“I’ve Still Got Unfinished Business!” Travis Interviewed
Having been a staple of the mainstream for 25 years, the perception of Travis is probably timeless songs delivered by nice boys. Not exactly the most rock and roll description, but it could be worse. Yet to assume it’s a description they readily accept is dangerous.
“We’ve always been bashed for being nice, and I always find that quite amusing,” says Fran Healy. “I would say to people: don’t confuse nice with weak. It’s the wrong thing to do, especially if you’re talking to someone from Possilpark. I’ll fucking rip your face off, you c**t. People look at us like, ‘Ahhh’. You don’t even know me. Fuck off.”
When CLASH speaks to the Travis frontman, he’s suffering from jet lag having landed in the UK to prepare for a short but condensed run of shows. Yet one senses that his riposte is not because of tiredness, more a flash of rarely-seen inbuilt Glaswegian steel.
“It used to annoy me,” he says of their public image. “But what can you do? You can’t do anything about it, it’s just the perception of a few people. The fact is, in a hundred years from now, we’ll all be dead and maybe there will be a couple of songs floating around. That’s kind of it.”
“It used to get on my tits a lot, but I realised not to confuse nice with weak. Nice is just having good manners and having a laugh!” Healy correctly points out. It’s an approach that has served his band well, with the UK shows the latest leg of a tour which has taken in South America and Europe, consolidating their universal popularity following the release of tenth album ‘LA Songs’.
“It was great,” he says of the South American dates. “We started in Paraguay, it got rained off, like really torrential rain. We never cancel shows, ever, but the roof was blowing off so we said, ‘Nah.’ So we cancelled that then played in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru and ended it in Corona Capital in Mexico City. Corona Capital was amazing because it’s such a very eclectic selection of acts, from Iggy Pop through to Paul McCartney. Shawn Mendes, Cage The Elephant, us… Travis were getting a lot of love from all of our contemporaries. I’m always taken aback because you hardly meet other bands but certain festivals put all the bands in one place.”
“I think bands just think everyone hates them, sometimes. We definitely do, but I think that’s more to do with being Scottish. It’s better to think you’re shit than you’re it, as they say. It’s weird, I don’t know why that is, it just runs in our DNA. And the severe beatings we take as children!”
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However, the European tour was more problematic, although not for the reason you may expect: “That almost broke me. We sold out the tour, but it was the middle of summer…and the rooms we played in were like 100 degrees every night, onstage. I couldn’t breathe, it was like running a marathon in a heatwave, there was no AC in any of the venues. I’m very fit, but by the end I was fucked. But the shows were amazing! You wouldn’t know if you came to the show what was going on inside my soul, slowly cracking!”
Fortunately, Healy’s suffering was worthwhile, as the new material has been well-received. “We have about six new songs (in the set), and we could do more but there’s not enough time. It’s great,” he explains, “Because we’re lucky to have these evergreen big hits, songs that people know and are familiar with and have soundtracked a lot of lives, then you bring in new songs… I remember playing ‘Driftwood’ at a party in Glasgow and it was like a fart in a spacesuit, as Billy Connelly used to say, but ‘Driftwood’ is now this massive song. ‘Gaslight’ is huge, it’s really connected, for some reason. ‘Alive’ really connects. I’m pleasantly surprised at how well the new songs have mixed with the old.”
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Demonstrably, Healy is conscious of not taking such a reception for granted, given recent experiences. “With the last album, ‘10 Songs’, we play one song from it. Because we released that album right in the pandemic, it just disappeared immediately, which was unfortunate. This album, we got to release, we’re getting to tour it. We didn’t get to tour ‘10 Songs’ and I almost ignore it a little bit, and I shouldn’t. There’s unfinished business but it’s trapped in this time and connected to the pandemic for me. We couldn’t work or do anything, especially bands, so I’m happy to move on from that. Anything from around that time feels a bit jinxy.”
‘LA Times’ was labelled as the “most confessional Travis album since ‘The Man Who’, yet it’s a description Healy thinks could equally apply to its predecessor: ‘10 Songs’ is a break-up album, it was (about) me and Nora (his wife) breaking up and that’s not a pleasant thing. It’s not fun for anyone concerned, and I think that anyone who goes through that – and I think we’ve all gone through that – that’s the nice part, that songs can help you get through it. It’s a healing process and if you can make something that comes out of you that’s not just crying… I always find that if someone’s written a song, and it touches me at a certain point in my life, it resonates with you. That album is very personal, (but) all our albums are personal.”
“If your life was a snow globe,” he continues. “But it’s not snow, it’s sediment, you shake it up and the sediment settles and you’re in another part of your life. That shaking is always big life things that happen. You go to school for the first time and it’s ‘Aargh!’. Then you fall in love for the first time, then you go and start the band… When ‘The Man Who’ was out, I lost my granda, I broke up with my girlfriend and my heart was smashed to pieces. We moved to London (so) there was an emigration part of it, upping parts and moving. Also, let’s go and fucking have this! There was loads of that going on, a really big shake of the snow globe. Some of it comes out in the songs, but there’s just something about the energy or the flexing of the album, or the way it pulsates, there’s something else about it. There’s an effervescence about it that you can’t quite see or hear, but it possesses it.”
