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Keeping It Wheel | |
PlayStation. Perms. Urine drinking. Dim your overhead lights for life on the road with Travis, the hardest-working band in Scratchwood.
Afterwards, we sit dunking KFC chicken strips in ketchup on a picnic beach and continue the haulage theme. “No, we’re not named after Travis Perins,” frontman Fran Healy grins, glancing at the lorry park. “They nicked the name from us. We’re suing the bastards for £26 million worth of timber, and we’re gonna build shelves for our pots and pans.”
“Naw,” bassist Dougie explains, “Travis is Harry Dean Staton’s character in Paris, Texas. Franny saw the film, loved him, and came to meet us in a black suit and red cap. The name was right for us.”
Andy, Fran, and Neil all nod. Then immediately regret the rapid head movement. The guys are recovering from what started as a quick pint after last night’s Pepsi Chart Show but morphed into a vodka binge. Dougie groans he’ll never drink again but Andy keeps grinning because he remembers that totally trollyed, he still managed to win 40 quid on the fruit machines.
Today’s a well earned take-five. Tomorrow, the boys fly down to Radio 1 Roadshow and leg it back to Top of the Pops to perform Glasto heavens-opener "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?" The they’re back promoting their now-gone-gold album The Man Who, followed by next month’s Brit tour. These lad really work it, and Travis’s years of slow burn are finally paying dividends. Fran admits they’re earning “over 20 quid a week. Just more than the dole.” Dougie says, “We’re buying new clothes, rather than cast-offs from Camden.” And Neil explains with pride that they have run the tour bus, the Golden Slug, so hard that its wheels fell of halfway up the motorway, and they have to Easy Jet it everywhere.
The success highway hasn’t always been this smooth. Their debut LP Good Feeling got lost in the post Britpop splurge, but since then, they’ve developed a reputation as the hardest-working band in the business, supporting anyone from Beth Orton to Mansun and, finally, Oasis. So when The Man Who debuted at No. 2, Travis got the payback they deserved.
Now life’s more glitzy than it used to be. “We’re meeting everyone,” gushes Fran. “Cher came to see us at the Astoria,” (Dougie interrupts: “She didn’t have her hair on. She was bald as a coot.”) “We’ve met Lionel Richie, supported Noel and Liam on tour.” (Dougie interrupts again: “We know Adam and Joe and love ‘em to death.”) “Ray Davies frowned at us once. We’ve met Suede Stign, Mr. Blobby…First time round we were the new kids on the block. Now we truly are New Kids on the Block, know what I mean?”
Travis are dead human--sitting picking their noses and biting their nails. Since they met at Glasgow School of Art (bar Neil who met Dougie working in a “smelly shoe shop”), they’ve been inseprable. “We are incredible,” Neil says modestly. “We never argue. No blood has ever been spilt. There wasn’t even a seven-year itch. It’s hard enough for people to find one person that they want to be with for that long, let alone three.” And the fact that they’ve finally stopped living together makes them real excited about hanging out on tour.
Touring is the usual PlayStation, broken screenings of The Godfather, and guessing who’s dropped a turd in the bus bog. (They sacked their driver Jimmy Peardrops for doing that.) But Travis are particularly looking forward to reuniting in October with their guitar tech Nick. “We pay Nick to do things for us,” says Neil with a dirty grin. “Like eat a tube of toothpaste for a fiver. Last time he drunk a bottle of ketchup, stuck ice down his pants, and let Dougie shaves his legs for nothing.” This time Nick will be introduced to a bottle of Tobasco, a packet of Cream Crackers, and bananas. “For putting up his bum?” I ask. “No,” deadpans Fran. “Nick would want to do that for nothing as well.”
“We do stuff like this on the road. Once when Dougie was dying for a piss and we couldn’t stop, he did it in a water bottle. Then he handed it to me to chuck out of the window--it was horrible and warm--and Neil, Neil…” Neil interrupts: “I grabbed it and had a wee taste!” Franny looks green: “Even now I feel like hurling.”
