Chris Martin once described Travis as “the band that invented my band and lots of others”. The Coldplay frontman was alluding to the late 90s and the Scottish four-piece’s groundbreaking way with a strummed acoustic guitar, seductive melody, unabashedly emotional lyrical sentiment and sensitive demeanour. This was post-Britpop, and beery leeriness was out and why-does-it-always-rain-on-me? elemental angst was in. See also: Athlete, Starsailor, Embrace – Generation Bedwetter, you might say, if you’re of the Alan McGee school of thought.
Frontman Fran Healy – a 50-year-old with an astutely analytical mind when it comes to the mechanics of songs and songwriters – thinks he can isolate both the similarities and differences between Travis and Coldplay. “Chris is studious. He’s got a first cum laude or whatever in Latin.” Actually it’s Latin and Greek. “I’m not that way inclined. We would be in the middle of nowhere in America doing a gig. I’d turn around and Chris would be at the side of the stage like this” – Healy cradles his chin in his fist – “checking it out, studying it, taking a bit of that… He’s a designer.”
Healy is speaking with approval rather than shade, his Glasgow accent undimmed by three decades living in London, Berlin, New York and, for the past seven years, Los Angeles. “People compare our bands. And we’ve always remained mates, but we’re very different. One’s a uni band, one’s art school. One’s studious, one’s a bit… fly-by-night!” That is: Travis made it up as they went along, with principal songwriter Healy possessed of a quasi-mystical faith in the power of The Muse rather than of The Main Stage. Or, as he said to me in 2021: “I’m more like your guy who sits on top of the hill, closes his eyes and waits for lightning to strike. Whereas Chris is off making a lightning machine to create the lightning.”
We’re talking over a pint outside a central London pub, a couple of hours before Travis support The Killers for the second of their six O2 shows. The Killers, by the way, are another band who wouldn’t exist without Travis. In April 2000, all four members, then unknown to each other, were in the crowd when Travis supported Oasis in Las Vegas. “And when they formed their little band,” recounted Healy last month from the stage of Manchester’s Co-op Live as the frontman introduced his group’s 2001 single, “this is one of the songs they played – ‘Side’.” A quarter of a century on, Killers frontman Brandon Flowers invited Travis to join them on their arena tour.
“I first met Brandon at Live 8,” Healy says of the 2005 London charity concert. “He ran up to me, wearing all white and with eyeshadow on. Even then he was a pop star. I always loved him for just saying: ‘I’m gonna go whoosh!’” Even when The Killers had rocket-powered lift-off, “he’s never changed. He’s always been Brandon: lovely, sweet, innocent, effervescent.”
The love, and the creative partnership, go both ways. After Healy co-wrote “Here With Me” for The Killers’ 2012 album Battle Born, Flowers has stepped up to sing backing vocals on “Raze the Bar”, the wee hours hymnal singalong that’s the standout track on Travis’s new album, L.A. Times, their best since 2001’s The Invisible Band. Who else supplies harmonies? Old pal Chris Martin.
L.A. Times is Travis’s 10th album, and the double Ivor Novello-winning band have weathered a catalogue of challenges in the 33 years since forming in Glasgow, not least drummer Neil Primrose breaking his neck in a life-threatening 2002 swimming pool accident while on tour in France. Healy has described the new record as his most personal since 1999’s The Man Who, their chart-topping, double-Brit-winning, era-defining second album inspired by “tectonic plates” shifting in his life.
Slugging his lager, he enumerates those long-ago seismic shifts: “My granda’ dying, that was massive,” he says of the man who was his de facto dad (Healy’s birth father was never part of his life). “Sacking our manager. Sacking two guys in the band [because they didn’t fit Healy’s vision for the band], then taking a risk getting Dougie [Payne] in,” he says. Their new bass player had never touched a bass in his life, but he was a pal of Healy’s from Glasgow School of Art, had a cool swagger and was more suited to that vision of the band’s future. “Moving to London,” Healy continues, “getting chucked by my girlfriend, Catriona… But knowing deep down it was [all] totally right.”
Twenty-five years on, apparently the tectonic plates have shuddered again. How so? Partly it’s down to his adoptive home, hence the album’s title.
“I’ve never been in a city where I’ve been in more physical fights,” says Healy, a slight, mild-mannered guy who, nonetheless, has steel lurking beneath his affability. “I’ve had an attempted carjacking, been bitten by a dog,” he explains, the latter nearly ending his guitar-playing days. On top of that, his son Clay, now 18, was bullied at school. The band sacked their manager (another one) after 25 years. Then, in 2021, the band lost a close friend, music video director Ringan Ledwidge, to colon cancer, leading Healy to check his own health. “I thought: ‘I need to get a colonoscopy!’ Which is all clear, thank God. So it’s been stormy for the last few years. And then me and Nora breaking up…”
Healy had been with German photographer Nora Kryst since the mid-90s. The couple split in 2019, but the news never got out. This is the first time he’s talked about it.
“It was this moment when we were both just sitting in the room. And I was like: ‘It feels like we’re in a different type of relationship. I feel like… your brother. We’re in the same family, but it’s graduated into this other [state].’ And you have to have a second to acknowledge it.”
He points out that a handful of songs on Travis’s last album, 2020’s 10 Songs, including “The Only Thing”, their collaboration with former Bangles singer Susanna Hoffs, referenced the dissolution of the marriage. But “even [the rest of] the band didn’t pick it up”. On L.A. Times he revisits the break-up directly in one song, the beautiful, gossamer-light, no-regrets lament “Live It All Again”. As he describes it, “it’s the last bit of toothpaste that I needed to squish out the tube”.
I point out that the demise of a similar-length relationship also inspired an album last year by another of his peers. Blur comeback record The Ballad of Darren was suffused with the melancholy of midlife heartbreak and loss. News of the split of Damon Albarn (who did barely any interviews to promote the album) from his partner Suzi Winstanley only emerged some months later.
“But Damon’s a different kind of songwriter,” says Healy. “Damon’s a cream-off-the-top guy. He doesn’t deep dive. This is fracking! The Man Who was drilling, but I’ve gone beyond drilling. I’m looking for gas that’s still stuck in the seams. There’s a lot of stuff going on.
“The last three years are among the hardest I’ve ever had. So I think there’s an intensity, a sort of fizziness, to the edges,” he adds of an album whose lead single, “Gaslight”, is a punchy attack on gaslighting born of bitter personal experience.
Out and about in support of L.A. Times, Fran Healy is also grasping the thistle of another potential midlife crisis – male pattern baldness – by dyeing his receding hair bright orange. We’ve met in this corner of London because he’s just been having it re-dyed by his preferred hairdresser. Crucial fact-check: what tone are we calling this?
“You’ve been Tango’d!” he says, laughing, Or, Irn Bru. “Or Annie Lennox. But it’s been lovely. It’s like driving a campervan around, people wave at you!” He pulls out his phone and shows me a photo of a postcard handed to him by a “wee old lady” in a New York restaurant. “Your hair is beautiful!” runs the message.
“I get that all the time – it makes people laugh.” Still, he cautions, don’t look too closely, or from above. “I’m like: ‘Don’t put any bright lights behind me!’ I just look like a f**king cotton-bud with a wee face drawn on it. Terrible!”
‘L.A. Times’ is out now