen all thse posters everywhere, and I was like 'What the fuck is all this
about?' When I said that onstage, it was a mixture of nerves and all these other things that go on."
"I apologize now if that was taken that way," Fran says. "That's not my line, I don't do that."
But you do want to strip down the showmanship of rock, erase the mystique?
"Yes."
Which reduces pop stardom to the fascination level of plumbing.
"Have you ever watched a plumber at work?" Fran barks. "It's fucking interesting! You can't tell
people what they want or don't want, that's too presumptuous. That's messing with kids' heads."
Travis's charm-in-a-nutshell bassist Dougie Payne intercepts. "It's less about that and more about
getting the fans and the bands closer than creating that huge divide between the two."
But youth culture is built on the divide between star and audience!
"That's not why I like music!" Fran argues. "I hate Bowie! I love his songs, but I didnae like all
that Ziggy Stardust stuff. When I was seven years old, I had my Adam and the Ants stripe across
my nose, and it's good for kids, but I'm 25!"
Dougie: "We've nothing against putting on a show, nothing against entertainment, but we come
from a place in Glasgow where you can find it difficult to bullshit, because you get the bullshit
kicked out of you. So we are not by nature like that."
If you thought that the string-drenched "Wonderwall" clone that was "Writing to Reach You" was
a bluff tactic before an album full of stonking, lager-sozzled booze anthems à la Good
Feeling, it's time to wake up and smell the Jewel. Their second album, The Man Who,
is named after the collection of psychiatric reports The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a
Hat, but could've been called The Man Who Thought His Band Was Called Deacon
Blue.
It's an album so unrock, so wafty acoustic pop, that it makes Belle & Sebastian look like
Lawnmower Deth. They can't even claim it's their 13, seeing as the last time Fran got
dumped was 1995. It's official: Travis have lost the will to rock.
"I think we still do," Fran disagrees, "but I didn't wanna do another album like that. We were
halfway through when it occured to me we were doing a really quiet album. I was worried about
that, I must admit. I had your thoughts exactly. But the songs are good, and the thing that got me
turned on to writing songs in the first palces was Blue by Joni Mitchell, and there's not one
fucking rock song in sight there."
What of the kids who come along to pogo their kidneys out? Aren't they gonna think you're
traitors to rock?
Fran shakes his head. "Not at all. Kids'll come down the front ready to rock, and they'll have to
listen. Some of them will fuck off, but for every two people that walk out of the theater because
they don't like it, another five will walk in."
Dougie: "We never really aligned ourselves with anything, we were just aligned to things by other
people. So we can't be traitors to something we haven't chosen to align ourselves to."
Andy: "You've still got the first album, we're not taking that away from anybody. We could've
fucking Sellotaped a couple of rock songs to the album, but it wouldn't have been right."
But there are limits. There are bits of the album that sound uncannily like Del Amitri.
"I don't hear it myself," says Fran, aghast, "but opinions are like arseholes. Everyone's got one,
and everyone thinks everyone else's smells."
Dougie leans over the Dictaphone, cheeks flushing.
"Del Amitri," he hisses, "my arse."
A few sips of lager to
ease the shock and Fran muses, "I see your point. I just don't like playing that
game. When I was a child, I said to my mum, 'I'm going to be a star.' When I said that, I meant,
'I'm going to be Spiderman.' When I was 12 or 14, I saw Roy Orbison with his big red guitar
singing 'Pretty Woman' on Jonothan Ross's show, and I said, 'Mum, get me a guitar.' I've kinda
fallen into it since then, and I'm here doing interviews and stuff, and there's half of me doing it and
half of me thinking, 'Why the fuck am I doing this?'"
Andy: "We're not saying rock 'n' roll's like this or like that or anything. We just do what we do..."
He pauses, sensing the metaphorical hammer poised over the last coffin nail...
...And Dougie steps in to save the day. "That's right," he beams. "And we're fucking
brillliant at it!"
At which point, we should inject a lethal dose of anti-maturity venom into Travis's neck and leave
them to perish, flapping in the gutter. But we don't. Because no matter how many AOR bells it
ring or mandolins it plucks, no matter how much the tiny Atari Teenage Riot fan in your gut
screams at you to despise it to the very core of your being, The Man Who is an undeniably
brilliant record. Maybe it's the sublime, quivering tenseness infecting the whole album. Maybe it's
the way it snatches all of Elliott Smith's morose glory with such grace and simplicity. But mostly
it's the sheer weight of masterful songwriting on the likes of "Slide Show," "Turn," and "She's So
Strange" that makes you glad that they don't sound like Radiohead screaming to be let out of a pub
cellar any more.
Reprieve granted with honours, then. And, relaxing, it turns out that Travis have more in common
with Cliff Jones's mob than they might have imagined. Fran exposes his dark history of submissive
bestiality ("When my cat was a baby, I was off sick one day, and I was lying watching the telly.
The cat was on my chest, and it started suckling me! It thought I was its parent!"), while Dougie
confesses to My Secret Life as a Ladyboy.
"Me and my friend Robbie," he giggles, "went to a Christmas party once that was a cross-dressing
party. I was wearing a long cocktail dress and a feather boa and thigh-high suede boots. It was
fantastic! We went to the party in full make-up, got a bit drunk, and we decided to go to the pub.
So we went to this drinking man's club, and we got chatted up by these two Canadian tourists,
asking us what we were doing later on. Every man in Britain should cross-dress."
Not quite the grey trads they thought they were after all. Just the most graceful and impressive
case of premature aging ever put on record. Perhaps you should, eh, come up an' see 'em
sometime...
Melody Maker
Houston, we have a....
Fran's Gay Dad comments come across to reviewers as an attack on personality and glamour in
pop.
Travis's
Five Favourite Film Moments
1. Raiders of the Lost
Ark
Fran: "The bit where he shoots the guy that's been
doing all of the sword stuff. It's a moment of comedy genius. It's Harrison Ford's face, that look
of pure disdain. It's fantastic."2. It's a Wonderful
Life
Dougie: "The moment when George Bailey goes back
into the bar that he's been drinking in, but he doesn't exist anymore. It's the first instance where he
realises that something funny is going on. He goes in with the guardian angel, Clarence. When he
throws them out, it cuts back to the bar, and the bartender, Nick, he's doing the till, going ting!
Ting! And he goes, 'Check me, I'm giving out wings.' Because everytime a bell rings, an angel
gets his wings. That film is amazing."3. The Right
Stuff
Neil: "The moment where Chuck is flying his plane,
and he's actually got out of the atmosphere, and he's just about broken the sound barrier three
times, and his plane stalls and goes into a flat spin. He falls to earth and comes out of it totally
unscathed. The cinematics are fucking amazing, and it's a brilliant film. All
true."4. The Great
Escape
Andy: "When Steve McQueen jumps the fence.
Because it's one of the classic stunts of all time, and Steve McQueen is fucking cool. Awesomely
cool."5. There's Something About
Mary
Fran: "The dog scene, because it's funny as fuck. And
the next scene where he sees the dog in a plaster cast with the tongue sticking out. Is that a real
dog? How do they do that?"
Neil: "I think it's a mechanical tongue, Fran."
May 29, 1999
Writing to Reach You: Mark Beaumont
Happy Snaps: Piers Allardyce
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