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Fran's Across the Ocean | |
Drawing to the end of a U.S. tour that's outlasted even their tourbus, and gearing up for their biggest U.K. hit, TRAVIS reveal how they overcame their "bone idle" tendencies to become The Men Who might just crack America.
It was another Travis in another era who said of New York: "Some day, a real rain'll come and wash all the scum off the streets." The place may have changed from the lunatic asylum of Taxi Driver legend, but as summer takes hold and the heat soaks into people's very bones, there are some inhabitants of this city for whom the madness simmers perilously near the surface.
"Hey Travis! Hey Travis!" Fran Healy sings a record sleeve for a teenage girl, affecting not to have heard the man standing less than steadily at the door to the adjacent bar, the man who thinks Travis the band are named after their singer. "Hey Travis! Gimme an autograph!"
For one guy, however, Traivs is the scruffly little Limey who leads the band of the same name--and therefore ripe for his strained brand of local humour.
"Hey Travis! C'mon, sign my dick!"
Fran Healy regards his inquisitor. The bloke's in his 20s, very possibly engaged in higher education, and pissed. He probably wasn't even at the gig.
"I'm sorry," says Fran. "MY name's got four letters in it, so I don't think it would fit." Smiling, he turns back to the throng.
Piqued, our assailant's mood changes. His outbursts become less coherent and more abusive until Roger, NME's photographer, trying all this time to get pictures of Fran and his public while enduring the drunk ranter at his elbow, makes a polite but firm suggestion that he shuts the fuck up or else fucks off.
What happens next happens extremely fast. Rant boy produces a knife and threatens to stab Roger in the throat. He then turns to a girl standing nearby and motions the act of slitting her neck open. The girl freaks, head for a payphone, and dials 911. Within what seems like no time, half a dozen of the NYPD's finest are on the scene. Rant boy's gone, legged it back to the bar from whence he came. The police are quizzing Roger as to exactly what happened, what the guy looked like, how big the knife was...
Fran Healy, meanwhile, has assessed the situation and taken decisive action. He's outta here. Striding down the street, almost unnoticed amid the confusion, he heads toward the bar to get drunk with his mates. Travis have been in the United States for six weeks now, and there's only another ten days to go. As Fran walks, rain starts to fall in large, purposeful drops. It feels real enough.
Travis are not big in America. After supporting Oasis for just over a month, they've been playing some headline dates of their own, at best to sold-out 1,500-capacity halls such as Irving Plaza. On the morning of their New York show, their album, The Man Who, sits at number 136 in the U.S. charts.
Mind you, they're not exactly big in Britain either. Travis are beyond big. The Man Who has gone platinum seven times, which means it's now sold more than 2.1 million copies, and on the first anniversary of its release, it shows no signs of stopping. The Man Who isn't an album, it's a virus. Each week, just when you assume everyone who would ever wish to possess a copy must do, thousands more succumb. As happened with (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, it's become part of the national consciousness. There are buskers form Sauciehall Street to the Central Line fumbling through its songs as you read this. Sky Sports uses "Why Does It Always Rain on Me?" as ironic backing for a montage of cricket clips. And the man who runs Cafe Chekour on Camden High Street sings along every time Travis come on the radio.
Which is a lot. Last month, purely in the name of research, your correspondent visited Cafe Chekour at roughly the same time every day for a week. It's bright, pleasant, and does a cracking bacon sandwich. Anyhow, the radio is permanently tuned to Capital FM, London's background fluff outlet of choice. For six days on the trot, between noon and one o' clock, the radio played Travis. "Why Does It Always Rain on Me?" four times, "Writing to Reach You" and "Turn" once each. The man who serves the bacon sandwiches seems to like "Turn" the best. He knows the verses to that one.
Conclusive proof of Travis's establishment status at home came when Fran played "Why Does It Always Rain on Me?" on Da Ali G Show, happily submitting to both the ritual junglist corruption of his most famous song and the host's fearless interview technique. ("So Travis, why is you so fucking depressed?") Fran giggled his way through the whole thing. He'd actually been due to go for a short holiday, but postponed it in order to do the programme. "A dream come true," he says of the experience.
