The rebirth of the uncool

What an ephemeral notion is Cool. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word in primarily unflattering terms: “unexcited”, “calm”, “unemotional”, “lacking zeal”, “lukewarm” – hardly qualities any self respecting rock ‘n’ roll band would covet.

And Travis are perhaps the epitome of uncool, but unrepentantly rather than terminally so. It makes sense that they named themselves not after psycho poster boy Mr Bickle from Taxi Driver, but the shambling Travis of Paris Texas, a man so wounded by love he quit talking for a couple of years and went zig-zag wandering along the Mexican border.

But why Travis the band should remain so unfashionable is a matter for endless conjecture. After all, for about five minutes after the release of their debut album Good Feeling in September 1997, they enjoyed a brief honeymoon with the tastemakers of the rock press. Here was a quartet who, like their countrymen Teenage Fanclub, wrote songs that positively welled up with melody, harmony and warmth, drawing on a time honoured tradition of B-bands (Byrds, Big Star, Beatles, Buffalo Springfield). Except where the Fanclub could boast endorsements from the likes of Kurt Cobain and Nick Hornby, no self-respecting hipper-than-thou would touch Travis with a bargepole.

Take Nick Kent for example, who ventured that they, alongside Coldplay, will be remembered as the Supertramp of their generation. Not that the band give a toss either ways: four million sales tends to take the edge of such snipes, as does praise from the likes of Ray Davies.

“To be honest I don’t read anything,” singer Fran Healy admits when I ask how this stuff affects him, if at all. “I don’t read magazines, I don’t read books so I don’t even know what anybody’s saying. I just write, that’s all I do, and I have been writing since I was 12. And I think the more you do it, the more refined or effortless it becomes, the more you become what you are, which is self-deprecating, which is slightly humourous, which is slightly serious, which is slightly romantic, which is all the things in the songs, lyrically anyway.”

Travis, love ’em or leave ’em, are a band in the bonded sense, beneficiaries of a pact sealed by personality rather than playing ability. At one stage, Fran, somewhat touchingly, takes a moment out to tell drummer Neil Primrose how much he likes his performance on one of the new songs.

“You’re drummin’,” he says. “It’s just so liquid, man.”

We’re in the dining area of the Landmark Hotel on Marylebone Road in London, undertaking one of the first interviews in the press campaign for the forthcoming album The Invisible Band. As the house pianist plays sickly elevator versions of George Michael and Beatles songs, Neil takes tea and Fran orders water. The former is an affable and self-possessed individual, while the latter sports a rather fetching bleach-blonde mohican which should contradict his soft-spoken demeanour, but doesn’t.

The lightness of touch Fran admired in Neil’s playing a minute ago renders addictive what might otherwise be innocuous songs such as the McCartney-esque ‘Flowers In The Window’ or ‘Sing’, a tune which carries unlikely echoes of Harrys like Nilsson or Chapin.

It’s a far cry from that raucous first side of Good Feeling. Back in 1997, I described that debut as “the album Cast, The Bluetones and all those other ocean coloured scenesters couldn’t make even if they all shelled out for talent implants” and gave it a nine on the dice.

Re-reading that write-up recently I was surprised by the enthusiastic tone, yet such reviews were not untypical of the time. Songs like the mighty ‘All I Want To Do Is Rock’ and the jailbait baiting ‘U-16 Girls’ seemed to set the band up as possible heirs to Blur and Oasis’ thorny crown. In a typically cheeky gesture, Healy would cop steals from both ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘The Universal’ on the follow up The Man Who.

Yet, when that second album appeared in May of ’99, Travis sounded infinitely older and more careworn.

“I think the first record’s different because it’s the first record – we threw everything in,” Fran reckons. “We just toured and toured and toured and two hundred shows of screaming every night will just fuck your throat up, so (I decided to) sing a bit quieter and try not to blow my bloody throat out. If you ask a three-year-old child why they look slightly different to the way they were at their first birthday, they’ll say, ‘I just grew up a little bit’. For the first year of your life you look like every other baby, and the next couple of years you get to be what you are.”

But if Good Feeling was a blissful but rambunctious infancy, then The Man Who sounded like an unhappy childhood, and its rainy, reflective quality met with mixed reviews. Nevertheless, radio programmers and plain people alike loved it, and by the end-of-year polls, opinions were being radically revised.

Like many a casual bystander, I became acquainted with much of that second album on the airwaves rather than the headphones, and while far from being a fan, was always happy to hear Travis on the radio, kind of like the drinking buddy you’re glad to see out on the town but would never dream of inviting into your parlour.

But then, preparing for this interview, I finally played The Man Who from top to tail, and was surprised by the depth of its songs, many of which seemed to evoke those first tender years out of school and on the dole. ‘Writing To Reach You’, ‘The Last Laugh Of The Laughter’ and ‘Driftwood’ sounded like paeans to the sundering of teenage friendships, letters to friends departed for Dublin or London or Boston; they conjured images of soft rain on the road as you ambled through another grey and aimless afternoon, numbed, but not enough, by rock ‘n’ roll and alcohol.