Other nocturnal habits include Andy filling saucepans up to the brim with water and pulling out all the plugs in his sleep. And Fran waking everyone up screaming: “It’s the beasties! It’s the beasties!” on a regular basis.
In fact, Travis’s caning-it stories are about as rock and roll as you can get on a bus. Fran: “The most out of it I’ve been? Paralytic and sleepwalking, I stood on my girlfriend’s brother’s desk stark bollock naked and pissed on his computer. He’d woken up and said I’d shouted to him, 'Don’t worry, there’s no bodges.' And the morning after I was like, what is ‘bodges’? Must’ve meant spunk. There was no spunk. But it was a mighty long pee.”
Andy: “The worst I’ve been was last Burns Night. It was free whiskey, and I lay on the floor and couldn’t even remember my address. My mates put me in a taxi home, and my girlfriend carries me in, sits me down, and says, ‘Andy, what’s my name?’ I still couldn’t remember an hour later, I just kept saying ‘I love you….’ I tell you, if you’re ever that drunk, it works. She wasn’t even angry with me the next day.”
“How do you feel?” Fran asks. “Dirty,” Andy says with genuine shame.
To go around the KFC table one by one, Fran’s the bossy, good-looking bastard and a right talker--which makes sense since he writes the songs. Stopping him gabbing is not an option, and as he’s a black karate belt, you think twice about doing it anyway. You forgive Fran his lip, though, because he’s a darn good songwriter whose tunes have matured on fast forward, and he’s 100 percent dedicated to Travis and dead serious in his ambition to leave a legacy of great songs behind them.
Dougie is sharply quirky with a twinkle in his baby blues. He's gone from making sculptures in broken glass which collapses and shattered, scaring the shite out of his punters at his exhibition, to picking up a bass, joining Travis, and learning to play on the job.
Andy’s the sarky, shy one, whose self-deprecating wit’s evident today in his Playboy t-shirt. “The most interesting thing about me is that I’m still alive. And the most boring thing about me is that I’m still alive,” he says before disappearing for another session on the fruit machines.
And Neil, he of the facial hair, used to be a good swimmer: “I’m a Pisces. I love water. I love cars. I love golf. I love the guys. I love cooking...(Fran quickly whispers in his ear) Oh and I love my wife as well.” (They all laugh.) “See, I’ve been married a year and I’m getting bored already.”
Two hundred and fifty gigs on, Travis are still best mates and a darn sight better as a band. Like learning how to drive, playing together has become second nature, and their gigs all year long have been heaving. Girlies speand hours painting their nails with the Travis star, and boys are shaving it into their new locks. It’s a far cry from being “the new” Verve or Blur. Finally they’ve graduated into a stand-alone, eat-all-comers-for-breakfast rock band.
“But we’re not even halfway to where we want to be,” Fran says. “It’s a slow process. Travis is going to take its time. We’re just waiting to be the best guitar band around and slowly it’s happening. There’s only one guitar band in the Top 30 at the moment, and that’s us. Long may it stay that way.”
Sky
Gateway services, formerly known as Scratchwood. The M1. It’s not sexy but there’s something appropriate about catching up with Travis on a grey day next to a three-lane motorway. For a band who’ve been pounding the tour/festival/foreign festival/tour circuit all summer long, it’s kinda normal and familiar. So are they. Eight years on, Travis are still just four great mates from Glasgow. Cheeky and dead self assured, yeah, but there’s no “We’re dead famous” posturing. They’re already dutifully stood in the service station car park signing autographs for a coach-load of fans--no complaints, no attitude.
Travis have cleaned up quite well, considering their grunge origins and a fetish for AC/DC (the band, that is). Fran describes their shifting image as “Long hair, short hair, long hair.” It’s at this point that quiet little Andy shouts, Tourette style: “And I once had a perm! Phew,” he sighs. “That’s the first time I’ve admitted it on the record.”
October 1999
Text: Lorien Haynes
Photography: James D. Ross
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