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Roots, Mon! | |
The home town: Glasgow
The band: indie rockers TRAVIS
The mission: to gain some sublime insight into the band via observation of their
space/time/er, place continuum
What goes around, comes
around. What started in a bar will surely end in another bar. What takes you out
around a wide circumferennce will only take you back in a glorious circle. Like you find downing
an emptying pint glass. Like you find when you take a day out to go from Glasgow to London
and back again. Like you find, say, with Travis.
Tomorrow, they announce, we will breakfast on "pie in a roll."
Tonight, drink is taken.
And the Pope? What does he say?
"...he says, 'Hey, youse cunts are alright!'"
Glasgow, 1965
"Our dads," enthuses Dougie. "My dad and Andy's dad used to know each other, like, 40 years
ago. Used to go for lunch together. They lost touch and had no idea at all, and then we reunited
them at a show where we were supporting Beth Orton. It was like, 'George!' 'Peter!'"
"So really," says Fran, quietly pleased at the symmetry of it all, "the story all begins, like, 30 or 40
years ago..."
11 a.m., Glasgow School of
Art
Today, as they band walk through the impressively scholarly surroundings, they ponder their
relative artistic merits.
"I got called Elfie because I was always sittiing on a stool, kinda banging away at things," says
Andy.
"I used to do a lot of stuff with found objects," says Dougie, in the way rock bassist often must.
"Chairs. Tables. Goldfish. I cut thing in half a lot. Sheets of glass balancing on top of tiny things.
Precipitous."
"I did this really famous painting," says Fran, "called Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. It was this
really big painting of a life model who was renowned in the arts school because he had a really big
old...dobber on him. You'd see him in his little room, and he'd always pull his skin back. You'd get
a waft of his odour. There'd always be a big space wherever the predominant breeze was blowing.
"We had two weeks to do the painting, and I'd done all the body, but the second week, the model
never came in. So I just drew this big old cartoon head on top of it. I was gonna change it, but
Dougie saw it and said, 'That's brilliant, man, leave it.' So I left it. Then they had this show for all
the second years, and Keith McIntrye, who's like this semi-famous Glasgow painter, was standing
there while they were hanging it. He was going, 'That's fucking atrocious. We can't hang that. It's
taking the piss.' But it was the only thing in the exhibition that made people stop and look."
Dougie finished his course with a First, and Andy finished too. For Fran, though, the business of
being in a band at the same time was just too time-consuming, and he was threatened with
expulsion. Summoned in the Head of Painting's office, he was asked to explain himself.
"I was in there crying," says Fran, "going, 'Ah--hic--wanna be a painter. Ah rilly--hic--wanna be a
painter.' Then I walked out, and I realised I didn't want to be a painter at all."
All there was to do was rock.
Possil Park School, Glasgow,
1979
"You're maybe six or seven years old," Fran smiles, "and you're hurling stones, going, 'Ya fucking
Proddy bastards!' 'Ya Catholic pricks!' I've a wee scar on my finger here from it."
Dougie: "We were all picked on at school. Either ostracised or hit. It's character-building."
"The people you meet in your life, your friends," Fran continues, "you look at them, and you can
see it in their face, from the moment you meet them, you just know. They either look the same or
they all have the same experience."
12:30 p.m., Breakfast, West End of
Glasgow
The meal provides, however, a fitting opportunity to take a break from sightseeing and instead to
contemplate the highly good natures of and good works done by those musicians here assembled.
It's not, allegedly, where you're from that matters, but where you're at. However, with Travis, the
situation is somewhat different: not only are they today at where they're from, there are in one
way or another here all the time. Great parents. Great teachers...Travis have a respect for past
goodness, good turns, the value of experience, and the same kind of goodness shines out of them.
The Man Who might have taken six different sessions with a number of different
producers (including Nigel Godrich, who did OK Computer, and Mike Hedges, who did
Everything Must Go), but the overall effect is of a continuous and refreshingly good and
simple whole. Radiohead, they remark are like modern classical music. Travis, though, they
reckon, are like modern folk music.
What's more, their album pumps. And it squeaks.
"Neil's dad and my mum were having this debate," says Fran. "Neil's dad's like, 'Well, I like to get
back from work, y'know, and Claire's not in, I put on the record, turn it right up so it's pumpin'.
Fill the room with sound.' And my mum's going, 'Well, I think it's better listening to it on your
earphones because you can hear everything, every little detail. I don't know what they are, but you
hear these little squeaking noises.'
"So he's like, 'Pumping!' She's 'Squeaking!' 'Pumping!' 'Squeaking!'"
Despite their artistic backgrounds, the Travis thing is nonetheless one of supreme
unpretentiousness. For all their admiration of Radiohead, it is really just the purest melancholic
empathy that is the preferred Travis mode.