These impressions were reinforced by the sleeve’s still life studies in pastoral paralysis. In retrospect, The Man Who resonates with loss and possibility, the post-adolescent trauma of transience.

“I think that’s because it was written at that time in my life,” Fran considers. “These songs, because they’re written at this time in our lives, they have much more… like if a song’s written in winter, it should be released in winter. It shouldnae be released in the fuckin’ summer, what’s the point of that, because you wrote it when it was snowin’ outside and it obviously had an effect on you, whether it was the way you were singing, the way your voice was wavering or whatever.”

A lot of people will tell you Travis are nice. This is a backhanded compliment. “Nice” can be code for a variety of unflattering adjectives. What they are is intense – courteous and funny, sure, but focused to a degree which means all banter has a serious undertone. I like this quality in people, especially musicians. It indicates, I think, a desire not to be liked, but understood.

Fran Healy is to all intents and purposes Travis’s sole songwriter. His mother left his father when he was a year old, moving from Stafford to Glasgow to live with her parents. Healy last met his father when he was 14. There’s no love lost. He has described his mother as over-protective – she herself was closely watched as a child following an elder sibling’s drowning tragedy – yet she was also supportive, putting up some of the money for the first Travis single.

In 1991, Healy met his future comrades Neil Primrose and guitarist Andy Dunlop at the Glasgow School Of Art while the latter pair were playing in a band called Glass Onion. The name was changed to Travis three years later, and a Radio Scotland session attracted the attention of American engineer Niko Bolas, best known for his work on records by the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, the Hindu Love Gods, Rod Stewart and Mike Scott.

“He taught us how to rock,” says Fran. “He taught us how to fuckin’ be a band, that guy. The dynamic of it was amazing. We had four days with him; he just sat us down and told us all these cool stories about Neil Young and Keith Richards. You’d come in in the morning and he’d be sitting at the kit knocking out a 4/4 and goin’, ‘This is what I’m talkin’ about’. He was trying to teach us that what you don’t play is important. Your rule is to keep time if you’re a drummer; if you’re a singer it’s to tell the truth, never lie. This is what he said to me: ‘If I don’t believe you, nobody’s gonna believe you.’ We’re indebted to the guy, that was a real key moment in our germination.”

“The first album came from working with him,” adds Neil. “Apart from the playin’ side of it, him tellin’ stories about all those people, the fact that he was so willing to talk about the simple things that these guys did and how they felt so humbled by music… then you think, ‘Right, the music’s there, we can play, now we work on the chemistry’. ’Cos if you don’t have that you’ve got nothing.”

Is it hard to maintain that bond through the day-to-day grind of press and recording and touring?

“Naw, it sorts us out when it goes off kilter,” the drummer explains. “We sort each other out. We’ve had moments of being pissed off, I had one last week, we sorted it out, talked about it, went out and got pissed and had a laugh, and here we are. It’s a new week, a new day, forget about it and get on with it, y’know?”

Travis’ current line-up was finalised when Fran convinced his friend Dougie Payne to learn the bass and join in the spring of 1996. The first time they rehearsed together, playing ‘All I Want To Do Is Rock’ in a space above a bar called The Horseshoe, sparks flew. The four moved to London that June. Within a month, former Go! Discs chief Andy MacDonald had signed them to his new label Independiente. Good Feeling made number seven in Britain, and the band spent most of the next year on the road.

Then came the difficult second album. The recording of The Man Who was a troublesome, stop-start affair, requiring two producers and a break for re-writes, all of which was reflected in the introspective nature of the material. Despite so-so reviews, it charted at number five, and thanks to a series of high profile festival appearances became the sleeper of the summer, eventually crawling to the number one spot. Not bad going for a record with such a serious case of self-effacing Catholic guilt (“Why does it always rain on me/Is it because I lied when I was seventeen?”).

Indeed, Healy has admitted that a strain of repressed anger informs his best songs, and it’s also worth noting that that second album took its name from a collection of case studies on schizophrenia by Oliver Sacks called The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

“Schizophrenia, the actual ailment itself, is so amazing,” he says. “People fuckin’ call them freaks but I don’t think so man, I think they’re like, advanced. There’s this thing called the bicameral mind, and they say that before we were able to write, before we created gods, there was a voice in our heads that told us what to do. Everyone had this, and they’ve traced it back. Only 10,000 years ago, relatively recently, we started having a sense of ‘I’. Only after we started writing for maybe 100, 200, 300 years, the idea of metaphors and all that started happening, and all of a sudden statues of gods started appearing because we couldn’t deal with the voice in our heads, we had to attach it to something outside of ourselves.

“In King David’s time, they brought these shepherds down to decipher dreams and tell the kings what to do. The reason they reckon it was the shepherds was because they still had that fuckin’ voice going on ’cos they were so remote from everyone. And I reckon schizophrenia is related to that in some way.”

How did that connect to the songs on The Man Who?

“Absolutely in no way at all, it was just a memorable title.”

