"Everywhere I go, the kids wanna rock." So said Bryan Adams back in the crazy days of
1985, when life was simple, rock was rock, and anyone who wasn't was Go West. "This
computerized crap ain't gettiing me off," he crooned. But then he'd never been on the new Sega
Fellatiotron. These days, computer virtual thrills are seriously threatening rock 'n' roll's cultural
supremacy in the minds of a new generation, it says here, in The Guardian Education
Supplement. And yet, if the human race is to survive, we must embrace the twin-headed
gorgon of technology and progress and rearrange its features in our own image. We must tame
the beast and make it serve us, not enslave us! And while we're at it, let's give that machine some
soul, goddamit!
Glasgow four-piece Travis are well used to taking on the big
philosophical questions of the day.
On previous releases, they have explored wanting to have sex ("All I Wanna Do Is Rock"--"rock"
used in the Def Leppardian sense), and not wanting to have sex with underage girls ("U16 Girls").
But with their new single "Tied to the '90s," they have confronted head-on the contradictions of
being a band of classic rock values (songwriting, tunes, guitars, lyrics about sex) while existing in
an age of fleeting thrills; dispassionate, impersonal culture; and the tyranny of irony.
And so we decided to take them on a '90s day out. A brief
surf on what the hip kids are calling
"the Net" at Cyberia, the Internet cafe, then to Segaworld in London's fashionable Trocadero
complex to waste a few hours of our lives doing something virtually exciting. Then, finally, dinner
at Mezzo, Terence Conran's mecca to neomodernism, where stupid posh people eat tiny pieces of
toss on toast for too much money. Hurrah!
Initially, however, it seems that the technological revolution
will not be televised. We gather round
a screen at Cyberia and hold onto our hats as we prepare to scream along to the Information
Superhighway at the speed of light, feeding our minds on the way. But every attempt at lift-off
seems doomed to failure.
Travis lead singer Fran Healy wants to find out about some novelist he knows who has moved to
Hawaii. After 20 minutes of waiting for the computer to process the simplest information, he
discovered that his novelist pal has written two books which are available from bookshops.
Cheers. But that's not all. Hawaii is a state in America, famous for surfing and its "paradise island"
image--and it has a range of hotels for you to visit! We feel our minds broadening as we speak.
Undaunted, we find an exhaustive menu of areas of concern we can tap into, each of which will
surely open up worlds upon universes upon galaxies of information! Science, Arts, "People,"
music magazines--it's all there. You just have to push open the door.
Except every door here has a sign permanently on it saying, "This service is unavailable for no
apparent reason." It's like the computer equivalent of a London Underground chocolate vending
machine, and no doubt you waste just as much money on it.
Is it just me, or is it really true that every time you go on the Internet, nothing is ever available
unless you have paid several thousand dollars to get some "application software" or something
and are prepared to run up your phone bill to the size of the national trade deficit. It's kind of like
paying thousands of pounds for an encyclopedia that only opens on a couple of pages.
And, of course,
when we finally do get somewhere, after waiting at least five minutes for every
transaction to process, the kind of information you get is as in-depth as a club flyer the size of a
postage stamp. So much for the Information Superhighway; this must be the Information
B-road-outside-Glastonbury-when-they've-closed-all-the-access-gates.
Never mind, eh? At least you can get a cup of revolting herb tea, served in just under 30 minutes
by a twitching young man clearly unfamiliar with a human social intercourse.
"What a load of bobbins that was," concludes bass player Andy Dunlop.
"Deeply unimpressive," agrees Fran. "You should be able to go in and type in one word, and it
comes up with every possible thing you might want to know about it. I mean, it's a computer, isn't
it? That's not much to ask. In fact, if the Internet was half as good as it's cracked up to be, it
should be able to sense through my fingers where I was trying to get in touch with."
Guitarist Dougie Payne takes up the philosophical baton." They're trying to build an intellectual
master race, with their own computer language that no one else can understand. I find it quite
sinister."
