Travis: Band Of Fathers

Sixteen years is a long time in pop. Since Travis released their debut album Good Feeling in 1997 – just days after the release of Oasis’s bloated Be Here Now bought the curtain down on the Britpop era – a lot has happened for the Glasgow four-piece. They were prematurely declared fit for the critical slag heap right before they became the biggest selling band in the UK; one member broke his neck and nearly died, another married a Hollywood star; and they’ve all become fathers. Now, after a five-year hiatus, Travis are preparing to get back on the road with material from accomplished new album Where You Stand.

“We finished touring in 2008. I think it was possibly the best tour we’ve ever had. I think we were just in a really good space and at the end of it we all said, ‘OK, let’s go and be with our families.’ So that’s what we did.”

Travis’s lead singer and songwriter Fran Healy has found time for a chat from Dublin where he’s performing at Dylan Fest and hanging out with “some friends from New York” – or, more precisely, Albert Hammond Jr from The Strokes and Boz Scaggs. I’m sure his preference would be to be with jamming with them but Healy doesn’t ever make me feel that he’d rather be somewhere else. He’s engaging, interesting and an absolute gent.

“We were very aware that the band would always be there but your kids will not always be kids. If you can afford it financially, and we’re lucky enough to have been successful, I think it’s good to spend that time watching toddlers grow up.”

There was never any serious falling out but everyone in the band was aware that a break was needed. “When we came to London in 1996 we were four very close friends and four individuals. And it happens in every band, but you become this one thing. You become a quarter of yourself. The time we’ve had with our families and away from each other was good – it feels like we’ve caught up with ourselves. We’re now four individuals again.”

If the results of the latest album are anything to go by, that time apart has certainly done Travis the world of good. Where You Stand sees the band return to familiar territory of melodic, radio-friendly rock, but with an assuredness and positive energy not heard in their other recordings from the last decade. They sound reinvigorated.

While the guys some took some time out, Healy recorded a well-received 2010 solo album, Wreckorder. Did he ever consider that his time with Travis was done? After all, they nearly called it a day a decade ago after drummer Neil Primrose dived into the shallow end of a swimming pool, broke his neck and almost drowned while on tour. (He’s since made a full recovery). And getting together must be a strain now that the four band mates all have families and are geographically dispersed – Healy lives in Berlin, while bassist Dougie Payne spends much of his time in New York with actress wife Kelly MacDonald.

“No. Dougie and I have this thing where we like the sanctity of a band: no matter what, just try and hold it together and get through the ups and downs … So I don’t think that not getting back together was an option or even came into our heads.” Healy suggests his solo material might even be considered a Travis album of sorts. “I already had the songs. I even asked Andy [Dunlop, Travis guitarist] to come and play on it. I put this record in a line with our albums and why not? I write for Travis and Wreckorder is pretty Travis-y.”

Aah. Yes. ‘Travis-y’. Somewhere along the line that descriptor became a byword for melancholic, middle-of-the-road, inoffensive music that your mum and dad would like, and probably your gran too. For dullness. It’s certainly unfair, but perhaps when you shift 2.7 million units of an album in your home country – as Travis did with The Man Who, the LP which featured worldwide hit single Why Does It Always Rain On Me? – you have to expect that you’re not going to be considered cool anymore.

“The funny thing about that is that we’ve never been a band that would look at the wallpaper in a room and try and make a record that fits with the wallpaper,” says Healy. “When we made The Man Who it really didn’t fit the pattern. What you found over the next 18 months was the success of that album changed that pattern and we sort of became invisible. Then we were the pattern, then we were the wallpaper.”

The fickleness of the music press and the arbitrary nature of a hit record is something that Healy knows well. British music glossy Q Magazine awarded the The Man Who a two-star review upon release and then nominated it for ‘Record of the Year’ six months later. In 2006, the same magazine rated the album as the 70th best of all time. “You realise that the success of that record wasn’t driven by [the media] and it wasn’t driven by us. It was driven by people who got a chance to hear the songs.

“Every year there is an album like The Man Who. Whether it’s Adele or Daft Punk, there’s always that record that goes beyond style and substance and taps into the zeitgeist. No one has control over that. Record companies might congratulate themselves at the end of the year but it’s all retrospective. I know because it happened. It’s arbitrary and wonderful – it is! – but as an honest Scot I can’t take responsibility for [the success of The Man Who] and nor can anyone.”

An incident such as the Q U-turn has got to make a musician skeptical of critical commendation and condemnation. Although he admits to always reading reviews, Healy finds that interviews often provide more useful feedback. “Questions make you see different things … It’s a bit like therapy. I’ll say, ‘Fuck! I didn’t even think about that!’ I’ve been asked about the title of the new album, Where You Stand. Well, there’s the song called ‘Where You Stand’. I liked the words, I liked how they looked graphically and that’s why I chose the title. But I didn’t think of the larger meaning of it. We’ve had these five years off, we’ve become fathers. In a sense we’re in the middle of the swimming pool: you start your life in the deep end, you then find your feet, and eventually you get sucked down the plughole at the end.

“At the moment, as fathers, we can look at our children at one end and then we can look at our parents at the other. It’s a very interesting point in anyone’s life and I reckon the album was written from that.” For sure, ‘family’ was on the band’s collective mind when they were writing Where You Stand: the opener is called Mother and Reminderis a series of helpful nuggets of advice to Healy’s seven-year-old son Clay (“Celebrate / Don’t be late / Finish what’s on your plate”).

Reinvigorated and refreshed, Travis will, later this month, leave for a lengthy tour that will see them visit the USA, Mexico, South America and Europe. I wonder how Healy will cope being away from his wife, German photographer Nora Kryst, and Clay, after spending so much time together over the last five years. “My son’s at school, he’s happy,” says Healy. “He understands that I do this job and that when I go away I may be away for three weeks … We work on sleeps. He asks, ‘How many sleeps is that?’ ‘That’s 22 sleeps,’ I say. ‘Oh right, OK, that’s quite long.’ But he gets it.” Unfortunately, there are no current plans for a trip to Australia, but that might change if the band gets its way. “I’ve written an email to our office and I asked why we haven’t been to Australia for 13 years. What’s going on with that?!” says Healy. “We loved coming [to Australia]. I sent the emails saying, ‘What the fuck? Let’s go back there!’.”

[Where You Stand is out now on Red Telephone Box]