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Prologue to History | |
The Pope may disapprove of their early influences, but God is certainly on their side. Having seldom put a foot wrong, TRAVIS have had the smoothest of rides to their current
gold-selling, transatlantic-crossing life. And this is how they got there...
First there was its video, which involved all four spending a whole week at the bottom of a swimming pool. Then there was Glastonbury--a fine, proud performance for sure, but one which invited the clouds to shed their load. And now, deep within a picturesque copse on Wimbledon Common, it's happening again. Before you can say "literal interpretation," the heavens opens, and a quite alarming amount of rain falls, soaking everyone to the marrow.
"Typical," sighs singer Fran Healy, resigned to his own status as Rainmaker General. "Why couldn't I have called it 'Why Is It So Damned Hot?'"
"Come on, out of the way, I'm next."
"Are you fuck! I'm freezing here."
Half an hour and a mile walk later, three-quarters of Travis are fighting over an inadequately sized hand dryer in the toilets of a cosy Wimbledon pub. While bassist and ex-bowlhead Dougie Payne contorts himself in an attempt to dry the collars of his shirt, gawky guitarist Andy Dunlop and Fran jostle for position. Zorro-esque drummer Neil Primrose, meanwhile, waits patiently at a table, lager in hand and wet jacket on back.
Totally at odds with current meteorological conditions, Travis's career thus far has been one of almost unbroken sunny spells. They may shrug their Glaswegian shoulders and come across as the most modest men in rock, but in the space of two albums, they've fashioned themselves into one of Britain's most eloquent and endearing groups.
If debut album Good Feeling was the uncomplicated sound of four men feasting heavily on ramalama excess, new album The Man Who finds them picking at only the finest in musical ingredients--the Connoisseur range of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, John Barry, Jacques Brel, the Stones, and the Byrds.
"Nothing's ever surprised me," says Fran, with the air of some kind of hush-voiced mystic. "It's because I'm lucky. I'm not lucky at puggies (fruit machines) or cards, but in life, I've been so fucking lucky."
Travis may be resident in London, but the lion's share of their story creaks with evidence of their Glaswegian origins: the members' secretarian loyalties (or lack of) plays its parts in their history; they owe their initial inspiration to the city's musical alumni; and the group finally coalesced around one of Glasgow's more venerable institutions. More of which later...
The eldest in Travis by 24 days, Neil Primrose--the beardy one--was born on 20 February 1972 in Cumbernauld, a new town full of roundabouts and ill-conceived shopping centres and on Glasgow's outskirts. His father was a power station engineer--which meant the Primrose family were forever moving around, first to Middlesbrough, then all over the northeast of England. What it also meant was that Neil was forever the new boy with the strange accent. "For those ten years, I basically got the shit kicked out of me wherever we went," he smiles grimly.
It wasn't until the Primrose family moved back to Glasgow that the desire to drum seeped into his mind, on account of a friend called Ronnie who played the drum in an Orange marching band. Also, in Travis's equivalent of Nicky Wire's aborted soccer career, Neil came perilously close to full-time swimming in his mid-teens. "I got myself into the national C Class, which is one down from being able to swim for Scotland," he shrugs. "200m butterfly was my specialty. I suppose if I'd stuck it out for another year, I might've got somewhere."
What saved him for a life of constant body shaving and chlorinated eyes was a small advert placed in a local shop looking for a drummer. Not having much else to do besides work in a shoe warehouse, Neil answered the ad and found himself in a cabaret band called Running Red with an enthusiastic yet bad female singer and a bespectacled, round-faced guitarist.
"Aye, that was me," admits guitarist Andy Dunlop, his head getting closer to the pub table. "We didn't put any influences on the advert because we were too shameful. We were really, really, really bad for many, many years."
Andy was born on 16 March 1972 and raised in Lenzie, a peaceful suburb 15 miles north of Glasgow. As a child, he'd bang around on the house piano, until at the age of seven, he turned his back on two years of proper lessons and switched his loyalty to the six-string embodiment of evil cool.
Thus, fuelled by an early love of AC/DC, Saxon, the Dead Kennedys, and Status Quo, Andy formed the Flumps, a "heads-down thrash band with ponytails" before shunning all things speed metal and getting tuned into the sound of Simple Minds and some far-flung purveyors of what was once called Caledonian soul called Hipsway (one of them is now in Texas). Enter, with no little fanfare, Running Red.
Britain may be mopping its brow in the face of the first truly long hot summer for aeons, but these days, it seems Travis can't do anything without getting wet. Maybe it's their own fault for releasing "Why Does It Always Rain on Me?" as a single, but over the past month, everything they've done has somehow resulted in soggy clothes, sopping hair, and the kind of sighing fatalism summed up in that very song.
