Ask Fran Healy what inspired Travis’s new album, LA Times, and he doesn’t hold back. “Getting pummelled by life. Getting absolutely f**king battered by the wind. Life is like you’re in a boat: sometimes it’s plain sailing; sometimes you’re running right into the wind. It felt for a long time our band were definitely doing that. It was a storm – an emotional storm. All the stuff that comes at you. Somehow it finds its way, encoded, into the music.”
The traumas the band have lived through over the past decade have been both personal and professional. Their bassist, Dougie Payne, separated from his wife, the actor Kelly Macdonald, in 2017; Healy, the band’s singer, had to cope with the loss of his friend Ringan Ledwidge, the director, who died in 2021, aged just 50; that year the band also changed management after 25 years. All those experiences – life, death, upheavals – have gone into new songs such as Bus and Live it All Again, which are in the Glaswegians’ proud tradition of sensitive acoustic pop that explores both the dark and the bright sides of the human experience.
For Healy, Ledwidge’s death hit hardest. They had met when the director oversaw the video for their 2000 single Coming Around, in which a man dressed as an egg seeks an emotional connection with strangers. They hit it off instantly, and their friendship inspired Healy to write The Humpty Dumpty Love Song, the beautifully devastating closing track on their 2001 LP, The Invisible Band.
Running a hand through his shock of freshly dyed orange hair, Healy speaks emotionally about sitting at Ledwidge’s bedside at his home in Washington state, in his friend’s final hours. “It’s beyond doubt one of the most amazing two days ever – for terrible reasons and for amazing reasons. We made videos together with this guy. I became very close with him. Sitting beside someone lying dying, literally he’s already kind of dead. He’s taking a breath ... and then, 25 seconds later, he [breaths again]. You’re, like, ‘F**king hell.’ And then it’s 37 seconds. You’re going, ‘Is that the last one?’ And he breathes, and it’s, like, ‘Oh, for f**k’s sake, Ringan!”
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Healy and Payne are seated in a corner of the Gibson Hotel in Dublin, across the road from 3Arena. They’re basking in the glow of a knock-out gig the previous night as support to The Killers. The show was the glorious full stop at the end of a manic several days. They touched down in Dublin straight from Munich, where they mingled with fellow supporters of the misbegotten Scotland soccer team at the Euro 2024 championship and played a charity event.
Touring commitments prevented Travis from watching Scotland’s opening game, which turned out to be a blessing. They were performing in Dublin as the team were ripped apart by Germany. Helpfully, an English fan up front kept shouting out the score.
“It was being funny on stage going, ‘It’s three minutes to the kick-off: we’re going to hammer them,’” says Healy. “And this guy with a very posh English accent was going, ‘It’s 1-0. You’re going home.’”
It’s mental in LA right now. It’s a bonkers place. It’s dangerous: I saw two people die. A guy got hit by a car, and I was with him in his last, bloody moments
— Fran Healy
Healy has lived in Los Angeles for the past 20 years or so. One of the ideas unpacked in LA Times is that southern California functions as an early-warning system for issues that will soon buffet the rest of the world. Los Angeles was an early epicentre for the Black Lives Matter protests; its homeless problem is on a far grander scale than Dublin’s; and it’s at the sharp end of climate change, with heatwaves, drought and rampaging forest fires.
But it’s also where the American dream blossoms and is the heart of the global entertainment industry. You can trace so much of the madness and joy of modern life to the place – a contradiction that is threaded through the album. (“I want to be million miles from here,” Healy sings on Bus, a tune that starts with him standing on the shoreline gazing at the expanse of the city.)
“It’s like a pressure point on the masseuse table. And the masseuse is going, ‘Does that hurt?’ And you’re going, ‘F**king hell!’ It’s mental there right now. It’s a bonkers place. It’s dangerous: I saw two people die. A guy got hit by a car, and I was with him in his last, bloody moments. Things like that have never happened to me any other places. I’ve lived in some rough places. There is something existential about LA right now that is intense.”
Payne nods in agreement. “LA is like the canary down the coalmine. It’s giving you a heads-up what’s coming for the rest of the West, the rest of the capitalist world. In the 1950s it was the golden age of Hollywood, and the second half of the 20th century was like this golden age of capitalism. LA was the barometer. This is what’s coming. And now LA – the polarity of everything, the wealth, everything is so divided, everything is atomised, so polarised. And that’s what’s coming.”
[ Travis in 2016: ‘Civilisations lose their technology all the time’Opens in new window ]
Travis formed in Glasgow in 1990, though with a radically different line-up. (Andy Dunlop, the band’s guitarist, is the only holdover from that initial incarnation.) Healy joined a year later, dropping out of art school to focus on the group. They drifted along, but after the sudden death of Healy’s grandfather, in 1994, he decided that the band needed to radically change direction, pivoting from shaggy indie rock to something purer and more emotive. (It was around this time that Payne, Healy’s best friend, joined.)
Their debut LP, Good Feeling, arrived in 1997, the heady late summer of Britpop. Rockier than their later releases, it caught the ear of Noel Gallagher, who brought Travis out as support as Oasis toured Be Here Now, their excess-all-areas juggernaut. But it was two years later, with their second album, The Man Who, that everything changed for Travis, as songs such as Driftwood and Why Does It Always Rain on Me? rebooted Healy and bandmates as sensitive young men with the weight of creation on their shoulders.
