"Fuck!" says Fran Healy, staring down from the top of Antonio Gaudi's undulating concrete edifice, La Pedrera. "Sorry," he apologizes, "but whenever I see anything of great beauty, my first reaction is always, Fuck!"
It's been a bizarre year for Travis, one in which their quietly beautiful second album, The Man Who, slowly but steadily won over a nation with such emotionally fragile songs as "Why Does It Always Rain on Me?," "Writing to Reach You," and "Turn," spending six months in the charts and eventually selling over a million copies. It was also a year in which they met their heroes; James Brown congratulated them on reaching number one at V99, and they stood in awe as their newest fan, Sir Paul McCartney, played an acoustic version of "Turn" during a recording break on Later With Jools Holland.
So where better to celebrate such a bizarre year than in one of the most beautifully surreal surrounds of Barcelona; Gaudi's moonscape architecture, the Picasso museum, and such hep Catalon hang-outs as Cafe Mocha, the site of George Orwell's political scuffles in Homage to Catalonia.
"Friends always told me how beautiful it was here," says Fran, "but I never thought we'd get here. I remember sitting in Abbey Road at the start of the year listening to the album, wondering where it would take us."
However, the band haven't exactly adjusted to the attention that fame has brought. "Fame is like having a bad haircut," explains Fran, "or one of those joke, shoe-polish black eyes on your face. People keep looking at you, you don't know why, and you feel a bit like an idiot."
Given the art school background of Fran, Dougie Payne, and Andy Dunlop, plus the learned ways of drummer Neil Primrose, Travis have used their first year of freedom and fame to broaden their cultural horizons, immersing themselves in the anarcho-syndicalist enclave of Copenhagen's Christiana, the grandeur of Rome, and the pop insanity of Japan. Their cultural "highlight" was visiting the former East Berlin, where the band met an old Communist party member now selling fake Gucci watches to tourists.
"He said that if the Communists had still been in power, we'd still be queuing for bread," says Fran. "I told him that selling Gucci watches wasn't that much better."
Given the well-read, learned image of band who named their album after Oliver Sachs's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and whose songwriter is inspired by the work of Kafka, Freud, and Nabakov, when asked why the band were looking forward to visiting Barcelona, their answer is a rather surprising one.
"Paella!" they answer as one. "We have to go to the Hotel Espana, best paella in Spain!"
The band will take a month off for Christmas and then plan to throw themselves back into their work.
"Plans for next year?" ponders Fran, "To get my finger out and write like a mother. We can't just sit outside European cafes forever, you know."
Mojo
January 2000
TRAVIS experience the myriad cultural delights of Barcelona: art, architecture, and paella.