As a result, after three years of brain-numbing grind, the spoils of musical war are now beginning to fall into their welcoming laps. The Man Who went gold several weeks ago. They can now depend on every gig selling out. Eeryone from Natalie Imbruglia to Adam & Joe and Cher (true! she made an appearance at their recent London Astoria show) comes to see them. All this and more has put Travis in a very joyous place indeed.
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Way back in the mists of rock history, when Mojo readers were hitch-hiking to outdoor "freak-outs" and one's girlfriend tended to be referred to as "the old lady," British muisc had one dependable source: the art school. It was here, until some point in the '80s at which the flow suddenly dried up, that innumerable icons sneaked into the toilets during life-drawing classes, lit up a joint, and decided upon an alternative career path.
Travis, commendably enough, represent a reawakening of that tradition--for at this point in the story, the eventual members of the band take an inevitable tumble into Glasgow School of Art, the scarily esteemed institution built by Scottish design-god Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Only Neil learned his life experience from the "University of Menial Jobs"--the other three took the same late-teens route as John Lennon, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, et al.
It was on his very first day at GSA that Andy met bassist-to-be Dougie. Fired up on free Fresher's Week lager, the pair hit upon the rich conversational vein of the Monkess. That day, their booze-driven friendship was sealed.
The second youngest in the band, Douglas Payne--the camp, motherable one--was born on 14 November 1972 into an upstandingly bourgeois Southside Glasgow family. Like Andy, his father was a bank manager (the two dads used to take lunch together three decades ago, but lost touch, only to be reunited at a local Travis gig years later). By the time he got to 16, he began to take refuge in the school art room while spending his evenings around Giffnock, South Glasgow, getting into what he calls "malicious mischief."
"There were about ten of us drinking Merrydown cider and cans of Tennents," he fondly recalls. "I did get into a bit of a bother with the police once for jumping over cars...but essentially, I was a good boy."
Dougie's artistic passions were expressed in sculpture, though he was more interested in the shadows they cast than the objects themselvs. But this didn't prevent him from getting a first class degree, and his exhibitions became notorious.
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This typical mixture of comedy and culture brought Dougie together with Fran. Attending an evening life drawing class, he sensed someone behind his left shoulder as he was sketching and turned round to see "this little wee guy checking out my drawing."
"So I turned around and did this fantastic Rolf Harris impression--'Can you tell what it is yet?'" Dougie remembers. "And we've been best mates ever since."
Born into a Catholic family on 23 July 1973, Francis Healy--the heartthrob--moved from Stafford to Glasgow aged nine months after his parents split. His unshuttable mouth has always got him noticed. Right from when he started school, he riled the teachers by refusing to keep quiet.
"I was always brought up to speak and never to be afraid to say anything," says the man whose favourite pasttime is arguing with doorstepping religious fruit loops. "Every one of my report cards, all the way up to art school, says that I talk too much and get easily distracted."
He's never been much of a reader, preferring to cram sketchbooks with doodles, life drawings, and his own intricate thoughts. "The best thing I can have is an empty book to fill up," he explains. "As soon as I start writing or drawing in a book, I want to finish it. I can sit for hours just writing bollocks--train-of-thought stuff, how I'm feeling, what I've been doing."
Fran's youth was spent indulging in erratic experimentation, finding out what he was good at, then getting bored at it and going on to something else. He was an impressive runner before becoming a black belt in karate. Then he took up art--something else he was later to abandon professionally--under the direction of an inspirational secondary school teacher who he's still in contact with today.
"I met him recently. He said that the impression he got from me was of somebody who sits on the edge of a pool but never wants to jump in." He pauses for a couple of seconds. "I don't think that's changed much."
Pretty much the only constant in Fran's changeable life has been music. His first band, Strange Relationship, swiftly gave way to the Sun Gods. "They're still going," he exclaims. "But now they're called Bulb Chutney."
It wasn't until he wandered into a town centre pub called the Horseshoe Bar that Frannie found the one thing that he'd stick at. Only then they were called Glass Onion, the band formerly known as Running Red.
It was only a matter of hours between Fran enrolling on the first day of a fine art course at Glasgow School of Art and meeting part-time barman Neil. In between serving pints to drooling, all-day drinkers, the pair struck up a coversation eventually resulting in Fran waving goodbye to the Sun Gods and edging out Glass Onion's female singer.
For his part, Andy was juggling his time between making cumbersome pieces of neck jewelry with large pieces of rubber shooting off in every direction, running a mobile disco catering for the over-60s, and working weekends as a marshall on a paintball site. Little technical knowledge was required, given that visitors tended to prefer using their fists to the guns provided.
Once Fran was on board, all this was sidelined, and more and more time was devoted to rehearsing in a room two floors above the Horseshoe.
