Travis is skulking in a corner of Los Angeles's Ocean Way recording studios. Each member is sucking on a triumphant fag apiece. They're bandying about potential titles for their newly completed album. The very last backing vocal was recorded mere minutes ago. And MP3 files of the new music are at this moment bouncing across satellites to their record company in London.
"We're going to call it Jobby Delight," laughs bass player Dougie Payne.
"Everyone thought it was Afterglow, but that's out," says Fran Healy.
"Actually, it's called The Man Two," Payne tells me, angelically. He is lying through his teeth. Finally, Healy himself comes clean. The record will actually be called The Invisible Band--this is an arch poke at those who think he is the main man of the band, simply backed by jobbing minstrels. It's also a yearning for anonymity, for the music to speak for itself.
Sony, shareholders in their record company Independiente, recently commissioned market research on the band. Gratified that The Man Who had sold 3 million copies, the suits were concerned the four blokes pictured shuffling around on snowy scrubland on the cover weren't instantly recognisable. It turns out they were right: 80 percent of respondents thought that Travis was the name of the singer.
"We'll have to improve on that," notes Healy. "I want to make sure the other 20 percent don't know who the fuck we are either."
And yet Travis's Los Angeles experience suggests that anonymity is not on the cards. In January, Healy spent some time alone in the city, songwriting. Returning to his hotel one day, he remarked what a lonely place it was without friends. Then he heard a voice in the hubbub of the lobby. It was Michael Stipe--presumably a fan--inviting him out for a beer. "Morrissey's coming," breezed Stipe.
"So of course I went," relates Healy with a flash of trademark dimples. "But I had to change my trousers first. You don't get less starstruck the bigger your band gets. Michael Stipe and bloody Morrissey! I was terrified."
That night, as the trinity of rock talent supped, Healy couldn't think of anything to say. In the end, he told Stipe that his English teacher, Mr. McLaughlin, once walked into class, slammed a copy of Green onto the table, and announced that REM were the greatest band in the world. Stipe shrugged. "I felt like an arse," admits Healy. "My neck went all hot and prickly. I'm glad I didn't tell him the rest. Mr. McLaughlin said that if I pulled my finger out, I could be the next Michael Stipe."
And history will record that Healy did pull his finger out. In a little less than three years, Travis has established itself as a leading light of British rock's "sensitive" wing. A large share of the credit must go to Healy, a popular songwriter devoid of rock cliches. Not for him the supercharged idealism of the Manic Street Preachers or the swaggering machismo of Oasis. If Noel Gallagher professes himself sick of his own myth and "getting more Donovan" by the minute, Travis is already in the unfettered, post-lad territory he hopes to claim. They are, simply, a band for grown-ups.
However, as we will shortly discover, the perception of Fran Healy as all even-tempered, slightly drippy New Man isn't quite so accurate.
Tonight the band celebrates finishing the record in Bar Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, where the buffed, siliconed young rich run, fame and wealth checks on anyone coming through the door. Prince had lunch here yesterday. Earlier, Christopher Walken was reading a paper in the hotel lobby two doors along. For Healy, musings on the illusion of fame continue. "They're just people, aren't they?" he observes. "And I'm just a bloke who writes songs. I don't feel they belong to me or that I should be worshipped for it."
Still, celebrity is encroaching on the Travis star in funny ways. Celebrity gossip magazine Heat recently published pictures of his new house in north London, reporting the place was not yet occupied. Within days, a vanload of chancers had broken in and taken six fireplaces.
"I didn't like them anyway," he shrugs. "But that's not the point. I'm one of those faces in mags now, someone who has their bill checked by The Sun."
For drummer Neil Primrose, there are no such qualms about fame. Tonight he pays respect to veteran action movie star (and aromatherapist) Steven Seagal, whom he spotted earlier this week. "He's a big fucker," he notes with approval. Julia Roberts, meanwhile, is staying at the same hotel as Travis. She wanted Healy's chalet and rang to offer him the more luxurious Presidential Suite instead. Healy told her to bugger off. "I'm very working class like that. I arrive somewhere and set out my stuff and that's it. I want to stay there."