"Have you been to Yo Sushi yet?" demands Fran. "It's this new Japanese restaurant which has got
a robot who serves you drinks. Now that's more like it. When computers are used to serve us, not
confuse us."
Is the Internet destined to put an end to face-to-face human communication?
"That's what it's getting to. It's the same thing with music because bands like Travis who sing
songs about human emotions are slowly being phased out. The age of rock music as we know it
won't last forever. Soon enough we'll be artefects. The latter half of the 20th century will be seen
as a golden age for art and culture.
"People will still fall in love, still want to shag each other, still need that bonding. But the Internet
is taking away human interaction and that can't be good. I'd rather have a wank, meself. And I
wouldn't get it off the Internet, either. I'd go to the newsagents and buy a mag, like all those sad
bastards don't dare."
Dougie grins ruefully. "We sound like such Luddites. Tied to the '90s--the 1890s!"
Ho-ho! But what, exactly, do the '90s represent to you?
Fran is ready for this one. "It's like the song says: 'We're stuck in the path where fashion is fast
and nothing is lasting.' That's neither good nor bad, it's just the way it is and you can't get away
from that.
"I remember seeing a TV programme where Leonard Cohen was asked whether he was an
optimist, and he replied, 'Terms like optimist and pessimist are obsolete these days--we're all just
hanging on to broken orange crates in the fold, and to stop someone and ask them to declare
themselves anything is pointless.' We're coming to the end of an millennium and you've just got to
hang on for dear life."
Ah yes, the millennium. That'll be, erm, a meaningless date then.
"It is just a date," says Dougie, "but the feeling that it's generating is relevant. And, er...it's
something to talk about, isn't it?"
That's right. And yet you wonder whether Travis themselves aren't more caught up in the '90s
than they would like to think.
For instance, we are told the band has nothing to do with fashion--a
statement made by a
drummer (Neil Primrose) with a pencil goatee, a bass player with big sideburns, and guitarist with
a Brian Jones moptop.
"Sure you can't get away from it," admits Fran, with a grin. "But look at the Versace
murder--treated like the Kennedy assassination. And yet barely anyone on the street ever wore his
clothes. It's when fashion starts to influence your mind as well as your dress that it's dangerous.
"The thing is nothing's original in culture any more. And nothing's shocking either, in music, at
least. Meanwhile, things that are truly shocking--things like the cloning of sheep--are treated as
progress."
"They're already on the way to cloning bands," warns Dougie. "Record companies are very nearly
there..."
And crazily enough, as we arrive at the Trocadero, the ultimate monument to the '90s mass
culture, the Spice Girls' new Pepsi-sponsored single about Pepsi, "Generation Next," available
only with Pepsi cans, is playing on a loop tape throughout the building--all day, every day,
presumably for the rest of eternity.
If you want a vision of the future, just imagine a platform training shoe stamping on a human face.
FOREVER. With special computer-enhanced tits, just like on Tomb Raider.
But we don't care because we're going to play lots of scary war games where you kill people
violently, exciting boy-racer games, rough and tumble footie games, and mild electrocution
games. Arses to the revolution. Let's get the MAX, dude! Awesome!
Wading through the oceans of toddlers queuing up to blow people's heads off, Fran plucks up the
courage to have a go on Time Crisis, where he is a World War 7 pilot going upside-down and all
around in a big cockpit, shooting planes. "That was amazing," he concludes. Well, it certainly
beats the bloody Internet, anyway.
Eschewing the delights of Virtual Gay Serial Killer and Super Necrophiliac Land, we head down
into the belly of the virtual beast. Here are games where you can drive pissed and mow down
pedestrians if you want or play footie with a goalkeeper apparently paralyzed from the neck down
and finally The Electric Chair, where you sit in a chair and imagine that you are the death row hero
of your choice. Except you only get a sexy little buzz, not a proper frying.