"We became very Wonderstuff-y," recalls Neil with a shudder. "There were these two brothers in the band, one on keyboards and one who played like Mark King (famously high-playing bassist '80s jazz-fusionists Level 42) on bass. We were going in a bit of a pop direction."
The first new-look Glass Onion gig found Fran dressed up in a full surgeon's outfit throwing out sweets from a large suitcase. Through pure coincidence, Dougie, who was yet to join, introduced the band. "He didn't want to get off the stage," laughs Fran. "He loved it so much we had to drag him off."
It was to be another year before Dougie, a man who'd never played the bass in his life, became a band member proper. Before that, there was the small matter of changing the name to the less cumbersome Travis (Harry Dean Stanton's drifter character in Paris, Texas) and writing some decent songs.
Meanwhile, Fran was having a few problems at college. He transparently preferred to spend his time writing songs as opposed to, say, painting the odd picture, so his tutors quickly became exasperated and gave him a gentle nudge toward the out door.
"It was like throughout my life, I had an imaginary piece of paper with everything I wanted to do on it," he says with only a small tinge of regret. "And leaving art school meant that there was only one thing left that wasn't crossed off. And it was being in a band."
So with entirely characteristic determination, Fran jumped headlong into Travis. Firstly, he stuffed two weeks' dole into his pocket and sprinted to the West Scotland seaside resort of Millport to write some songs. Upon his return, proudly carrying tunes like "She's So Strange" (on The Man Who) and "All I Wanna Do Is Rock," the band's manager was swiftly sacked, a record was cut, financed by Fran's mum Marion, and a publishing deal with Sony was on the table.
But there was still the small matter of replacing their Mark King-a-like with everyone's mate Dougie, a situation fraught with problems, the least of all being that he couldn't play.
"Two days earlier, I'd been on the phone to the publisher," says Fran. "And he was saying, 'Get yourself a new bass player, and get your arses down to London.' Suddenly I found myself saying, 'Oh, we've got a bass player,' and the image of Dougie came into my head. So I borrowed Neil's girlfriend's old bass, went straight around to Dougie's house, put it on him, and stood him in front of the mirror. I said, 'Woof! You were born to play the bass.' He still said no, but I got him in the end."
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The rest came easy. Just two months after Dougie had been press-ganged into Travis, everyone quit their jobs and moved down to London. Within a week of taking up residence in a rundown semi in Haringey, a manager was found and a rehearsal room rented in Farringdon. There followed months of 40-hour weeks in rehearsal, honing the songs that would later appear on Good Feeling.
"There was no risk moving to London," assures Fran. "At the time, we were so confused that we just toddled along with it all. But I knew it would happen for us. I just felt it in my gut. There's a part of my brain that whispers, 'Do it,' and you have to do it. Now I religiously base everything I do on that little voice. It might be making a career choice or going down the shops, but I still do it."
What followed was common-or-garden slog. Soon enough, they were signed to the just-born Independiente label, with a deal financed out of the personal funds of owner Andy Macdonald--rather than go through the rigamarole of corporate finance, he drew a £100,000 advance cheque on his own account. In the next two years, Travis supported everyone from the Longpigs to Beth Orton, Reef to Mansun. But it wasn't until Travis landed the Oasis support tour at the personal request of Noel Gallagher that their true rock education began.
"Out of all the bands we supported, Oasis were holding it together the most," Andy gushes. "Noel is one of the sweetest people I've met."
"The first time I met Liam was pretty amazing," adds Dougie. "I remember using my bus fare once to buy 'Some Might Say' and walking home quite happily with it in my bag. And so when I met him, I was dumbstruck. He was going [adopts impressive crazed Manc accent], 'Fuckin' top! Fuckin' band! Fuckin' tune! I fuckin' love that!" I was like, 'Hello.'"
Right now, Travis exhibit at least some of the trappings of Oasis-endorsed stardom--like the fact that Dougie flies over to L.A. anytime he gets the chance to meet up with his scriptwriter girlfriend. This year wil see them extending their worldwide reach to Japan and, later on, America. But whatever the post-millennial era holds for Travis, it'll come as no surprise. Everything, they claim, happens for a reason.
"Everyone has their own life path, and you see these signs, little signals that tell you to go off down a certain route," explains Fran, finishing off the last dregs of his lager. "It's like if you're driving down the motorway and you haven't seen anything for miles and you think you're lost, then suddenly you see a tiny blue sign and it's telling you you're on the right road. You don't know how long it's going to take or where it's going to take you, but you definitely know that place is where you should be. Maybe it's a bit mad, but it seems to be working."
Outside, incidentally, the sun's suddenly come out.
Select
September 1999
Text: Sam Upton
Photography: Karl Grant
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