THERE'S NOTHING quite like a healthy dose of commercial success to bring a warm glow of contentment over all involved. For Scots quartet Travis, the last couple of months have been particularly satisfying. With the sublime and inescapable single Why Does It Always Rain On Me? invading the airwaves and their second album The Man Who nestling comfortably at No 2 in the UK album charts three months after its release, things are looking rather good.
It s fucking mad right now for us, begins Fran Healy, the band s frontman. We ve been A-listed on pretty much every radio station in Britain including BBC Radio 1 and Radio 2. Our pluggers were saying the other day that Why Does It Always Rain On Me? was number four on the national airplay charts which was pretty amazing. It s Rickie Martin, Madonna, Whitney Houston and us! Fucking mad."
Not that they re in any way smug or complacent about their current star status. On the contrary, rarely will you come across such an unaffected, down-to-earth bunch. But Healy and the equally together bassist Dougie Payne are in no doubt about their creative abilities.
"I ve always thought that song in particular would do well for us," Healy muses. "It s one of those songs that seems to have struck a chord with a huge number of people.
Whatever about the music, and it s a pretty appealing blend of youthful pop exuberance and world-weary classic songmanship, you d have to admire their infectiously confident outlook. Named after Harry Dean Stanton s character in the Wim Wenders movie Paris, Texas, Travis first emerged in 1997 with their effervescent debut, Good Feeling, an album oozing with happy-go lucky spontaneity. Songs like the melancholic More Than Us , the achingly soulful I Love You Anyway and the rallying U16 Girls marked them apart from their contemporaries, inviting comparisons with everyone from John Lennon s Plastic Ono Band and Aladdin Sane-era Bowie to Simon & Garfunkel. It sold well enough, allowing the band the space and time to write and record the follow-up.
Teaming up with producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck, Pavement), The Man Who is a far more thoughtful, introspective affair. The fact that it took six months and as many studios to record compared with the four days it took to put down Good Feeling speaks volumes.
"We took pretty much the same approach to recording this one as the first album." Healy explains. "It was fundamentally just the four of us in a room playing live. We had a little more time to think about things, that was the only difference."
Containing more than its fair share of low-key, slow burners, The Man Who has been described by the band themselves as "an album to stay in to, rather than one to go out to." Are they growing old gracefully already?
Payne: "People have been asking, did we plan to make such a mellow melancholy album. There was no plan, no agenda. It was all very accidental; we just did whatever the songs demanded."
Healy: "I don t write albums, I write songs. An album is just a collection of your songs. You don t plan to record fast songs and slow songs and put them in a sequence that balances out the record."
For all his acknowledged skills at penning hook-laden, instant classics Healy claims to find songwriting a difficult and sometimes harrowing process
"I actually hate writing," he states bluntly. "You sit in a room for three weeks and you come up with a load of absolute shite. Then you get one brilliant thing out of it and it s all worth it. I ve got a big black plastic bag at home full of my sins of the past. Including B-sides and album tracks, we ve put out 44 songs to date and the black plastic bag has about 500 songs in it. So that s a strike rate of about one in ten. It s not bad when you think about it, but it could be better. We were in the Brill Building in New York where back in the sixties people like Carole King and Burt Bacharach were locked in little offices with pianos, knocking out classics all day long. That s the way it should be done."
Much of the credit for the success of The Man Who is laid at the door of producer Nigel Godrich with whom the band appear to have forged a special relationship.
"Nigel is very good at recording, Payne offers. "His working method is outrageous. He will wait and wait until his instinct tells him it s the right take. We did The Fear and we d been rehearsing it in the studio playing it over and over again. He came through on the headphones and said right, cool so I said So, are we ready to do it then? He said, No, it s already done . Technically he s excellent, he s done it so many times. His father was an engineer who worked for the BBC, so he s been twiddling knobs and playing with desks since he was a wee boy."
Naturally enough, the Godrich connection and Travis penchant for occasional languid rhythms and sweeping textures has given rise to more than a few Radiohead comparisons. Payne is clearly irked by such speculation:
As far as any Radiohead comparisons go, what we do is just so completely different it doesn t bear up to any scrutiny, he says. We re more like contemporary folk music. They re like contemporary classical with all those constructed melodies and bits and bobs. Our songs are so much different to Thom Yorke s songs in every way.
Much has been made of the art-school background of three members of the band, but with characteristic modesty they play down the notion that this has influenced their music.
"It s not art rock that we do, put it that way," Healy offers "It s true that I had my heart set on being a painter but I gradually slipped into music. But if you say you re going to be something you re probably never going to be it, so there s no great surprise there.
"People go to art school because they don t want to do anything else. They don t want to conform. They don t want a 9 to 5 job. I came out of a train station the other day at Farringdon in the business district of London at 5pm when everyone was heading home and I couldn t believe what I saw. It was like the school bell had gone off. Thousands of people heading off for the day. That s why I m doing what I m doing to avoid that kind of nightmare.
Healy, given to sporadic bouts of philosophising is similarly scathing about much of today s music:
"There s a lack of imagination in music these days. There s probably some guy in a bedroom writing fanzines right now who is a shit hot songwriter but we ll never hear about him. It s all about money and lawyers. On the positive side, I think it can only be a healthy thing when the music press can t get a movement going. As soon as you get a movement, which is usually a core of three really good bands, you get 20 shit bands clogging up everything."
Already they re looking ahead working on songs for the next album which is due out next year. "Again it s falling into place naturally," Payne offers. "It s happening again. The songs are coming to us easily. We went in to record a few B-sides and we came out saying hey that s not a B-side, that s a single .
"Travis is not us, it s the thing we re carrying," Healy adds cryptically. "Einstein said that success can only be measured by what you can do for others, not what you can do for yourself. It s a gift that you have to use. It s like a bucket full of water, full to the brim that you ve been given. You re told it s the only water left in the world and you have to carry it hundreds of miles without spilling a drop. Too many people end up drinking it or spilling it along the way or even leaving it somewhere. They think they re important when it s the talent they ve been given that matters." n