Travis on the Killers: "We’ve known The Killers since they came out of their cage in 2002"

Famous Travis hits such as ‘Writing To Reach You’‘Turn’ and ‘Why Does It Always Rain on Me?’soundtracked much of the late ’90s and early noughties. Indeed, one in six households in Britain possessed their sophomore album, The Man Who. So, when you sit down with Fran Healy, the man who penned that glut of hits, and he decides on an impromptu masterclass in songwriting, you damn well sit up and listen!

It’s just a few hours before he goes onstage at the spanking new Co-op Live in Manchester, now the largest indoor venue in Europe, in support of old muckers The Killers and he’s pretty chilled.

“We’ve known The Killers since they came out of their cage in 2002” he quips. “They’re getting better and better, they are consummate professionals, and they want to give their audience the best night of their life. I worked out with Brandon yesterday. If he wasn’t a singer, he’d be an amazing trainer. He’s just like, ‘Okay, you pick these up, these are called skull crunches.’ I’m like, oh no!”

Travis are in the support slot for the UK and Ireland leg of The Killers’ Rebel Diamonds show, which took in three blasting shows in Dublin. There’ll also be a further four in Manchester, three in Glasgow and six in London. That’s a sweet pace, I suggest.

“And we’re playing at home!” Fran agrees. “We’re playing Glasgow for three nights in the middle of it. The Killers are getting even bigger and you couldn’t wish it for better guys. They’re lovely people, and we’re their support, I love it! It’s the best job in the world, we get to go on for 40 minutes. Before the tour, I texted Brandon,‘You do realise we’re going to go on every night to blow you guys off the stage?’ And he replies, ‘I’m perfectly aware of that!’”

No better band to do it. But let’s talk LA Times, the tenth album from Travis.

“It was written all over,” Fran explains. “But a lot of it was demoed in my studio in Skid Row, LA. We recorded it in a place called Dave’s Room, which is Dave Bianca, the producer who worked with Tom Petty. It was his personal studio that no one got into. When he passed away, rather than sell it, his family kept it, and now they let it out to friends of the family. Tony Hoffer, our producer, is a friend.

“I love guitars and drums. This studio is like going into the most amazing vintage musical instrument shop, but it’s also a recording studio. That’s where we recorded it, in what I call the cauldron of Los Angeles, which is Lankershim Boulevard. It’s an industrial area, but you open the door of the studio and you’re in this Bagpuss emporium – LA is like that, it’s got some really cool studios.”

The titular closing track is something of a state-of-LA address.  “We recorded The Invisible Band in LA 24 years ago, and it’s the coal miner’s canary,” Fran explains. “It’s always been that way. But it’s really got egg on its face in the last few years, because of the exploding homeless nightmare that keeps ballooning exponentially, because they just don’t know how to handle it.

“You’ve also got global warming – driving to school through what looks like hell, mountains on fire, you think your car is going to burst into flames.

“Then you’re on a faultline. And you’ve the disparity of wealth and poverty, added to the fact that LA is so segregated. Everyone travels from one sector to the other in their own little personal pods, listening to their podcasts. LA’s a tough city, and it’s going through a tough time right now.”

Travis LA Times album artwork

Fran teases out the thought further.

“But I need to make it plain,” he continues. “I don’t ever sit down and think, ‘Oh, I’m going to write a song about something in particular’. Andy (Dunlop, Travis guitarist) sent me a bit of music we’d done a while ago, and I was trying to sing over it. And my thing with songwriting is, you keep running at this wall to try and find a way through it, a weakness in it. There’s a metre in this song that’s, ‘da-da-da-da-da-da-da’ and I hooked on it.

“It’s Neil’s (Primrose, Travis drummer) hi-hat, I was trying to sing on it. Suddenly, I got frustrated with that, and I started mumbling to follow the hi-hat pattern. And then the line just came out – ‘I look around and all I see is pain and suffering’, which I do see every day when I come into my studio. And then I remembered this thing I saw – this guy in his Lamborghini going down the street, bejewelled fingers, a big Rolex, mirror shades, cruising through people.

“And there’s the first lines of the song – ‘I look around and all I see is pain and suffering, reflected on the 50 facets of a diamond ring… Hanging out a yellow Lambo, aviators to the haters, fuck you all’. I was through the first wall and suddenly you’re in the song. Then you run at the next wall, and eventually you get a song at the end of it. At some point, you figure out what it’s about.”

Another standout track on the album, ‘Naked In New York City’, was started 25 years ago.

“So another thing with songwriting that I do,” Fran elaborates, “and anyone that writes songs for a long time will possibly agree with me, is that you write something, and you go off and forget it. If it’s good enough, you come back to it four months later, six months later. Then you run at it again, and you run and run, but sometimes you don’t break through the next wall.

“I had the opening line, ‘Naked in New York City, here on my own again / If you make it, it won’t be pretty / You might not come home again.’ I just couldn’t take it anywhere. But you keep coming back to them. If it’s got a pulse, don’t ever throw in the towel - it will be born when it wants to be. So about three months before we were coming to the studio, Dougie (Travis bassist) mentioned that song. I tried running at it, and whatever it was, I managed to get to the end of it and finish it.”

Elsewhere, old pals – the aforementioned Brandon Flowers and Coldplay’s Chris Martin – add star turns on ‘Raze The Bar’.

"It’s about a New York bar called Black & White,” Fran notes. “It was open for 21 years and it was started by a friend of mine, Johnny T, and his brother, Chris Yerington. The Strokes’ management office was above it. Everybody went to this bar. It was a local bar and they did poetry slam nights. Jonah Hill got his big break there at the age of 17, doing standup. Locals would go up and do their poems; they’d do open mic and have a DJ every night. It was just your platonic conception of a bar and that’s why everybody went.”

However, there was a twist in the tale.

“But they had to close it down because of Covid,” Fran continues, “and their landlord was being a bit of a fanny. So Johnny, being Johnny, says, ‘I’m not leaving this bar. He’s going to get a whitewashed cube’. So one night, him and his brother and a couple of mates, went in with a truck and pulled every single piece of the bar out. They put it in the back of the truck – the floors, the walls, the stuff on the roof, the mirrors – everything.

“The song is an imaginary last night at the bar, because no one got to say goodbye to Black & White. The lyric goes, ‘It’s like Johnny and Jack’. Jack is Jack Walls, one of Robert Mapplethorpe’s muses, a lovely guy. He and Johnny are at the bar having a drink, and Chris Martin is in it. Richard Hamilton is also in it, because Johnny was also very good with helping artists out if they needed it.

“Richard is no longer with us, but he was one of the original downtown graffiti artists that started with Basquiat. Johnny was so moved when he heard it. Anyone who’s been in the bar and heard the song, they get a warm little feeling when they hear it.”

• LA Times is out now