halo boys

They are the biggest band in Britain and now Travis have their sights set on America. As the four Scots storm Chicago and Detroit, singer Fran Healy opens up about his family, his ruthless streak and why his band have angels on their shoulders

AS TRAVIS roll in to a field on the outskirts of Chicago, one quick glance around tells them exactly what they are up against. Looking comfortably dishevelled, the Scottish band tumble out of their silver tour bus after an overnight journey from Detroit, and attempt to relax in the early summer heat before meeting their hormonally-fuelled adolescent audience.

A few yards away, outside a neighbouring tour bus, stands the opposition - a heavily tattooed, semi-naked thrash metal musician with a shaved head, who is ready to drop his shorts for anyone who glances his way. As he shakes his penis dangerously close to the lens of a nearby photographer, she remarks that he is man enough to shave where the sun rarely shines. It is no wonder Travis are dubbed the nicest men in pop.

The four-piece band are about to experience what is termed America's "shed circuit" for the first time since they began their seven-week US tour. They are scheduled to appear on a small stage in the shadow of a much larger ready-built arena, vying for the attentions of a 20,000 crowd with a line-up of bad-boy bands including the Bloodhound Gang, The Suicide Machines and Mancow's Morning Madhouse. Hundreds of such metal "sheds" have been thrown up across America, all attracting legions of suburban teenagers desperate for an afternoon of rebellion with a soundtrack of what Travis's lead singer Fran Healy refers to as "hard corn" rock.

After weeks of supporting Oasis on their American tour - and according to the critics, threatening to eclipse them - Travis are out on their own. They still have the reaction to last night's gig ringing in their ears. A sell-out audience high on Newcastle Ale and Brit culture welcomed them to Detroit's appropriately-named St Andrew's club. There, under the rafters of the converted church, Travis's mix of sweet ballads, like the melancholic Driftwood, and howling anthems like All I Want To Do Is Rock, won the hearts and minds of about 900 devotees.

This afternoon's date at Chicago's answer to T In The Park is in a whole different league. Travis's challenge is to convert thousands of Bloodhound Gang fans to their songs, which wooed a string of British music festival audiences last summer. It will be tough arguing with a generation of middle class, Mid-West kids with the slogan "No reason to live (but we like it that way)" emblazoned across their T-shirts, but if anyone can do it, Fran Healy can.

Dressed defiantly in a green and beige stripy pom-pom hat, an overcoat and a red woolly v-necked jumper, Healy retreats to the back of the band's tour bus. Following close behind is his right-hand man, Travis's bass guitarist Dougie Payne, dressed slightly more appropriately for the climate, in a nylon shirt, dark trousers and shades.

Apologising for the mess, which barely lives up to the image of a busful of lads on tour, Healy settles down for his first British interview in a while. The band have been courting the American press and radio since they began this tour, determined to make their mark weeks after the US release of their Brit Award-winning album The Man Who. They have had only three days off and as they approach the final hurdle, their hard work appears to be paying off - the album has sold 60,000 copies in America. In Britain, the bandwagon is taking care of itself. The Man Who, which has already sold an incredible 2.4 million copies, is still shifting from the shelves. Days later, Healy is named songwriter of the year at the prestigious Ivor Novello Awards in London, with Why Does It Always Rain On Me? awarded best contemporary song.

The singer, with his slight frame, baggy clothes and boyish charm, might look rather less intimidating than his hairless, exhibitionist neighbour, but he has enough fire in his belly to make even the most cynical thrash-loving teenager sit up and listen. It might not be today, when an impatient crowd screw up their faces at his tendency to philosophise on-stage, or tomorrow, when Travis play their last US gig in Minneapolis, but Healy swears America will take notice one day soon.

"We're going to be bigger than any band, or we're not going to be anything at all," he says earnestly, setting out Travis's basic tenet. "It's all or nothing and if you're in a band, that's the way you've got to think." Payne nods in agreement as Healy insists Travis are motivated, not by the urge for fame or money, but by an unseen force that has bonded the four friends and propelled them from Glaswegian art school outfit to Britain's biggest band. Healy explains that they simply can't help what is happening - or what he believes will come next.