So when Travis release their new single "Coming Around" next week, matters aren't likely to calm down. Recorded as a B-side the week before The Man Who was released, when Independiente boss Andy Macdonald heard it, he went bananas, insisting it had to be a single. He even suggested stripping it onto the alum after it had shipped 60,000 copies, an idea vetoed by Fran after it became obvious that The Man Who was destined sell far more than that. The only doubt surrounding "Coming Around" is whether it'll make Number One or else merely the Top Three. Then they headline Glastonbury. Then T in the Park. In July, it's back to America, east and west coasts. Then back to Britain for V2000. Then back to America for a bigger jaunt, winding up in L.A. in September.
Then they begin recording the next album with Nigel Godrich, a task originally scheduled for spring of this year, until America got in the way. Travis might not be big in America, but according to the marketing boffins at their U.S. label Epic, the perception among the people who could help to make them big is that they will be. Perception, that's what's important. At this moment, America wants Travis. And Travis appear perfectly happy to oblige.
"I remember in January, we were in the Epic offices, and I was totally going off on one," says Fran, "going, 'You've got to give us no days off. Any city we're in, we want to e doing radio stations, doing interviews…' And all the big people at Epic were like, 'A band that wants to work? What's this all about?' And to their credit, they did it. It's good. Everything is to do with attitude. I don't think we've got a big ego as a band."
"You get energy for it," considers Fran. "If you're representing something that's good and makes people happy, then you…" He trails off. "I don't know. I don't know where I get the energy from."
Neil Primrose, drummer with a beard shaped like the letter T, has an inkling: "If you've been doing six or seven weeks or whatever, it's when you get home that you get really fucking knackered. Your body will keep going for as long as you want it. It's not as if it's hard work. A guy working in the street, shoveling muck for nine hours a day, that's hard work."
"The interviews do your head in a bit, especially when there's a lot in one day," says Dougie Payne, ebullient man of bass, loud shirts, and louder guffaws. "But you wake up the next morning and you're up for it again."
Andy Dunlop, guitarist and last man out of the bar the night before, nods wholeheartedly. "And if it's a show day, you've got your reward at the end."
"THE SHOW IS THE BISCUIT FOR THE PERFORMING DOGS!" booms Dougie. Everyone laughs.
The problem, such as it is, for a band in Travis's position is that huge domestic success is hardly every simultaneously replicated abroad. The scenario is a familiar one: band with collective big head get used to regarding the likes of Brixton Academy as "clubs"--an attitude once legendarily typified by Jim Kerr when he pointed out that the Glasgow Barrowlands "has a roof"--and then can't handle the reality of a club like the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco, where Travis played the first of their own shows on the visit; the sort of place where the staff can virtually collect the empties from the stage without moving from behind the bar. Stars in one universe tend to be invisible in another.
"There's never any chance of that with us because we honestly don't think we're anything," Dougie says.
Fran: "It's better to think you're shit then you're 'it' because as soon as start thinking you're 'it,' then…"
"Maybe it's because we're Scottish," says Fran. "Maybe it's that ingrained…"
"Humility?!" offers Dougie, chuckling.
How about "inferiority complex?"
Fran: "Aye, probably. Just knowing that you can always be better. I mean, everybody raves and goes on about 3 million records…Aye, but we made only one record. We sold 3 million but we made only one. That's the point."
Dougie: "Now when you start thinking about making another record, you've got to think about it like it's your first again."
Which is the only way this erstwhile hard-line skeptic can account for the difference between the Travis that made Good Feeling and the one that made The Man Who. That debut album, as trailed by the artless romperstomp swagger of "U16 Girls" and "Tied to the 90s," suggested that Travis were little more than a nutrition-free pudding after the Britpop feast. Fun for those of a certain inclination, but hardly essential. How, then, to explain "Writing to Reach You?" No pop song more insidious, brutal, or downright beautiful appeared last year. And then the album compounded the mystery: expansive yet claustrophobic, pretty, and dark. Of course, with hindsight, the tense "Funny Thing" at the end of Good Feeling had suggested as much. And it's a tribute to their blinkered self-belief that Travis themselves see no radical differences, nor care that anyone might hate their first album and love the second.
"I don't give a shit," says Fran. "The one thing that changed between the first record and the second is that radio decided to play Travis. Unanimously, Radio 1, Capital FM, every single radio station in the U.K. played 'Why Does It Always Rain on Me?' Fucking hammered it. And the first album, they didn't, at all. The success of all the single was totally down to radio."
"Radio's the most important medium," says Dougie. "Bands are a medium for songs to get out, and radio's more important than bands, 'cos radio can play the songs to 30 million people a week. We cannae do that."