We conclude that Segaworld stands at the very apex of popular entertainment in the '90s, resolve
never to speak to each other again, and go off to buy a load of Iron Maiden records and join the
Conservative Party. So were computer games, perhaps, the new rock 'n' roll?
"Naah," sneers Fran. "They just work on one level, don't they? It's just brain candy, really. They
don't relate to anyone emotionally. There's nothing spiritual there."
At the same time, though, this is a man who has always played down the idea of rock'n' roll as
high art, passed down from the gods.
"It's not art to me 'cos it's just something you can do," he reasons. "But when you write something
that you look back at and you can't believe you've written it, that's beyond an artform to me.
"It's some kind of weird instinct or spiritual thing. So in that sense, it is almost religious. And
you'll never get that feeling from a computer. You need that humanity to communicate feelings in
that way.
"When you really get the feeling, there's warm butterflies in your stomach and the song writes
itself. That's what I call soul music. It comes effortlessly. It doesn't need marketing, analysis,
fashion, or technology to help it along."
Dougie agrees. "That's the beautiful thing about music when everyone comes together and finds
the same thing. That mass communication, almost a religious thing. Oasis at Knebworth was
almost like the prophet on the hill, everyone getting the same feeling. And it's like when OK
Computer came out. I walked into three people's houses and two people's cars, and they
were all playing that album. People will always latch onto soul music. 'Cos it's people music.
"You can still reflect the times, too. If you look at someone like Weller, he has reflected his times
totally and been ridiculed for it, yet even in the '80s, he was writing timeless songs. Because they
were soul songs at heart. So we're a '90s band, but we also wanna be timeless."
It's not so easy, mind, when no one in the '90s seems able to take anything seriously. It's always
got to have an ironic edge to it. It's a cultural scourge which Fran has always professed to hate.
"Well, I've changed my mind about this. I use irony sometimes, so I can't talk. It has its place. I
hate it when people use it as an excuse for everything as some sort of defense mechanism."
"People use it so as they don't have to express themselves or be passionate about anything," adds
Dougie, "'cos someone might think they were uncool and take the piss."
We are, of course, being entirely ironic about taking the piss out of going to an uncool but
ironically exclusive eaterie like Mezzo's 'cos it's Fran's 24th birthday.
So it's straight out with the champagne, Cuban cigars, and elaborate crustacean dishes, drawing
the line only at the 95-a-throw caviar. But your indulgence is OK, of course, because we all do
subversive "fingerbobs" jokes with the crabs' heads and that. Show these snooty bastards that we're
still rock 'n' roll at heart.
After dining heartily on speck-of-slowly-throttled-newborn-pelican in a rabbit droppings
marinade, after-dinner conversation comes round to the topic of the mediocrity seemingly inherent
in '90s culture.
"It's true to an extent," muses Fran, "but in 20 years time, the good will out. I don't know whether
we'll last, but I think some of our songs will. You see, if you rip a painting off the wall, it's gone
forever. If you destroy a record, the song lives on. It's in the air. It's apparently nebulous but it's
also permanent once it's out there. I don't care if we're around forever, but I hope the songs are.
And I have a prety good idea that they will be.
"As for mediocrity, I quite enjoy shite bands doing well 'cos I know we'll shine through all the
more..."
And with that, we return to our pate de merde grise and make rude gestures at the orphans and
paupers pressing their noses to the windows. And feel slightly reassured that amid all this cynical,
ironic, impersonal, inhuman, aspiritual, soulless modern world, at least someone still gives a shit.
Vox
October 1997
by Johnny Cigarettes
pictures by Jon Sharp
Unashamed purveyors of classic pop-rock,
TRAVIS play real songs about real life on real instruments made of wood.
Computer games? Fancy food? The Internet and that? Not their scene, surely. Vox invited
them to the ultramodern fleshpots of London's West End to see if they couldn't be
tempted.
