It’s been 10 years since the Scottish quartet Travis released their seminal album The Man Who, unwittingly building Britpop’s bridge to the ultra-earnest, Coldplay-heavy decade that followed. The obnoxiously humble Chris Martin has even described himself as “the poor man’s Fran Healy,” referring to Travis’ ruby-throated singer-songwriter. But while Coldplay has been playing stadiums, Travis has slowly returned to their intimate roots, culminating in Healy and guitarist Andy Dunlop’s low-profile acoustic tour, where they’re playing and discussing songs from the Travis catalog chronologically.
“The idea came about pretty accidentally,” explains Healy. “Andy and
I were doing what we thought was going to be just a brief radio-show
appearance in Austria a while back — just playing a few songs.
But when we got there, it wasn’t a radio station; it was actually this
big hall — a real venue — with like 300 people there! So I
asked someone, ‘What’s this? Who’s playing here?’ And the guy said,
‘You are!’ Basically, we had 10 minutes to think of concepts for an
hour-and-a-half show. So I came up with this idea of doing a set in
chronological order, mainly because it’d be simple. And as it turned
out, it was a big success — the people really went mental for it!
Austrians are usually quite subdued too, so we were thinking, ‘Fuck,
this is great!'”
Soon Healy and Dunlop decided to adapt the concept into their first
tour without the full Travis lineup, dubbing it “A Chronological
Acoustical Journey Through the Travis Back Catalogue: Laugh Out Loud
Stories, Scottish Accents, Handsome Scottish Men & Naked Torsos.”
Appearing at considerably smaller venues than a typical Travis tour,
the “acoustical journey” also presented Healy with a chance to knock
out two birds with one stone.
“I’d been harboring this idea of trying to write an album on the
road,” he says. “Just traveling across America and writing a record.
And so we took these two ideas and turned them into one, so that the
subtext of this tour is that Andy and I are going to be trying to write
the next Travis record while we’re on the road.”
For those keeping score, the next Travis record will be their
seventh. The first six garnered a broad spectrum of critical reaction
— especially in the incomparably fickle British press — and
their chart success has dwindled in recent years, with last year’s
Ode to J. Smith only reaching No. 20 in the U.K. and No. 122 in
the U.S. But with the aid of hindsight, 1999’s hugely successful The
Man Who is now generally regarded as a classic, making it both a
benchmark and an anchor for Healy as a songwriter.
“When a record becomes famous, the band who makes it gets dragged
along the ground behind it, almost like a cowboy movie when the cowboy
gets shot off his horse and dragged along by it,” says Healy. “It’s
like that. The horse is the record and you’re the cowboy. And at the
end of year, or however long it lasts, you see a picture of the horse
sitting munching some grass, and the cowboy is just fucked. You know,
[The Man Who] is still very pure to this day — kind of
delicate and untouched. And people are still really affectionate
towards that record, even as we’ve carried on all these years.”
While hit singles like “Driftwood” and “Why Does It Always Rain On
Me” took on anthem-like status over time, Healy has found that
revisiting his older songs on this tour is helping to put things in a
new perspective.
“After playing those songs for years with the band, I think playing
them acoustically really brings you back to the moment,” he says.
“You’re almost transported back to the time, sitting in your room with
a four-track recorder. One memory springs to mind for the song called
‘As You Are’ on The Man Who. I did a demo for that on the stairs
of our apartment building, because it had really good natural echo. And
all the neighbors were coming up the stairs from work, climbing over me
and asking me what I’m up to. I always have that nice memory of that
song. A lot of times you spend the rest of your life trying to make a
song as good as the demo.”
While Travis has played their share of big arenas and festivals,
it’s that sort of staircase intimacy that Healy hopes to bring back on
his acoustic journey.
“This is where songs are born and where you to get to see music in a
really honest kind of light. With this tour, it’s kind of like showing
people pictures of yourself when you were a kid. We’re going to be
presenting these songs just the way they were when they were
babies.”
This article appears in Oct 21-27, 2009.