| 1. T R A V I S |
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The Man Who
Independiente |
In this millennial year, which saw the likes of Damon Albarn abandoning songwriting skills for post-rockin' kudos, the one album that truly triumphed fell back on a troubadour tradition that's older that the millennium itself: the sensitive crooner, armed with guitar, throwing out nuggets of emotive truth to the populace has rarely been so welcome.
With their second album, The Man Who, Travis revealed a communicative power rare in this age of prickly reticence. Making the most of their natural combination of intelligence and earthiness, they produced songs, inspired by such things as Kafka's Letters To Felice, that could reduce even Bonehead to tears. Which really is quite a mighty feat, all told.
Reading the lyrics cold, one would have imagined a barren, wintry affair, but instead, producer Nigel Godrich helped the band fashion a consistent, ever flowing, organic work that could justifiably be called beautiful. Above all, it simply sounded warmly, unsentimentally human.
No one really saw it coming. There was, to be frank, little reason that the second album from the workaday group who sounded sort of like a cross between Radiohead and Oasis should cause raptuous excitement in the streets. But then, no one knew Travis has finally found the road they wanted to be on and were sticking to it.
"If you play [debut album] Good Feeling all the way through," admits singer Fran Healy, "it's quite a hard listen, because you've got all this 'Do da do de' fun, up stuff. Then it heads down into this darker area, ending with 'Funny Thing.' The Man Who carries on where 'Funny Thing' left off and stays there."
It took a whole summer for the songs from The Man Who to work their way into people's consciousness, but by August, when it finally reached Number One, it was clear that their gamble in sticking to the same downbeat, reflective mood throughout had paid off in grand style.
THE SONGS
"Writing To Reach You"
"It was written one Boxing Day in the coldest flat in Glasgow," explains Fran. "It was about minus 22 degrees, there were two gas heaters going and I was, like, getting fuzzy-headed, because you couldn't open the windows 'cos they were frozen shut. It's kind of Kafka's Letters To Felice meets Oasis. It took 20 minutes."
"The Fear"
"It's about that whole thing when summer's finishing and everything's beginning to change, people are moving away from you. You can feel something coming, and you don't know what it is, there's just that feeling that a change is gonna come."
"As You Are"
"I met this old guy on a train when I was seven years old, and he really took a shine to me, wrote this poem on the back of a pencil box, and gave it to me. I'd always thought 'As You Are' came from Nirvana's 'Come As You Are,' but I read this old guy's poem to our manager and realised it came from the first line: 'As you are now, so once was I...' I never saw the guy again."
"Driftwood"
"I was doing the dishes one day, and I started singing 'You're driftwood, de de de de de de,' so I ran upstairs, put the tape on, went back downstairs, and forgot all about it. I went back to it the next day, and all you can hear is me walking about for two hours, Andy coming round, making cups of tea, this guy coming to fix the phone, and I was going, 'I've lost it, oh fuck, I knew it had a good tune.' Then about 30 seconds before the tape runs out I sing it again."
"The Last Laugh Of The Laughter"
"I wrote that on holiday in Israel, on a boat with these four French hairdressers I'd met in the hotel. I got them to translate lines in the song, and by the time they'd done it, I'd finished the music. One of the girls fancied herself as a bit of a singer, so she sang the French lines. When I listened to the tape, she was singing it better than me."
"Turn"
"It was written at the same time as 'All I Wanna Do Is Rock' on this little island off the west coast of Scotland. It was the first time I'd gone off to write somewhere, done it properly. It's kind of a list of wishes."
"Why Does It Always Rain On Me?"
"It was written in Madrid and Israel, both supposedly hot places, both pouring with rain. In Madrid, I was sitting up after this phone call, the first album was out, and it kinda wasn't doing as well as everyone thought it would. Everyone was saying it was fine, but you were wishing they'd be more honest about it, and I was in a bit of a hole at that point, I was kind of lonely, and ugh, doing all these interviews in Madrid with all these people going, 'Who the fuck's Travis?' And I was like, 'I don't even know yet.'"
"Luv"
"I wrote it when my ex-girlfriend left to go to St. Andrew's University. I was feeling really, really shit, so I sent her the four-track demo. I saw her at Christmas and said, 'Did you get it?' And she was like, 'No.' But I knew it had got to her."
"She's So Strange"
"It was the very first song I ever wrote. They were having a fire sale in this music shop, getting rid of everything really cheap, and we went down to buy a Hammond organ, and there was a Tanglewood 12-string guitar. I picked it off the rack, sat down, and the first chord I played was this weird chord, and that was the first chord of 'She's So Strange.'"
"Slide Show"
"That was written in this big rehearsal place in King's Cross. I took a sleeping bag, sandwiches, video camera, Dictaphone, and eight-track and just sat and worked everything out. Noel Gallagher came down and later when he'd gone, the 'Wonderwall' thing kinda popped into my head. It's about what songs do to bookmark events in your life."
"Blue Flashing Light"
"It was recorded during a B-side session after we'd finished the album. A lot of people were saying, 'Ooh, that's fantastic!' But it's an odd song, we couldn't just stick it in the middle of the album, because it'd blow the whole continuity of gentleness, so we put it on as a secret track. It still scares the shit out of me 'cos I forget it's there."
