“Very pure”: Fran Healy’s protective relationship with the classic Travis album ‘The Man Who’
“When a record becomes famous,” Travis frontman Fran Healy said in 2009, “The band who makes it gets dragged along the ground behind it, almost like a western movie when the cowboy gets shot off his horse and gets dragged along by it.”
He elaborated, “The horse is the record, and you’re the cowboy, and then at the end of year or however long it lasts, you just see a picture of the horse sitting munching some grass, and the cowboy is just fucked.”
That sounds like a rather gloomy metaphor to make when discussing a major success in one’s career, specifically Travis’s 1999 breakout album The Man Who, but Healy was careful not to blame the pitfalls of sudden fame on the art that led to it. After all, the “horse” in this scenario had no ill intent.
“That’s the strange thing about that album,” he continued, speaking at the time with ten years of hindsight, “It is still very pure to this day; kind of delicate and untouched”.
Of course, when an album goes to number one on the UK charts and includes a pair of top ten singles, the label that put it out isn’t always thrilled to hear that it was a ‘one-off’. That goes for many of your new fans, as well, who want to hear more variations on ‘Driftwood’ and ‘Why Does It Always Rain On Me?’ rather than some sort of push into less heartbroken territory.
The timeline context is a big factor in The Man Who’s sort of weird permanence in the Travis catalogue, as well. When it came out in the spring of 1999, it unintentionally provided a convenient little bridge from the pop era of Radiohead, who were preparing to dislodge themselves from acoustic guitars and balladry altogether, and the imminent arrival of Coldplay, the smoothed-out aughts version of anthemic U2 schmaltz.
Fran Healy and his mates also had a loose connection to the last days of Britpop, sounding like happy acolytes of that scene on their appropriately titled 1997 debut, Good Feeling, only to pull the rug out from everyone with the soulful, feathery wallop of their sophomore effort. There was a lot of ‘next big thing’ talk and plenty more ‘instant classic’ chatter. It was the moment the horse got spooked, and the drag of expectations began.
All things considered, though, maybe partially because Radiohead’s Kid A and Coldplay’s Parachutes took some pressure off of them at the start of the new millennium, Travis came back with a really good follow-up, 2001’s The Invisible Band, which became their biggest record in the States. It went straight back to number one in the UK, as well, and six subsequent albums have reached the top five in their homeland; a point of some pride for a band that’s been at it for over 30 years.
Still, as Healy sort of predicted, there was no recreating the very specific sound and tone of The Man Who. As years passed, though, and the stress of success gave way to more of a general appreciation for that period in time, Healy allowed himself to get at least a little nostalgic.
“The other night, a friend had found some videotape of us in the studio mixing ‘Driftwood’ with [producer] Nigel [Godrich],” Healy said in 2009, concluding, “Little did we know that it would sort of blow up into the stratosphere like it did.”