“We’d been called schizophrenic a lot,” Neil offers. “It was a lot of irony for the journalists, but there was no direct link.”

Perhaps not, but many people reckon heightened creative states to be akin to hypomania, the next-to-last stop on the line between depressed and manic.

“That’s what they say about Lee Mavers from The La’s,” Fran relates. “People like Mozart and stuff, they just went over the edge. I don’t think there’s any chance of me ever doin’ that though, y’know what I mean? I think you would know. I think there’s people who are immensely fuckin’ gifted, beyond the realms of understanding, and I’ve always been too sensible or something, I dunno.”

“I think it’s that consciousness thing about music or art,” Neil adds, “whether you go over the edge or not doesn’t make any difference if you just do your thing without thinking about it too much, or just let go.”

Which is the sense one gets from The Invisible Band, another deftly arranged and emotionally disturbed album, whose most instructive lyrical moment occurs during ‘Safe’, when Fran sings, “Don’t go astray/You’ve got to be who you are”. But then, don’t go reading too much into the lyrics.

“We all put too much onus on words, too much emphasis,” the singer maintains. “At the end of the day it’s how it’s delivered, how it’s said, it’s the gentleness, knowing when to do it and when not to do it.”

Ask Fran if there were any cases of the bends when Travis suddenly woke up and found themselves not just one of the biggest bands in Britain, but making good headway in America too, and he has this to say:

“Never underestimate the power of denial. You can just go, ‘Fuck that, man’. We sold four million records, but we only made one. If we didn’t come back with another record, out of that four million about 10,000 would be like, ‘Where’s Travis?’ That’s being realistic. A lot of bands go about going, ‘We’ve sold four million records, therefore four million people think we are the dog’s nuts and will miss us’. But the basic truth is a lot of these people go and buy records like I buy records, which is, you get it, and if it’s really good you listen to it ten or 15 times and maybe go onto another record. Maybe, if you’re really enthusiastic, you’ll go and see them live. Maybe. But 90% of people in the world don’t give a toss about bands. They like a great song but they don’t give a toss who’s singing it. So that’s the way we think about, and that’s why coming to terms with it is easy.”

Hence the title of the new record, plus the fact that the band have been getting smaller on each successive album cover?

“That’s just the fact that a tiny amount of people know what the band looks like,” Fran continues. “In today’s fuckin’ time of visuals and personalities and celebrities, it’s just a statement that bands are still invisible to the majority of people. There’s a celebrity thing that’s here, and then there’s the music thing, which is here, and the two are hardly ever connected. The one example is that song ‘ Save All Your Kisses For Me’ by the Brotherhood Of Man. I didn’t know what the band were called, I didn’t even know what they looked like, but I knew that song from the age of five, and I was 18 or 19 when I eventually saw them for the first time and I was like, ‘Jesus Christ!’”

Healy’s insistence that it’s always about the song and not the singer echoes the poet Patrick Kavanagh’s assertion that the self is only useful as a specimen. In music, this translates as the players’ subservience to the sound, the importance of transparency.

“I believe that in order to make something truly brilliant there can be no ego present when that happens,” Fran says. “And I think maybe what happens with people who go over the edge is that you can get rid of your ego and then it gets stuck and just disappears. ’Cos your ego is the thing that keeps you cool, y’know, you’ve got to keep up appearances and all that stuff. But when your ego goes on vacation anything can happen.”

True enough. But songs like ‘Flowers In The Window’ and ‘The Cage’ beg another interpretation of The Invisible Band. These are songs of devotion and sometimes desolation written by a man in a pre-marital state, bound not by the ring on the finger, but a vow, a promise made in the grey area between courtship and co-habitation. As it happens, Fran is engaged to be married.

“That’s an even better reason for calling the album The Invisible Band,” he quips. “Cheers for that. I’ll take it and pass it off as my own!”

He won’t though. He’s just too damn conscientious.

When the tape is turned off, the singer confides that, “if it was wartime, man, these songs would be everywhere.” When I ask what he means, he mentions names like Cole Porter and Glenn Miller, the way people cling to romantic standards in a time of emergency.

For Fran Healy, Travis has a life of its own, its own benevolent, if often bewildering momentum, far beyond notions of cool or uncool.

“The band sorts us out,” he says, “we don’t sort it out. It protects you. It looked after us since the day we all stood in a room together and let go of it. It’s got its arms around us and it takes us fuckin’ everywhere. It’ll lead you places where you think are really impractical to go, but you’ve just got to let it. Fuck’s sake, I got told, for six, bloody seven years, man:

‘Yer daft – what ye doin’?’

‘Yez are shite – what ye doin’?’

‘Give it up – what ye doin’?’

‘It’s impractical – what ye doin’?’

And I’m like, ‘It’s the most practical thing I know because I believe in what we’re doin’. But at the same time the band always looked after us and it always will, man. I feel a bit charmed ’cos this lovely thing keeps its wings over us.”

The Invisible Band is released on Independiente on June 12th. Travis play Dublin Castle as part of the Green Energy Festival on May 5th and 6th