“This album has that same thing because the last four years have been…(aged) 47 to 51 is a time in one’s life when there’s people dying, relationships coming to an end. It’s a transitional period, so again this big snow globe has been shaken up. Weirdly, at the end of that tour, coming back from Europe and getting boiled every night and arriving back in LA to an empty house. Just me and two cats. It took four weeks to (realise) it was a new chapter. The dust has settled.”
“This record is dipped in something; it’s got something else in it and it’s been a tumultuous five years. But I’m happy to say I feel like I’ve metamorphosised into something else like we all do. I’m ready.”
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With ten albums and nearly 35 years under his belt, Fran Healy can be considered an industry veteran and, with much debate about the current Band Aid single, it seems an appropriate time to discuss his experience of the third version in 2004. “It started with Dominic Mohan from The Sun coming up to me at an after show at the Astoria,” he begins. “Dominic came up to me, we were just chatting and in the middle of the conversation, in the darkness having a drink, he goes, ‘Oh, it’s Christmas, if they ever did Band Aid again, would you do it?’ and I was like, ‘Fucking right, absolutely!’ And that was it.”
“The next day, I get a phone call from our manager and he says, ‘What the fuck have you said?’ ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘There’s a big thing in The Sun today saying you’re going to do Band Aid 20’. I’m like, ‘What?’ Then I saw it and it was like, ‘Holy fuck’. It was an amazing, cool, funny, experience. Obviously, nothing’s going to compare with the first one but in a funny way, there’s lots of parallels with it. There was lots of mayhem! It was brilliant.”
“I got really into it, because when we did the thing at Air Studio, I just got the feeling that a lot of the participants were just doing it because their publicist told them to, so I was getting a bit cynical. ‘No-one knows what this is even about, no-one’s going over to Africa.’ Then I thought I should probably do that because I was moaning about it. Why don’t I do it? I reached out to Save The Children and we went to the south of Sudan.”
“I came back with the weirdest feeling. I get all the controversy about the way Africa is portrayed and I completely agree, it’s not a good look. However, I came back going, ‘We’re fucked. Britain is fucked, the West is fucked. I’ve just been in a place where they have nothing, they’re poor in the things that money can buy, but they’re rich in the things that money can’t buy. Community, togetherness, humour and laughter.’ Everywhere we went, they would give you their last grain off their plate, they were so generous. I came back to the UK and realised that we’ve totally lost our way. Our grandparents used to leave their doors open, everyone was in it together. In pursuit of the plasma TV and the house, we’ve lost track of things that are important. I got a big life lesson from that.”
“The exchange is this: if you can bring people together for shows and music and everyone’s part of it, you’re bringing a country together that’s separated because of the pursuit of the plasma TV – for want of a better phrase – that’s a good exchange for what you get. We get community, they get commodity, and I think what we’ve lost in our country is worse. You can get money from anywhere, but you can’t bring communities back together.”
In a similar vein, attendees of the UK shows will be encouraged to donate to the food donation platform Bankuet’s Eat The Beat campaign, an initiative which is sadly still required in 21st century Britain. “We’d seen The Last Dinner Party were doing it,” Healy explains. “Me and Mum would be doing that, if that existed back when I was wee. I thought it would be good for us to just do it. We were approached by the people who run it, and it’s great. It’s a necessary thing, unfortunately, but thank God there’s people who do it.”
“I remember being there, and if you’re poor you can’t do anything. You’ve got nothing. You get hobbled by poverty, and it shouldn’t be the case, but it is. But the initiative is great. If you go to a gig and have a few pints, instead of having a pint you just chuck your money into the thing, and that money will go to the food banks.”
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Such a gesture is typical of one of the UK’s best-loved bands. Yet, despite all their success, Healy freely admits he still has ambitions for Travis. “I want to play Madison Square Garden,” he admits. “I want to play the Hollywood Bowl. There’s things I want to do. I’ve still got fire in my belly and I’ve still got unfinished business.”
“Travis always wanted to be the best band. Not the biggest band, but that happened and it was like, whoa. The best band is the band that stay the course and stay true to their initial idea. I want to be like R.E.M., I want to write for the song and express my soul. I accidentally coined this nice phrase in a gig in Lima; Travis have been in the charts and always done OK, but we don’t write for the charts, we write for hearts, which is cheesy, but it’s true.”
“The ambition is to stay true, stay the course and try and keep writing from your heart. For me, that’s all you can do. Most people in the whole world are just trying their best. You’ve just got to keep doing that.”
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Catch Travis at the following shows:
December
5 Leeds O2 Academy (SOLD OUT)
6 Manchester Albert Hall (SOLD OUT)
8 Liverpool Olympia, Liverpool (SOLD OUT)
9 Wolverhampton The Halls
10 Nottingham Rock City (SOLD OUT)
11 Margate Dreamland (SOLD OUT)
13 London O2 Shepherds Bush Empire (SOLD OUT)
14 London O2 Shepherds Bush Empire (SOLD OUT)
15 Bristol Beacon (SOLD OUT)
17 Eastbourne Winter Gardens (SOLD OUT)
18 Sheffield Octagon
19 Newcastle City Hall (SOLD OUT)
21 Glasgow OVO Hydro
Words: Richard Bowes
Photography: Steve Gullick
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