46 Entertainment An interview with Travis
THE HERALD FRIDAY JANUARY 6 2017
2016 SAW Glasgow rockers
Travis return with their eighth studio album, ‘Everything at Once’, which landed at number five in the UK charts. Bass player Dougie Payne reminisced on their phenomenal career with interviewer Karen Anne Overton before the New Year and she has kindly shared the conversation with The Herald this week. It must be great ending the year
with three big gigs. Is there any one you’re particularly looking forward to?
It’s always just brilliant to play
live. We’ve done about 50 shows this year, which isn’t bad, but we would have liked to have done more. We’ve not played Sheffield for a while so it’s exciting to be going back there; Liverpool is brilliant because it’s where Andy [Dunlop – guitarist] lives and his whole family is there; and Hydro in Glasgow is an amazing way to end the year. We’ve never played there before and it’s a great venue… In fact, the only time I’ve been there before is for Mister Tumble‘s Circus with my kids, so this will be a different experience! It’s just going to be a really nice
little run of festive shows and we may even indulge ourselves with some balloons and confetti. Glasgow has an incredibly rich
and vibrant music scene; do you think that shaped Travis as a band?
Funnily enough, someone asked
me recently how being Scottish affected us, and I said ‘I don’t really feel Scottish, I feel Glaswegian’. It’s a peculiar thing because Glasgow has produced so many bands over the years, a ridiculous amount considering it’s a fairly small city, but people just want to make stuff here. I think the Art School is central to it, and loads of bands, including us, have emerged from there. So, I’m not sure why it’s so creative, but lots of people where I live are either Turner Prize winners or people in bands. Can you remember your first gig in Glasgow? It was at the Art School funnily
enough. I’d only been in the band for about a month and we’d been rehearsing furiously above the Horse Shoe pub. We played in the Vic bar, which is like the student union, and the audience comprised of all our pals and families. I’m sure we were pretty ramshackle, but it was brilliant and an amazing way to lose my ‘gig virginity’. You recorded ‘Everything at
Once’ in Berlin – another city with a deep-rooted musical history. Was that a creative or practical decision? It was both, actually. At the end
of the previous record, ‘Where You Stand’, we went to Hansa in Berlin just to record B-sides because the producer Mike Ilbert’s studio was there, and it went so well that a
couple of the tracks ended up on the actual record. We knew instinctively it was a place that just worked for us and when it came to doing the new record, we just decided to do it all at Hansa. Berlin is amazing and has a
very singular atmosphere. Strangely dark, slightly oppressive but also very creative... it’s like a living museum where all the ghosts are in the walls and you’re only ever a few handshakes away from history. I’m also a bit of a Bowie-obsessive, so I got to live out a few fantasies like using the keyboards they used on Low. You also made a film to go along
with the record. How did that come about? It was a giant undertaking
because when you make a record there’s about 10 people involved, but there was 150 needed for making the movie. Franny [Healy – lead singer] is king of the blag. He can get people to do anything and pulled in all these favours, so we had all these amazing people who make proper movies and we were just four guys from Glasgow in a cardboard kingdom. Have you got plans to go in the studio this year? We’ve already started writing
again. We’ve got a trip to Japan at the start of the year and then hope to be back in the studio by late spring/early summer.
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