Fran: "When people hear tunes, they don't fucking think of the band. Remember, we're in a tiny majority--90 percent of the people in the world don't give a fuck, They'll know how Ricky Martin is or Britney Spears, but they won't give a shit about it, they just know them as these little people who turn up on the telly. When they hear a tune, they'll remember their lives, they'll use music to define themselves. How can they possibly use a fucking band? Unless it's the Beatles or the Stones, something spanning a long period, how can you use a band to define yourself?"
Because people like to live vicariously through others. And bands represent things that people are missing in their lives, a sense of community, or strength…
"Mmmm, yeah. Maybe."
Don't you think so?
"Well, I've never really been into bands," says Fran. "I've always just liked tunes. When I hear a tune, I don't think, 'Who's that?' I think, 'What's that?'"
"A song that you love," says Dougie, "a song you want to sing along to, will last your whole life. And it will never let you down. But bands and artists, they'll let you down. Eventually, they'll do something to let you down. That's why the Beatles are seen as this perfect iconic thing 'cos they split up, so they can't let you down. The band itself is a finished piece of work now. As for bands still going, it's the songs, that's what people want. They can't sing 'Neil,' they can't sing 'Franny,' but they can sing 'Why Does It Always Rain on Me?'"
During the set, a homemade Travis tribute card is passed from a group of rapt teenage girls to Fran. He says New Yorkers are like chocolates. "Hard on the outside, soft on the inside." They encore with a brilliant version of Joni Mitchell's "River" and the Band's "The Weight." Aw, man. This band is a cynic's nightmare.
"It's always annoyed me when people slag us off or whatever," sighs Fran, ''cos I'm like, 'You don't know how special this is.' It's such a special band. I don't care whether you like the music or whether I annoy you, whoever says that doesn't know what we've been through. I juts think we're dead lucky, and we're getting on with it, and we're not taking anything for granted, and we'll just keep doing that until we collapse."
"Which," says Dougie, staring at an invisible schedule, "is in about an hour and a half!"
Travis are onto their second bus of the tour. ("We broke the first one," says Andy, reclining happily in its plush confines.) It's about as comfortable as these things get: two lounges, leather sofas, mirrors on the ceiling, and 500-channel satellite TVs in the bunks. Ultimately, though, it's still a pressurized container, an artificial environment in which they'll be spending an unhealthy amount of time between now and the end of 2002, by which point they estimate they'll have finished touring the third album and will finally be able to allow themselves a year off. Ummm, except during that year "off," Fran plans to write the main body of the three albums after the next one.
Are you running away from something or what, trying to avoid real life?
Dougie: "I don't think we're running away from real life 'cos it's all our ambitions to be completely bone idle. And I don't think that's particularly good for you! I think we're running into more and more stuff to do to keep us going."
Fran: "But I must admit, as we get further into the whole thing, from a human point of view, it's interesting. You're almost experimenting on yourself."
To wit: Later on, Fran disappears and rummages through his bunk. He returns wearing a set of grotesque false teeth and a brand-new persona, a hellspawn cross between Alan Partridge and Tim Nice But Dim: "Hello, jolly nice to meet you here in the city they call the Big Apple…!" They always did say that they were a schizophrenic group.
It could also be argued that "Coming Around" too sounds like an experiment: like how close can we get to a Teenage Fanclub/Byrds interface without enraging the Glasgow Guitar Gods?
"Shit, were you spying on us?!" hoots Dougie.
Fran: "Eh? What? Well, if you can play me a song that…"
It was a joke.
"Oh. The best bit in 'Coming Around,' that surprises even me, is the melody in the bridge. It's great. We recorded it in 25 minutes, didn't even take tapes home with us. We just left it." He fiddles with his Starbucks lid. "And anyway, it's about time Teenage Fanclub put another good record out." Much laughter ensues: "I mean that with the utmost respect, I fucking love that band! See, as a writer, you can't stop yourself and go, 'Shit, it sounds like…' All I can think of is, 'Would I like that if I heard it on the radio?' And I would. And I wouldn't care who did it, whether it's Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Travis, Oasis, Radiohead, Richard Ashcroft, whatever. Radio's faceless. All it requires is someone's imagination and their vocal chords while they're sitting in the car or washing the dishes."
Travis, you will have gathered, aren't punk rock. Their arch populist's musical vision isn't just commendably unelitist, it's positively consensual. Which shouldn't really come as a surprise, for every great band holds up a mirror to their environment and their time. It's not to say they're happy about the State of Things, merely realistic about the part they can play.