Whey-faced and heartfelt – and now successful – they were obvious targets for the British music press, which got stuck in with gusto. Q, previously Travis cheerleaders, notoriously gave The Man Who a withering two stars; “terribly derivative” reckoned the NME, which accused them of trying to rewrite Oasis’s Wonderwall.
“There’s two things journalists can’t stand: artists becoming successful without their permission,” says Payne, “and artists using cool sources of music they like” to make uncool music.
A conversation with Travis is a complicated thing because it’s hard to discuss the band without talking about what came before and what followed. What came before was Radiohead, whose falsetto-fuelled indie rock bubbled with the same angst that informed key Travis moments such as Why Does it Always Rain on Me? and Waiting to Reach You (the video memorably featuring a mournful-looking Healy chased by a Spitfire).
What came afterwards, of course, was Coldplay, and Chris Martin running around stadiums in a neon jumpsuit. There is a continuum of open-veined indie pop running from Radiohead’s My Iron Lung to Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto, and bang in the middle you’ll find Travis.
“Chris is an old school friend, if you know what I mean: the two bands grew up together,” says Healy, who invited Martin to add backing vocals to their new track Raze the Bar, a valentine to their favourite watering hole in New York. “He lives kind of up the street, in LA terms, from me. I was sitting one day with the track listings. I was, like, ‘This is shit: I hate this record.’”
Making an album and immediately loathing it is all part of the process, he says.
“First of all it’s ‘I love this record.’ Then it’s ‘This is the worst record on earth.’ I wanted to throw the masters into the ocean. I called Chris. I don’t go out and surf with Chris, but he’s always been there. And I’ve been there for him. I called him and said, ‘I need an ear that hasn’t heard this record.’” Healy was trying to work out the optimal track listing. “‘I don’t know what to do. Can I drive up?’ He was, like, ‘Sure. Come on over.’ Chris has never changed.”
He doesn’t feel any rivalry with Coldplay. He does, however, vividly recall encountering their megahit Yellow for the first time and realising that Travis, then the biggest band in Britain, weren’t going to be the biggest band in Britain for much longer.
“I remember hearing him on [the BBC radio show hosted by] Jo Whiley. That was the first time. I stopped the car – because we were the biggest band in the country. I pulled the car in like that. ‘Oh Jesus.’ They played Yellow. I was, like, ‘Oh, f**k, it’s good. That’s really good.’”
Thom Yorke, the Radiohead singer, was trickier. There’s an apocryphal tale of Yorke falling out with his producer Nigel Godrich after Godrich agreed to work with Travis on The Invisible Band: Yorke supposedly felt that Travis were too heavily indebted to Radiohead. Healy hasn’t heard that story. He does, however, recall Godrich being in a peculiar place when he joined Travis.
“Where there’s a little blend of weirdness is that Nigel had come off doing [Radiohead’s 2000 masterpiece] Kid A, which was an intense record, and coming into our world, which was the absolutely opposite of it. That moment I remember being very hard for us. That’s because Nigel was having a tough time coming out of that – coming out of this atmosphere, where you breathe a certain oxygen, into [the Travis] atmosphere.”
Whatever about Godrich and the challenging transition from one camp to the other, there was never any bad blood between Travis and Radiohead. “We’ve known Radiohead since 1997 – we played in a little tiny bar, and [Radiohead’s bassist] Colin Greenwood was there, and afterwards he said [Healy affects a mild-mannered English accent], ‘Do you want to come back to my place for a cup of tea?’ He said, ‘We’ve just finished our new record. Do you want to hear it? And he put on a tape, and it was OK Computer. We were there going, ‘Oh, that’s quite good.’”
As for Yorke, well, lead singers are “tricky f**kers”, says Healy.
“We’ve known him for a long time. Thom has always been a tricky customer. He’s an artist. He’s like me. I’m tricky – as frontmen are. Thom is no different. I can’t speak for Thom, but I can speak from my paranoia – my paranoid android ... I always felt he saw me from a certain distance, where I look a certain way. From a distance we’re not an art-school band; we’re Why Does It Always Rain on Me? We’re stealth cool – you will not know until you get close what you’re looking at. We’re like a Chuck Close painting.” Close’s art contains hidden images that only become apparent at close quarters. “There’s something below the surface that [Yorke] couldn’t see.”
He and Yorke were friendly but distant – until the fateful evening they and Godrich ended up in the pub together. “Nigel and him were out, and I turned up. Thom was, like, ‘What the f**k?’ We had the best night. He got me. He got close enough to be, like, ‘Aah’. Nigel was, like, ‘Thom [says of Healy] ‘He’s really cool.’ And I was, like, ‘Yesssss ... Thom Yorke thinks I’m cool.’ But, look, he’s a hero of ours – like we are, maybe, to some people. How awesome is it when you hear they think you’re all right?”
Healy is right to describe Travis as “stealth cool”: spend a little time in their company and the stereotype of the group as wet-blanket indie boys is revealed to be a myth.
“The thing that got levelled at us our whole career: ‘Oh, they’re nice,’” says Healy. “Here’s a great bit of advice: don’t ever mistake nice for weakness. Because that’s wrong. As Irish and Scottish people, we’re brought up to be decent and mannerly and polite. But do not f**k with us. I’m from Possil” – aka Possilpark, a district of Glasgow. “I’ll f**king knock you out. Nice – that’s not weak. That’s what a lot of people perceive it to be. We’re tough as nails.”
LA Times is released by BMG on Friday, July 12th