Recently, the band made friends with rapper Tricky, also recording at Ocean Way. His new, more commercial direction involves work with Alanis Morissette. The surly Bristolian duly invited the band to a party at Morissette's Bel Air house. "Ally McBeal was there!" enthuses Primrose, keeping the beanpole lawyer quaintly fictional. "And David Duchovny." Also in attendance was actor Jim Carrey. Payne, a big fan, managed to engineer himself into a position by Morissette's indoor basketball court where he mock casually threw some hoops. Carrey eventually joined in. "I just wanted to say, I got your video out mate! But I couldn't," he trills. "The whole thing about those parties is that you be cool and not make a big deal about people's status. But for fuck's sake, it was surreal."
Guitarist Andy Dunlop, the band's most accomplished musician and a shy, charming intellectual, dreads interviews and quakes at celebrity. For him was reserved the most traumatic L.A. star experience. One morning as the hotel elevator bumped onto the ground floor, the door opened to reveal Lou Reed waiting to go up. Unable to cope with the shock, Dunlop frantically stabbed the Close Door button and shot up again, leaving the famously grouchy legend in the foyer. "You come down looking for a bit of breakfast, and there's fucking Lou Reed standing there. I just couldn't deal with it. I was just staring into the mirror in the lift going, Bloody hell, bloody hell, it's Lou Reed."
The "we've finished!" celebration ends with Travis educating the bar staff in the ways of the "lock in." At 2 a.m., the locals are thrown out, leaving the quartet of Scotsmen to leap behind the bar and lay about the drinks cabinet like a giant chemistry set. They stagger about mixing their own "cocktails."
Studio B at the Ocean Way recording complex is spooked by legends. Nat "King" Cole recorded Unforgettable in here. Sinatra recorded here when it was known as United Western, and portraits of satisfied customers the Stones, the Beach Boys, Michael Jackson, and Madonna line the walls. For the past six weeks, it's been Travis's home.
When Q first arrives, a few days earlier, the place is swathed in Christmas tinsel and lights. Coloured candies flicker everywhere. "We've made it soft and soothing," explains Payne. "It's the Travis vibe...We've tried recording under strip lighting in other studios and you just end up writing songs about waiting to sign on at the DSS."
The weight of expectation this time is considerable. Their record label hope that The Invisible Band will double the success of its predecessor. In January, when Healy unpacked his guitar in a house in the Hollywood Hills to write another three songs, he was "shitting himself." It didn't feel like a game anymore. He felt everyone was relying on him to come up with "the magic." Meanwhile, producer Nigel Godrich had been chosen to pick up where he'd left off on The Man Who.
Today Godrich is hunched over a laptop. Evidence of his wayward, improvisational approach is there if you look: his collection of obscure echo units, a £90 Casio keyboard that even Rolf Harris might baulk at...and a cardboard box. In the "drum room," Primrose's glinting custom kit has been usurped by this mic'd-up box, stuffed with a blanket from which you might expect a Big Issue seller to emerge at any moment. On selected tracks, Godrich prefers the sound of the box.
"Nigel sees something new in everything," says Healy. "There's nothing that can't be reinvented." Godrich produced half of The Man Who after original producer Mike Hedges departed. Since then, he's knocked out Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac, Beck's Mutations, and Divine Comedy's Regeneration. He is exhausted. And the final week of recording for The Invisible Band has been the most stressful. There has been a polite battle over a track called "Flowers in the Window," a pretty, shambling, acoustic love song that Healy wrote about German fiancee Nora Kryst. Godrich doesn't like it. Healy does. Six versions have been recorded, and finally, with drum and bass parts rearranged, it works. So well, in fact, that it's now to be released as a single.
"I'm very populist and very mass," says Healy. "Nigel's very arty. It was a good war finding compromise between the two. Like McCartney was always a bit pop and Lennon more arty, that's a good example to follow. Anyone who writes flowery melodies is prone to getting cheesy, and Nigel took the cheese out of Travis."