"I'm on a mission and the more we do this, this thing has got us and we're just kind of hanging on," he says, wide-eyed and deadly serious. "It's a faith game. You've just got to let go and trust it and it'll look after you. It's like a guardian angel."

Healy describes what it is like to be part of the Travis revolution, to realise that after two albums - Good Feeling was their 1997 debut - and relentless touring, the world has begun to recognise the "thing" he finds so difficult to articulate. He speaks of how he, Payne, drummer Neil Primrose and guitarist Andy Dunlop, are married to the band, and how he would give his life to Travis if he thought it would help. He speaks of commitment, love, loyalty and the apparently mystical forces that drive Travis. Whatever they are, the other band members insist they feel them too, and in the last year, so has an audience of millions.

"People say you sell your soul to the devil, right?" says Healy. "You don't sell your soul to this thing that's totally intangible and completely invisible. Some people call it God, some call it nature, some call it Buddah, I just call it 'it', because it's beyond language. We're just putting out songs. Everyone goes home feeling great, the way you feel when you hear the best joke in the world. We do it every night and this thing comes through you. It's like a fucking spiritual enema."

"Nice," interjects Payne, unleashing the generous, wraparound smile that must have been at least part of the attraction for his partner, Scottish actress Kelly MacDonald.

"It's one of the most unpleasant, but then peaceful things," says Healy, ignoring the interruption.

Later, Primrose and Dunlop reiterate his sentiment. Even Primrose, the band's only married member, who returned briefly to London last month for the birth of his first child, Lola, has no doubt how committed he is to Travis. "We're all married," he says. "We've been married to what we've been doing for about 10 years." Looking serious, despite his Mickey Mouse t-shirt, Dunlop agrees: "Being in a band is like bigamy. We're all bigamists four times over."

WHATEVER invisible forces are driving Travis, there is no doubt who has harnessed them. Healy has learned to live with the irritating tag "the nicest man in pop", but he couldn't care less if the reality matches the media image. What matters to him is making music with three of his closest friends, getting his songs heard and spinning more magic with a third album, already written and due to be recorded in LA this autumn. It hasn't been easy.

Until Healy took the reigns in 1995, Travis - originally Glass Onion - were bumbling along, gigging around Scotland and dreaming of a record deal. It took Healy's tunnel vision to steer the band into an outfit that would convince Sony Music boss Charlie Pinder of their marketability - and weave the magic the singer craved. After taking control, Healy sacked two band members, the manager and a booking agency. He is honest about his apparently ruthless actions, which he stresses have paid off.

"We were a five-piece, we had a manager and a little agency that was getting us gigs up and down Scotland," he says. "We came to a point where I was like, this is going absolutely nowhere, and for a long time, because you're the youngest in the band, people don't really listen to you. I was cheeky and they respected me for certain things, but it was their band. There were five drivers.

"I just turned around one day and said, right, I'm taking it, it's mine now. I'm going to write all the songs and call the shots. You can't disagree with me because you've just got to trust me. If we do it as a committee, like we did for five years, it's just pissy. We sacked our manager and the next thing to go was our agency. We cut ourselves totally adrift."

The catalyst was the death of his beloved grandfather, after which Healy shut himself away in his Glasgow home for a week, before deciding on the sackings. His grief focused his energies on the band, which he was later to describe as his security blanket, and out of necessity, friendships were relegated. Healy revealed how pragmatic he could be when he used the rejected pair to record a demo tape before telling them they were out.

"When my granda' died, it was just like, I don't give a shit, because losing you is nothing like losing him," he says. "I locked myself in my room for a week. Anyone that came to the door I told to fuck off at the top of my voice." Remembering the anger he felt, he clenches his fists, screws up his eyes and says under his breath: "Just fuuuuck offfff," before continuing: "I was getting ready to do the dirty deed, which I did, and Neil and Andy were backing me. It was for the good of the overall thing. That's why I don't have a conscience now, although at the time it was hard to do."

In what later proved to be a stroke of illogical genius, Healy recruited Payne as the new bass player, even though his friend couldn't play the instrument. Incredibly, Primrose and Dunlop decided to trust Healy and after Payne had learned the basics, the new Travis was born.