"I haven't heard any great indie band recently," says Fran. "They're all fucking trying to make noise, trying to make sure their mums and dad will hate what they do. I don't hear anything that's lyrically beautiful, fearless melody. And I want to hear it, and that's probably why we're forced to do what we gotta do."
You say you're not hearing anything that's good, but what are your sources?
"The radio."
But the radio, as you know, commodifies music. It's very selective. There's lots of stuff the radio won't play.
"I don't buy records. I'll rely on the radio to give me what I want and I don't hear it. All I hear is junk music that has been supplied by corporations. I do believe that if something's shit hot it will get there eventually, and I will hear it on the radio."
It would be nice to believe that.
Dougie: "If something is absolutely brilliant, the corporations will say, 'We can make money off that,' and you'll hear it."
But the corporations are inherently conservative. And if they find a formula that works, they're not going to bother looking for anything else.
Fran: "Yeah, I know, but what does that tell you? It tells me that the end of the corporation is soon to be at an end."
Dougie: "It might sound naive, but the age of the massive corporation is going to implode. And all these little independent labels are like TIE fighters going into the Death Star!"
Wow, Travis lead the war on corporate hegemony! Maybe they're punker than we thought.
"When I listen to the radio," says Fran, "all I can hear is 'somebody's written this for the money.' They've not written it just for the fucking joy of singing a song. I'm just hearing money music. Business doesn't make music anymore, it makes money. And I hope songs will always be the currency of the music business. It will come back to that, it just takes time. But it will be exciting again, and I hope we're going to be a part of it. It's not coming for us, and it won't come from us. I know that. We're just gonna keep doing what we do. 'Cos you need a movement, and we're not part of any movement, we're just a little alley unto ourselves, we're the Travis bubble. I just want to have the radio on in the car, and this thing jumps out, grabs me by the head and smacks my head off the fucking steering wheel and goes, 'I'm a tune!' I don't wanna go looking for it in a record shop. I want the tune to find me."
Dougie spots the NME's crestfallen expression. "It's like we said--we're lazy!"
"Bone fucking idle, man!" laughs Fran. And with that, the hardest-working bunch of lazy bastards in rock prepares to shatter Irving Plaza's tough exterior and make merry with its gooey insides. It's a cinch. Travis might not have broken America yet, but if all signs are to be believed, America is theirs for the breaking. It's hard to conceive of a group better adjusted or qualified for the job at hand, let alone one that's sold more than 3 million records. Indeed, so calm are the four individuals at the eye of the storm, it feels positively creepy, like someone up there's watching out for them.
This time he looks over, but still Fran says nothing. Instead he carries on signing and chatting to the friendly scrum of fans who've been waiting for well over an hour outside Irving Plaza, the venue in Manhattan's Gramercy Park district where Travis have just played. The other members of the band are a block away, in the sanctuary of a bar requisitioned for an impromptu aftershow party, and Fran intends to join them just as soon as he's signed the last autograph and graciously reviewed the final fulsome compliment from the dedicated fringe of a growing cross-section of Americans to whom Travis are more than just the latest guitar-toting Brits intent on exporting their parochial charms across the Atlantic.
Fran Healy rubs his still sleepy eyes and swigs at a caffeine-based frothy concoction. Six weeks in America, one and a bit to go, and the only thing he's worried about is not being able to feed his Starbucks habit as readily back home. His American record label did as he told them: yesterday was Travis's first day off since they played Seattle in early April. Considering this, they have no right too look as well as they do, the four of them sat in a bar at their Madison Avenue hotel, full of jokes and bonhomie.
Dougie: "Then you're shit!"
In a wicked world, Travis can be just a little bit too humble to be believed sometimes. How else can they claim on the one hand that bands no longer matter and then witness the overwhelming desire of people in New York to be a part of the goodness that they put forth so vividly? In the dressing room before the gig, Fran studies a postcard featuring the famous picture of John Lennon wearing a New York City T-shirt. Out of Lennon's mouth, a speech bubble says: "Imagine there's no tickets…" The message on the other side is from two NYC Travis fans sitting in a cafe across the road, hoping that by "writing to reach you," they might somehow get into the gig. Travis put their names on the guestlist.
Safe in the aftershow bar,
with the mad knifeman under arrest and three Captain Morgan and Cokes downed, Fran and Dougie toast another day's work done, Fran saying he'll do anything to get these songs to as many people as possible.