Godrich is 29, yet the worry has burnt every spare molecule of fat off him. Dark hair thinning, boyishly slight. In his Radiohead hoodie, he picks from a take-out that he likens to the remnants of "a pig in a cage on antibiotics," and we listen to a mix of "Shut the Folk Up," a track likely to be rechristened "Pipe Dreams." It's a sweetly resigned hymn to the futility of life's struggles, with a lovely vocal from Healy. But at its end, there is Godrich's hallmark electronic squall, a harsh synthetic postscript. On Radiohead's OK Computer, such angular sonic oddness made sense. On this occasion, it sounds a little like Godrich autographing someone else's work for the sake of it.
"I don't know if that's staying on," says Healy.
"It is," says Godrich.
"Oh, OK," says the songsmith.
In the fug of studio smoke, Healy and Godrich are interesting to watch. Healy, heavy with cold, swoons along to the playback of another alluring new track, "Indefinitely." He found the tune on an old MiniDisc he'd recorded on the back of a tour bus. "I'd totally forgotten it," says Healy. "I was crying my eyes out while singing it. Must have been having a bad day." As he listens, his Tin-Tin face writhes with a brewing sneeze.
When it arrives, his hand covers only one nostril, while the other launches a torpedo of rock star snot that lands on Godrich's laptop. "Sorry, it just came out of this hole," says Healy, as though the orifice were a complete surprise to himself. Godrich frowns at the mess on his computer silently.
Meanwhile, other members of the band are concerned with a dark controversy: has Godrich been tossing himself off in the studio while making their album? "Can you actually see his knob?" asks Andy Dunlop with steady, legalistic fervour. The band has installed a webcam in Ocean Way, and several of the pictures posted on the Travis website reveal Godrich working with his hand stuffed down the waistband of his trousers. Discussion rages as to whether this is an innocent shirt-tucking maneuver or covert shuffling. Someone has established a microsite consisting entirely of pictures of Nigel's suspicious rummaging. "He looks like he's having a wank. What do you think?" asks Healy.
Having hardly exchanged hellos with Payne, Healy is massaging my shoulders in one of the studio's swivel chairs while muttering what sounds like the fruity indiscretions of the The Fast Show's "verv very drunk" Sir Rowley Birkin QC in my ear. "I've got a big surprise for you...listen to this," he oozes. The speakers offer up a stunning rendition of Queen's "Killer Queen," which will eventually appear as a B-side. To achieve the requisite degree of camp urgency, Healy wore a "ladyboy" moustache made out of gaffer tape for the recording and held a torch under he chin for authentic "Bohemian Rhapsody"-style uplighting. "I held my nuts like this for the harmonies," says Healy, triumphantly cradling his scrotum.
The hi-jinx lend weight to Healy's self-effacing talk of "a democratic gang of friends." But Travis, invisible and unassuming as they might seem, didn't just emerge from the ether. There's a notable steeliness to the frontman.
It was he who, with considerable verve, stumbled on the constituent parts and assembled them. Prior to Travis, Healy had merely toyed with music. His output amounted to one song--an attack on his headmaster entitled "Mr. Mullin Blues" (sample lyric: "One day we had baked beans for tea/The whole smell filled the room/Then some bugger lit a match and the whole place went ka-boom!").
When Healy auditioned as a vocalist for Dunlop and Primrose's band Glass Onion, he quickly usurped the existing female singer and began molding the unit to his own vision. Two brothers, Chris and David Martyn, were playing bass and keyboards, and their father (another David) was a brash, self-appointed mentor. He told Healy his songs were good and advised that success would come if the singer followed his instincts. He did and sacked Martyn's sons from the band. "It was a bit of a shitty thing to do," admits Healy. "But me granddad had just died and I was feeling a bit, Who gives a fuck? The bass player was just too muso--little solos here and there."
Significantly, he was also reading early interviews with Oasis, Noel Gallagher describing how he had hijacked his brother's band Rain, assumed songwriting responsibilities, and steered then to success.
