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One Day A Real Rain Will Come... | |
...and wash all the other guitar bands off the streets. Travis arm themselves with the Loaded Readers' Best Album Award in New York.
There are Travis fans inside and outside the Radio City Music Hall on 6th and 51st in central New York. Outside the venue, they wait by the stage door and offer to buy any guest passes for a hundred bucks. Inside, they sit in the dressing room at the 6,000-seater high art deco palace, mooching about and waiting to headline this landmark sell-out gig. This last lot of Travis fans are, of course, Oasis. Travis have been invited to open their American tour after a succesfful support slot on the recent Scottish leg. In the lift backstage, Noel Gallagher rates Travis as "really fucking good," and the respect is mutual. When, toward the end of their set, lead singer Fran Heally announces, "This is a cover," somebody in the crowd shouts, "Supersonic!"
The crowd go wild. Unlike in Britain, where support bands normally play to an empty auditorium while the crowd gets pissed in the bar, Healy and his band play to row after row of packed seats. The eagle has landed.
It's been a long slog from the early '90s through to Radio City Music Hall and one which began when Healy, guitarist Andy Dunlop, and bassist Dougie Payne met in the art department of Glasgow University. As art students have a wont to do, they formed a band, originally called Glass Onion, with the addition of Neil Primrose on goatee and drums.
"I was working in the Levis store in Glasgow," says Payne as he curls up in a big leather chair backstage before the gig. "That's how well my career as a sculptor was going."
The music business it was, then. After no appreciable success as Glass Onion (big surprise there), they changed their name to Travis (after the Harry Dean Stanton character in Paris, Texas--not, in fact, the Robert DeNiro character in Taxi Driver) in 1994 and took that time-honoured route to the top of borrowing 600 from someone's mum (in this case, Healy's), gigging relentlessly round the Scottish toilet circuit, moving to London, getting single of the week in the NME (for "All I Want to Do Is Rock"), appearing on Later With Jools Holland, and then releasing the critically acclaimed first album Good Feeling. See? Piece of piss?
"How many people voted?" asks Primrose eagerly.
"Like you haven't spent the last three months sending in thousand of voting slips with Travis written all over them..." I tell him sternly. There's a pause, and then he laughs.
"Oh, aye, I forgot," he smiles and reaches for the rider. If you've got an image of Travis pouring JD down their necks in between snorting lines of coke the size of road markings, get rid of it. Andy's drinking mineral water and eating quartered slices of celery. Similarly, dispense with any romantic idea you've got about rock 'n' roll dressing rooms. This is Radio City, not King Tut's Wah Wah Hut. There's not even graffiti in the toilets. Well, not until Loaded gets there, anyway.
Having cut short an interview with the Washington Post to accept the Loaded award, Fran Healy saunters in. He looks pale and a bit drawn, up close like nothing more than an adolescent version of the kid who played Billy Caspar in Kes. But that's not really surprising--last year, he almost had a breakdown at the end of an enervating world tour.
"Me and Nora [his girlfriend] were sitting in bed, and I was just crying. I was beginning to lose it. It's the pressure. It's like a pressure cooker, and you've just got to let out a little bit...there was just too much going on."
There's no less going on this time. In between shows from coast to coast, they're also "doing press." Which means that, for example, the morning after the Radio City aftershow after the night before, they will be picked up at the crack of dawn and taken to Long Island to appear on a radio show before being driven to the Conan O'Brien TV studio, where they will rehearse before playing live on the show that night. Travis will be away for another month, and when I ask Dunlop if he is looking forward to getting home, he just looks at me as if I'm stupid.
Appearances aside, however, the band seem to be relishing the tour so far. Back in the dressing room, Primrose is hanging out of the first-floor window and chatting to some fans as Healy picks up the Loaded award and polishes it with his sleeve.
"Is it silver?" asks Primrose over his shoulder.
"They wouldn't trust me with a silver one," I have to admit. "It's just made out of any old shit."
"Any old shit?!" he yells.
"Er, no...it's, er...proper," I tell him unconvincingly.
"Well, it looks proper," smiles Healy, weighing it in his hands. "It feels dead heavy." He should try carrying it in his luggage. But they're all obviously as chuffed as a dog with two dicks.
For the purposes of an acceptance video, we have hired a film crew varying in incompetence from shambolic to rank amateur. The cameraman, a dead ringer for a Close Encounters-period Richard Dreyfuss, has a nice line in humor, which includes telling the band he has never heard of them, asking why anybody would vote for them, and then, once the band have left, pretending that the camera had not been running. Ha ha ha. It must be a New York thing, but just in case, I round off the evening by pushing him out of a window.
"Thanks for voting for our album," says Healy to the camera. "It's great to win this award, but a little bit surprising because you slagged our album off. At least the readers seem to know what they're doing. We'll be drinking wine out of this after the show...or something."
As the band crack up at their little "in" joke, I try to explain (by shouting at them off camera) that, as the singles and the albums are reviewed by a toy monkey, the editorial staff of the magazine cannot be held responsible for negative reviews.
"Oh, alright then," says Fran as he walks through the door, now fully convinced of our love for Travis. Obviously buoyed by their prestigious Loaded award, the show is a tour de force, and the band go at it like four frogs in a bucket. The crowd love them, and even the third tier are on their feet at the end. Oasis, God bless them, also turn it on and put in a performance that reminds you why you thought they were the greatest band on the planet in the first place.
As the crowd starts to leave, a mobbed Andy is marooned in the lobby, shaking hands with fans and being modest. He looks bemused. Bless. If you think Travis are big now, wait until this time next year, because they are going to be clinging to the outside of the Empire State Building and swatting other bands out of the way with contemptuous ease. You read it here fifth.
Loaded
"No," he replies without looking up, "there's only one band who can play that, and they're coming on next."
Fast forward two years, nine Top 40 singles, an album that has sold more than 2 million copies and is still selling (The Man Who), two BRIT awards, and now, the cream of the crop, the Loaded award for best album, after polling almost 80 percent of your votes.
"It's like a real trophy!" he says of the real trophy.
July 2000
Story: Bill Borrows
Photos: Pieter M. Van Hattem
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