Travis: New album's creative process was liberatingly unstructured

Aug 29 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Just making music in the studio has produced a new album for Travis. Emma Pinch reports on this liberating experience

TRAVIS star Andy Dunlop has a roomy home on the fringes of Sefton Park, a gorgeous wife and a three-year-old son.

With a lifestyle shift from the mean streets of Glasgow to something you might find lurking in the pages of OK!, and a musical shift from “the autobiographical and everything in Fran’s diary”, towards anonymous vignettes, it might appear the band’s supply of existential angst is running dry.

“We’ve plenty left to be miserable about,” says Andy with gloomy relish. “Trust me. We’re Scottish, we can find something.”

The speedy production of the album, released on September 29, shows at least how energised the band were.

They came back to the studio after a tour ending in November and gave themselves a whirlwind four months to write and record an album. They ended up with Ode to J. Smith, their rockiest LP to date.

“The last one, The Boy With No Name, was three years in the making,” points out Andy, 36, lead guitar player. “Everyone was reluctant to have that experience again. We had the self-imposed deadline of Dan having a baby in March. It wasn’t a shifting line in the sand it was a real deadline.”

But the creative process itself was liberatingly unstructured.

“We went into a little studio and just played together,” he says. “We haven’t really done that for ages, just messing about. Some days nothing, some days tons of stuff and once you are writing and there’s a buzz about it you run with it.

“After the success there’s a load that comes with it, things you forget to think about, like marketing. It was like being in a band again.”

Fran’s offerings, he says, were in the autobiographical vein but the rest became stories, with Ode to J Smith as the springboard, and four “exceptional” songs by Dougie. It has “rough edges”, plenty of prog-rock electric guitar, and even a Latin choir heaved in for good measure.

“When you are sitting in the rehearsal room what you’re doing seems very small,” says Andy. You’ve just come in going I’ve got this little thing, we’ll try this or we’ll try that. It’s just a bunch of guys messing round then it suddenly becomes an album.”

Travis started very small and very determined. Andy was in the original line-up with two school friends from the Lenzie Academy and Neil Primrose on drums. Art student Fran Healy was drafted in as a vocalist and soon assumed song-writing responsibilities. The band was named after the character played by Harry Dean Stanton in the film Paris, Texas. After some radical surgery to the line-up by an enervated Fran Healy after his grandfather’s sudden death, the final version was born, and in 1996 Fran borrowed £600 to record their first record, All I Want To Do Is Rock. They moved to London and their first album The Good Feeling was produced by Steve Lillywhite of U2 fame.

They’ve twice received Brit Awards for best album and are credited with paving the way for Coldplay, Keane and Snow Patrol. There’s not doubt the songs share something – often inflected with melancholy and punctuated by soaring, anthemic choruses.

“We’re just writing about how life is – this happy, sad thing with great moments of joy and the next moment sadness,” says Andy. “It would be unreal just to write about one side of it.

“But I don’t think we sound the same. I see where they get the beats from, they’re from the same family trees. With Keane maybe we influenced something, but what makes a difference is success. When we were successful Coldplay sounded like Coldplay and Keane sounded like this, but the record company says, ‘this can sell now’, that’s the difference.”

Nevertheless the release of their ode to life being rubbish, Why Does It Always Rain On Me from 1999’s The Man Who, was pivotal to their fortunes.

“There are points in your career that you would include in the one and a half hour film of it. Bits of luck that made the band take off,” says Andy. “Like when we were doing Glastonbury and it rained as soon as Why Does It Always Rain on Me started. Everyone was talking about how we made it rain.

“It was just a tongue in cheek song, saying you have to lump it. If you are unlucky that’s normal. It’s got a really nice melody and it’s just the right speed for people to sing.