"That had a big effect," says Healy. "I thought, I can fucking do that. I thought, We need a pop star, a personality." In came Dougie Payne, a longtime friend with previous experience as a sculptor and shoe shop assistant. Payne had never held a bass guitar before in his life. Within two weeks, they played their debut gig at Glasgow College of Art. But now, with £600 from Healy's mother, they began demoing ideas. "Writing to Reach You" and "Safe," a track on the new album, were among the earliest compositions. Within eight months, the had moved to north London and started recording their debut album for Independiente. Andy McDonald, establishing a new empire after success with the Housemartins, the La's, and Portishead at Go! Discs, sensed greatness and signed them for a reputed £100,000 of his own money. Not to the label, but to himself personally via "golden handcuffs." If he ever leaves the Sony-financed indie, the band goes with him.
With his intense blue eyes, Healy is friendly but wily and questioning. The famous "Hoxton fin" haircut is now grown into what Andy Dunlop has dubbed the "Buddha Khan," a hybrid of a Buddhalike tuft and a Mohican. Born in Stafford, Healy was brought up by his mother, Marion, after she fled from the violence of husband Frank. Once established in Glasgow, Healy was surrounded by aunts and grandparents. By the age of eight, he was taking karate lessons to fend off bullies drawn to his slight frame. He's a black belt, though he admits this guarantees nothing: given his body mass, it's easy to imagine him executing a flurry of perfect pokes, gouges, and punches, only to find his opponent still standing cross-armed and smiling, before throwing him through a window.
Healy recalls getting a Bullworker home gym at age 10 in order to fill out his frame. One day he sat on it like a pogo stick and, bouncing around, caught himself on the underside of a table. "I nearly cut me cock off," he recalls. "I caught it on the veneer. And my aunt's going, Oooh Franny, get your pants off and let me see! It was embarrassing, but that was my life, surrounded by strong women."
Healy's development under a matriarchy informs who he is to a remarkable degree. His mum taught him manners, and he says you don't get anywhere in life being a "rudie." When riled, though, he is passionate and forthright. The next day, he checks the band's website and finds that someone is trying to sell mobile phones in the chat room. His guitar-calloused fingers furiously tap out a message: "If I find you trying to sell stuff on here again I'll shove a mobile phone so far up your ass you'll be getting free calls for the rest of your life."
"I've got a really bad temper," he says later. "It's very physical. I've never really been a fighter because I'll get a doing 'cos I'm small. But I have that feeling where I want to go off all the time. It's so primal you can't control yourself. And I don't like it. I've come off the phone from my mam or Nora, and I'll smash the phone up. I mean, smash it right to pieces...I'd like to do anger management. I don't like losing control. I'd like to do therapy or something and learn how to channel those feelings because it's happening more and more. But then, creativity is a good outlet. Writing and performing with Travis is my therapy. Otherwise, I dunno, I feel like I'd be flying off the handle all the time..."
The young man brought up by his mother openly admits that he struggles to assert his "male" feelings. The story of his one-parent upbringing is by now well known. In January 2000, his father, Frank, contacted Q to put his side of the story and seek wider understanding for punching his wife in the face. Healy's friends, the Gallagher brothers, come from an analogous background: nurtured by a strong single mother after the departure of a violent father. But while Liam, and to an extent Noel, emerged as swaggering, macho self-parodies, Healy turned out differently. The sensitive songwriter of Travis's lush, gentle melodies struggles with what he sees as "the inherent badness of men."
"Having been brought up by a woman, you think more like a woman," he says. "But I go from being a really 'right on' guy to being just like any other bloke: all cock and balls. You're just a seed carrier. That's what I hate about men.
"Someone once said that if it was left up to women, we'd still be living in mud huts, and the feminists went mad. But it was just a bunch of dykes wanting to be guys. You shouldn't want to be guys...guys are daft. Some women don't have that maternal drive, that's fair enough. But if I were a woman, I would have had five kids by now. As a bloke, your job is to be the provider. Catch the gazelle and bring it back to the cave. Look at the animal kingdom, that's what we're like. And at the same time, I think men's natural instincts are fucked up; men are responsible for making the world the fucking mess it is now. No woman, except for maybe once a month, would ever have invented the machine gun."
