Travis have a quiet, understated confidence and self belief. They’ve been brushing it under the carpet for three decades, while enjoying an intrinsic kind of success (apart from the time they dominated the UK pop scene). They are stealth awesome. Fran Healy explains…
“I don't even think you make your own luck. You’re just lucky”.
Fran Healy and his band Travis have this longevity thing down. Firstly, you must have a love and addiction to music, as something magical. Secondly, that magic is for you to create - making music to nobody’s expectations but your own. But thirdly, you get lucky. As Fran says:
“The chances of a shit kicker from Glasgow going on to win the best band in the world is a billion to one. How can you be proud to be lucky?”
Well okay, but as all bands that ever got a break know, you have to be in it to win it. And for 35 years now, Fran has been in it - always mining for that song gold.
“Most songwriting is digging, until you find that nugget, and you extract it from the rock. You keep digging because you know you will find something”.
New song Gaslight is one such nugget - a fabulous pop-rock stomp, with a brass arrangement and burst of dirty guitar to boot. It feels confident. And, Travis has a new album - L.A. Times - written by Fran from his studio on the edge of Skid Row, Los Angeles, where he has lived for 10 years. He describes L.A. Times as Travis’ “most personal album since The Man Who”. That album went 9X Platinum in the UK alone and shot the band into superstardom, and while no such expectations exist for L.A. Times, that’s just as it should be. The band that rose to fame during the peak CD era in the 90s is releasing their 10th album into a world where vinyl sells more than CDs, but streaming still rules. Does Travis still have a place in this space? It’s just not something that will concern Healy or his bandmates that much.
“The problem is when you think you are the shit, you are the diamond. But I’m still a lowly miner, and always will be. Joy and success you can define any way you want, but it’s about you, the person, not outside things”.
The writer of a song called Gaslight will never be gaslit it seems.
In the documentary film Almost Fashionable (2019), Travis are joined on a tour of Mexico by journalist Wyndham Wallace who is a critic not a fan - at Fran Healy’s invitation. It is a nice bit of self deprecation, turning a weakness, i.e. Travis’s niceness, into a strength. Will Wallace be won over by the band’s refreshing attitude to their fans, their gratitude to be where they are - and finally - by the band’s underrated musicianship?
The answer is equivocal - it would be too predictable otherwise. But at one point Wyndham admits (to bassist Dougie Payne) that he has had Travis’s songs get into his head, and he hasn’t minded it too much. That’s the highly distilled version of Travis’s longevity - a sustained career in music via the vessel of the classic song. The fans love those songs, while more casual listeners might simply admire them. But this business and surviving it, starts and ends with good songs. Travis has a bunch of them, and as such, are able to ‘achieve’ collective moments such a recent spontaneous and joyous Hamden Stadium rendition of their most well known Glasgow anthem “Why Does It Always Rain On Me”. Was that part of a manifesto?
“Yes. There’s no cool filter for me, I listen to songs like a child - it’s the moment when the hairs stand up on the back of the neck, that’s what I’ve always wanted to achieve with music”.
In a strange way though, that song and others from the Travis canon seem underrated in the streaming era. The song hasn’t reached 100M streams (“Sing” remains the band’s biggest Spotify hit). Why not 500M or a billion? It’s easy to forget just how massive Travis got to be with The Man Who and The Invisible Band. They sold millions of albums and were all over UK radio. But has it always been such a smooth and gentle roller coaster ride?
“If you’re 23 when you make your first album, you’ve been working on it for 23 years. The hardest thing is when you get to your third album and you only have a year to make it. You need to hold songs back for that, which we had with “Writing To Reach You”.
Okay, so great songs, a humble, self-deprecating approach to fame. But there must be more to Travis’s longevity than that?
“We have respect for each other, don’t step on each other's toes, and we’re very different people but we complement one another. And we’re Scottish as well. Scottish people are very good at sweeping things under the carpet”.
I hesitantly suggest too, that the reason Travis is still here, making new music they are into, and impressing audiences (and studio engineers) wherever they go, is that they might actually be really good.
“I did tell Dougie recently that I think we are stealth awesome”.
There it is. A quiet, understated confidence and self belief hiding under the carpet.