THE SLEEVE
Tony Crean, Independiente Records' creative and marketing director during the conception of The Man Who: "Even though we were mainly listening to demos, when we started to think about the cover, we knew the finished album was going to be mellower than Good Feeling, quite evocative and moody with an REM-meets-Echo-and-the-Bunnymen vibe. So we decided to do a Bunnymen-esque cover, something that would capture the same mystique of their covers without ripping them off.
"We also wanted to shoot it somewhere with snow--and preferably in Scotland to reaffirm the band's links with the country. So when Aviemore was suggested as one of the possible locations, we chose it straight away. Then we saw the Caterpillar ad campaign--all wide-open spaces with a sense that something's either just about happen or has just happened--and decided to try to get the same photographer. He's normally based in San Francisco but happened to be over in London. He liked the band and was willing to do the shoot for less than he'd normally charge. So it all came together."
Anthony McGee, marketing manager at Independiente: "Then we went up to Aviemore in January, thinking there'd be tons of snow, and not only was there no snow, but there was rain and 70 mph wind. And it was all outdoor shots! We finished for the day knowing that we hadn't got what we needed but that out of all the locations we visited, the one with the telegraph poles was ideal.
"Because the band were still working on the album at this point, they had to fly straight back to London the next morning, so we aimed to get up at 5:30 a.m. to try again. When we opened the curtains, it had snowed, and everything looked serene and perfect. The only thing was that Dougie was wearing this jacket with a big fur collar that was a little too Bunnymen retro, so I persuaded him to try on my coat for the last few frames, and we got the shot.
"We mocked up some of the previous day's shots as covers, but they just looked windy and wet, and the idea wasn't to imply that Travis were a soggy, miserable band, so we went back to the snow. Then there were discussions along the lines of 'But the album's coming out in May,' so we just said, 'That's OK. In the summer, it's sand; in the winter, it's snow.'"
THE VIDEOS
Anthony McGee: "We wanted to continue the sleeves' tones and themes in the videos. We gave all the directors the covers as a palette. Now you know if a poster or frame of a video is Travis even before you see any type. We also wanted the videos to be something really different in order to stand out, so we thought that rather than hyping the band and making them look great, we'd just put them through hell."
"Writing To Reach You"
"The treatment we chose for the first video really stood out--it made you question what on earth was going on. Fran gets fired at by a Messerschmitt 109, stoned by small boys, and has an arrow shot at him by a little girl! The band weren't convinced initially, but when we took Fran along to the special effects company to have his chest protector moulded, and he realised it was the same people that had done the effects for Saving Private Ryan, he changed his mind. We put it straight onto the website, and after the single came out ,we were getting 1,800 hits a week."
"Driftwood"
"The main reason the band liked the treatment for that was because there was going to be 500 girls in it. Until they found out they were all about 12, that is. We got to treat the band really badly again: there's this big cloudburst, and the girls run off while the band just sit there dressed as teachers getting absolutely soaked. I think poor Andy got it worse than anyone."
"Why Does It Always Rain On Me?"
"Getting them wet was one thing, but for that one, they all had to learn to dive. Dougie found out he had a heart murmur, so he couldn't do any of the diving and kept thinking he was going to die, and then Andy perforated his eardrum diving. At which point we felt a little bit guilty.
"Turn"
"Fran was meant to train for four weeks with a personal fitness trainer beforehand--the idea of the video is that the rest of the band bet Fran he can't do press-ups for 12 hours--but he didn't do any of it, so when he got onto the set, he could only do three in a row. It turned into a two-day shoot! When he's sweating and dribbling in the video, it's real. It's not put-on or acting, it's real."
THE CAMPAIGN
Tony Cream: "The last campaign came right at the start of Independiente, so there wasn't much time to plan, it was just, 'Let's put out a record, let's get the band on tour.' It was just single, single, album, and there wasn't much of a chance to sort it out. This time we sat down and planned it. We decided that the strongest things we had to work with were the songs and the loyalty of the band's fans.
"We had about 20,000 people on the mailing list after Good Feeling, so we decided to start the ball rolling by sending them a postcard with Fran's handwritten lyrics to 'Writing To Reach You' on it, along with the address for the website [www.travisonline.com], which at that point was a one-page site with an e-mail link directly to their studio. The band loved it, because they'd been out of touch with the fans for so long, and it gave them something to do when they were bored with recording.
"We decided that we couldn't rely on Radio One to playlist the single and, even if they had, you can't expect that alone to sell the records: Suede had massive airplay this year but their album hasn't really sold. So, because the band couldn't tour in support of the single--they were finishing the album--we webcast a rehearsal instead. It went down an absolute storm. Apparently no one had done it before, and the single went it at 14, their highest-ever placing.
"They've continued to have an interactive relationship with the site, filing a daily tour diary with pictures and popping into the chatroom unannounced. Apart from that, the campaign had a bit of a false start. The comeback gig at King's College was universally slated, but that just spurred on the band to work really hard on giving the album a live feel, which really paid off--the Christmas dates at Glasgow Barrowlands sold out in two hours. The festival dates in the summer were terrific, and the press loved the fact that it rained during 'Why Does It Always Rain On Me?' at Glastonbury. The album itself wasn't brilliantly received--except by Select--but as I pointed out to the band at the time, the last time I read reviews like that was when (What's The Story) Morning Glory came out."
Select
January 2000
From underrated outsiders to proud victors: TRAVIS take home Select's Album Of The Year trophy, pausing to deliver the inside story of their watershed LP...