Healy and his fiancee plan to marry later this year, but despite this, and the tenderness of "Flowers in the Window," which celebrates their future children, he doesn't know if he'll make a good dad.
"Listen, you don't live with me," he says. "It's totally different when I'm at home. I'm not a cunt, if you know what I mean. But imagine you've got a kid and daddy comes home off the road, and he doesn't want to talk to anyone and just sits in his room for weeks not wanting to come out. And when he does talk, he's like, Grrrr! That's the reality of when you come off the road."
Later, in a moment perhaps illustrating Healy's dual impulses, he fans out cash with which to pay for a driving felony. And there he is, pictured by a traffic camera, an extremely vexed-looking pixie at the wheel of a semi-wreck surging through a Los Angeles red light.
In his own charming way, Healy takes an interest in life's darker side. He carries a small laptop with him and whiles away the time seeking out interesting websites. He is keen to share the latest one with me: a little corner in cyberspace devoted to people who enjoy eating their own shit. "Why would people want to do that?" he asks, shocked and fascinated.
His best is yet to come. The next day, he summons me to another discovery: a site offering video footage of a man dynamiting a beached whale. A male narrator, betraying stifled glee behind the professed sadness, describes how the hapless giant mammal must be moved before it rots. It cannot be towed or lifted or buried. So after shoving high explosives down its spout, the plunger is pressed. Beachcombers for hundreds of yards turn and run as a shower of red blubber cascades over the scene. "How fucking amazing is that?" marvels Healy, his little face somewhere between ecstasy and righteous outrage.
Together Travis are friendly, unaffected, and funny men, each with a role. Primrose is "the stoic one," says Healy. Primrose, who talks two octaves lower than everyone else in the band, prefers "laconic." Combined with the Glasgow accent, "Cup of tea?" can sound like a death threat. He has just bought his parents a B&B on the Mull of Kintyre and hopes to spend some time there with his family. A jokey suggestion involving preferential room rates for Q readers is bandied about. Even this is closely analysed by the dour, spiky-haired drummer. "Can't change the rates...perhaps a malt," he suggests, lip curling cannily.
Andy Dunlop is the band's cultural antenna. While Healy admits he owns few records and listens only to the radio, the gentle, bookish Dunlop is every inch the knowledgeable fan. His Led Zeppelin, Who, Beatles, and Stones badges form a breastplate on his denim jacket and identify him as the keeper of the band's hidden "rock beast" flame. It was his idea to add AC/DC's "Back in Black" to the Travis set during the last U.S. tour. It is he who feels most relief that the band will never perform Britney Spears's "...Baby One More Time" ever again. "Don't people know when a joke's over?" he moans.
Payne, meanwhile, is the tactile, permanently upbeat pop star beloved of tight trousers and foxy fur-trimmed jackets. And yet he has serious musical intent. Payne has written a B-side, "Ring Out the Bells," which Healy decides I must hear. It's a good song featuring Payne's strong, Lennon-like vocal.
"And you've grown into a fucking, fucking amazing bass player too," encourages Healy afterwards, sounding, well, parent-like.
Next day, in search of a picture for their new album cover, they head for the hills. Travis may be from Glasgow, but they feel resolutely rural, natural, yearning for the space beyond the urban. So we drive to Pescadero, two hours south of San Francisco along the beautiful Pacific shoreline. Healy and Nora sit fetally entwined on the back seat. With their heads resting together, a stark discrepancy in colour betrays their different lifestyle choices. Nora, clearly ingesting regular vitamins, is golden and radiant and laughing with a deep, pack-a-day raunchiness to her voice. Healy, white as a sheet and stubbled, is sniffing and slipping in and out of consciousness.
"Are we there yet?" he groans.
Nora consoles him mumsily while entertaining the rest of us with a story about how hubby-to-be recently waited for her outside their local Waitrose. A woman approached Healy, frowned sadly, and gave him a pound to get something to eat.