Primrose says he quickly accepted Healy's leadership - and still does. "We've tried other methods and you do that when you start out, but they don't work. You've got to have one man driving the ship or it just goes round and round."

An only child born in Stafford in 1973, Healy moved to Glasgow as a baby with his mother Marion, following the break-up of his parents' marriage. After living in Maryhill with his grandparents, they moved to Possilpark and finally, Cathcart in the city's southside. Marion, who gave her son #600 for Travis's demo tape, has proved an enduring inspiration, along with Healy's late grandfather and Gerry Kelly, an art teacher he met while on a school residential trip to Castle Toward in Dunoon.

To his list of what he calls superheroes, Healy later added his German girlfriend Nora, who is also Travis's make-up artist; Dougie, who he met at a drawing class before they studied at Glasgow School of Art; and Andy MacDonald, the former Go! Discs boss who made Travis his first signing for the Independiente label. These people, along with Primrose and Dunlop, are all part of what the singer describes as his makeshift family - and he insists they all have angels on their shoulders. He launches in to another slice of Healy's homespun philosophy.

"I surround myself with people who've got angels," he says. "Little invisible people who sit on your shoulder and shine, and have conversations with each other when you're not even aware. And you feel attracted to these people for some reason and you can't work it out, and it's because your little angels are attracted to each other. Throughout my life, I've gravitated towards these amazing, exceptional people."

Asked if he regards himself as one of these extraordinary people, Healy hesitates momentarily. "I am an exceptional something ..."

"I can answer that - yes," says Payne, laughing, and Healy beams back at him. "I'm a bit different," says the singer. "I'm a bit odd. I felt it from that size up." His hand hovers a couple of feet from the bus floor. "That's maybe because I was a single child. It was just me and my mum and I never had that many close friends. You felt special."

He is adamant that his father doesn't even figure in his life - the last time he saw him was in 1992, when they went for a drink together in Glasgow. As a child, Healy was upset by the older man's absence after periodic trips to England to see him.

"If you give a kid an ice lolly and then take it away half way through them finishing it, they'll miss the fucking ice lolly," he says. "My father wasn't there. I would go down south to see him and it'd be like going to see your dad, but my idea of dad was just that. You'd come back up and be all weird for a week or two, and your mum would be like, 'Come on son, what's wrong with you?'"

Healy once said in an interview that he wanted to make five Travis albums before leaving the band to start a family. Those plans have moved further down his list of priorities since the world began waking up to the band. "That was a nice thought romantically," he says, "but the idea that you can fill a room with 1000 people and they will go away and take these beautiful feelings with them, that's more important than making sure the gene pool keeps spreading."

A warm, funny person who can launch into the occasional angry tirade, Healy demands as much loyalty from Payne, Primrose and Dunlop as he gives. The foursome, who in 1996 moved from Glasgow to within a square mile of each other in North London, work and play together, and have had little problem enduring each other's company on a cramped bus for weeks on end. They all know the ground rules.

"It's totally unwritten," says Healy. "It's like brothers. No, it's even better than brothers, because brothers fight like cat and dog. The point is, we're four babysitters looking after this very delicate baby-type thing. You can't get pissed, you can't get coked out your nut, you can't take heroin, because something might happen to this precious little thing you've been asked to look after."

If Travis have their way, that precious thing will intoxicate American audiences, just as it did British crowds last summer. They know it will take hard work and some careful nurturing. After returning to Britain, and tomorrow's release of their new single Coming Around, they will headline July's T In The Park near Kinross, before returning to the US and another bout of club and music festival dates. They are looking forward to finally recording their new and as-yet unnamed album, which will leave The Man Who's brooding territory for what Healy calls a "sunny" sound to match its LA backdrop.

As for the rock 'n' roll, bad-boy image that their bald, tattooed neighbour stands for, they say they are not interested. "We don't do drugs and we don't get mashed up every night," says Healy. "We'll have a drink after the show, but we're just normal, normal people."

With one difference, of course - those angels on their shoulders

Copyright 2000
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