"I like words. For me, that's the important thing. When I was little, I used to forget the number of
my door, so my mum used to say, 'Sing it, and you'll remember it.' So I used to go home singing,
'Two-three-seven!'"
The Man Who album has this short of homely wisdom written into its every sad song,
pretty much. The important thing that comes out is to be true to yourself. If you're happy, enjoy
being happy. If you're sad, maybe just go with it.
"When you have a wee bit of heartbreak," Fran begins, "it's horrible, but it's nice at the same time.
I was really depressed one time when a girlfriend chucked us, and Dougie said to me, 'Don't fight
it, just go with it. If you fight it, you'll have a nervous breakdown.' 'Cos I was really badly fucked
off. So since then I know you have to embrace it. You have to let it take you."
"If the album has a theme," says Dougie, "it's about not being afraid to be vulnerable. Everyone's
afraid of being uncool, falling on their arse or whatever. Vulnerable's seen as a bad thing. But if
you're open to bad things, then you're open to good things too."
Birmingham-Glasgow Train,
1983
"Like I was saying about the people who come into your life," says Fran, "this guy was really
kind. Played with us. Kept us entertained. And at the end of the journey, he gave us this little
poem on a piece of paper: 'As you are now/So once was I/Remember this, as time goes by/As
I am now/Soon you will be/Remember this and pray for me.'
"I was telling our manager about that the other day, and he said, 'Right--so that's where "As You
Are" on the new album comes from.' I hadn't even thought about it..."
3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Horseshoe Bar,
Glasgow
It's 11 p.m., and Travis walk into their hotel bar, right, and they start telling jokes, and chiefly,
these concern the leader of the Rooman Catholic Church and his relationship with a fish called
Fucker. They are Neil Primrose, blue-eyed drummer; scholarly Andy Dunlop, the guitarist;
Dougie Payne, the bassist (modernist gait, signature pronouncement of "excellent!"); and lastly,
Fran Healy, the singer and songwriter. They have written a second LP, The Man Who,
which is both melancholic and fine, and they are at the beginning of a slightly nostalgic trek:
having moved to London to first sign a record deal and where they now live, they have returned
to Glasgow to show us the parts of their native town that made them the men they are today.
One o' clock being their appointed hour, the two gentlemen arrange their papers and make good
their escape. Away from the counter and the customers, they walk from their respective jobs in
their respective banks as they have done most days: Mr. Payne and Mr. Dunlop. To lunch.
But right here, among the statue-lined corridors and fine details of the art school, is where the
story of Travis really starts, in 1992. There are pletny of coincidences, some sadness, the
occasionally artistically misplaced erection, but the real story is of the burgeoning friendship
between Dougie (then sculptor), Fran (then painter), and Andy (then jeweller and silversmith).
An early meeting and discussion about the Monkees had cemented their acquiantance beween
Andy and Dougie, while Fran and Dougie had known each other for a couple of years since
meeting at a life-drawing class. Dougie as yet has no musical aspirations. Fran, meanwhile, has
auditioned for a band that features Andy and a barman from the Horseshoe Bar in the town
centre. That's Neil, who would refer to the others, not unreasonably, as "arty bastards."
The fence that divides the two neighboring schools, Protestant from the Catholic Possil Park, is
green. At least, it's green on the side that concerns us here, as the six-year-old Fran Healy finishes
his pre-breaktime lesson and makes his way with all the others down to it. On either side, the kids
are massing. Then they start with the stones.
At this moment, Fran is most readily experiencing a phenomenon known as "Breakfast Envy,"
caused by mistakenly not ordering a full breakfast when the opportunity is offered, then having to
endure the enjoyment of the rest of the band consuming just such a breakfast. Partly, he feels
unwell.
"But there's definitely some sour grapes."
"I've never really bought music or listened to it," says Fran. "When I go home at night, I watch the
telly. I was really worried about being interviewed when we first started because bands seems to
know everything about bands. They know all these facts. I know wee bits and
bobs, but really I know nothing.
The child Fran Healy is proving to be a bit of a handful. The long train journey back home from
his auntie's house is bringing out his worst side. He's playing up, giving his mother gyp. Seeing the
mother's impending annoyance, a gentleman in the same carriage decides to invervene.
What goes around comes around. As a man plays a belting middle-of-the-afternoon bagpipe,
Travis walk into a bar, right, and they know the boss. They walk up to the bar, and it's drinks on
the house because this is where Neil used to work, and more importantly, where, three flights up,
Travis would rehearse under the auspices and kind benefaction of the landlord, Smudger, who let
the use the room upstairs for nothing and threw in the electricity, too.
The band play idly with the superiour novelty items that they've bought from a quick en route visit to Dougie's sister's shop, while drink is taken and a warm glow envelops the throng. A good feeling. A Travis feeling.
So the fella from London says, "Y'know? Youse cunts are alright."
NME
May 29, 1999
Text: John Robinson
Photography: Martyn Goodacre
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