"Sometimes he just has that look where you feel he needs looking after," giggles Nora, looking down indulgently at her croaking beau, who looks like he's reenacting the final moments of Nelson. "She was a Scot," Healy observes of his charitable benefactor, easing himself upright.
All members agree that Travis would never have survived if all four members had not left Glasgow for London. They needed the discipline and challenge of life in the alien "Smoke" to galvanise them into action. And yet, the Caledonian ties are strong. Payne recounts how, aged four, he noticed his dad cheering for England on a televised home international football match against Scotland. It was the day his father admitted he had been born south of the Border. "I sat on the floor crying, going, No daddy! No!" he recalls.
Each member sees a future in Scotland. First, though, Healy would like to spend a couple of years in his fiancee's homeland, Germany, learning the language, getting to know German ways.
"You think I'm Yoko Ono, don't you?" Nora asks me.
As we near our destination, the band whiles away the drive by holding an enquiry into recent acts of cultural treachery. Yesterday Dougie Payne was overheard saying "Awesome!" to an American. "Yeah, I know," he admits. "I really do need to go home and see my girlfriend." He then sits silently pondering a $2,500 hotel bill for telephoned cooings to his loved one. "Is England really, like, that different?" asks our American driver to a volley of unseen V-signs.
We arrive at Cascade Ranch, a farm just south of Pescadero. Neil Young lives up the hill. Children with overhanging caveman foreheads swerve by on bikes, lending weight to the suspicion that, here, family trees have few branches. We're warned that if a bear should wander into our paths the best policy is "to fight back vigorously."
Suddenly everyone is keen to get the job done. In the cause of "downhome" ordinariness, the idea is that Travis will be pictured in front of a series of smashed shacks, wrecked pick-ups, and thrashed bushes. The photographer also has his eye on a field of heather. "No, no heather!" says the man from their record company. "We want something different this time."
"It's exactly like fucking Scotland," observes Primrose, swivelling on his heels to take in the scenery. "We could have done this at home."
Healy is concerned at the suggested backgrounds: a rusting oil drum, the yapping mongrel circling in the trashed yard. "The British aren't racist or anything," he tells the photographer. "But if they think we've just fucked off to America or we think we're American, they'll drop us just like that. We're their band, and they belong to us." So they take pictures by a big tree.
The striking thing is that the faces of the urbane young Glaswegians wilt in front of the cameras to achieve the Travis "look." Dougie tells me with delicious mock grandeur that he and girlfriend, actress Kelly Macdonald, are "the Scottish Posh and Becks." He's still threatening violence with a piece of agricultural junk if his comments are printed when he's summoned before the camera. His smile drops, and he assumes the sad, po-faced Travis demeanour. Healy, too, ceases prancing about and singing a schoolboy version of a famous Scottish folk tune ("Westering home with my dong in the air!") and forces himself to stand before the camera with the regulation glum face.
And so they stand, shrugging and smoking, against a corrugated milking shed in the same clothes they have worn all week. They look floorward, skyward, anywhere that feels inconspicuous. Ordinary Joes. Regular guys. Invisible. And yet their rise has been anything but ordinary. Travis's music, flowing from Healy, is born out of pain, turbulence, and not a little confusion. And with Godrich's astute ear and under his rigorous tutelage, this time they're sounding bigger, richer than ever before. What's more, with strong roots and an unbreachable set of friendships to draw on, Travis will cope when their ridiculous dream of anonymity fails to come true.
"I just want to look ordinary," says Healy later. "I know that sounds daft, but image can get in the way of the only thing that matters, the music. I want us to be the invisible band. What we look like or my past or their past or anything else about the band shouldn't matter. We're a fucking fantastic band for ordinary people."
Q
June 2001
Text: Michael Odell
Photography: Jason Bell
Is fame weirding out the nicest men in rock? Travis were the band you could take home to meet mum. Now they gargle cocktails, tussle with Julia Roberts over hotel suites, and threaten to shove mobile phones up fans' arses. "I'm a black belt in karate," Fran Healy tells a cowering Michael Odell.
