Travis - "The Greatest Band in the World:" At Least That's What The Script Says
Sep 15 '00 (Updated Jan 17 '01)
The Bottom Line You'll probably love them, but you might hate yourself in the morning.
British indie* bands want to be rock stars and they don’t care who knows it. They unashamedly construct anthemic songs with sing-along choruses and catchy guitar riffs, and nearly always feature incredibly charismatic lead singers who embrace their audiences (at least initially) rather than push them away and moan about the horrors of being famous. This is what simultaneously attracts and discourages me about the whole Brit indie/Brit pop scene. While the music is often fantastic to listen to and the personalities involved fascinating (Liam and Noel Gallagher, Jarvis C0-cker (note to Epinions language filter - this is the man's name, grandma, not a naughty word), Damon Albarn, etc. etc. - hubba, hubba), the forces behind it often seem too confident, too careful about scripting every last move perfectly in order to achieve the proper measure of popular acclaim. And sadly, this is what was going through my mind as I watched an otherwise excellent Travis show at Clutch Cargo’s in Pontiac, Michigan on Thursday night.
Travis are the most recent holders of the “Greatest Band in the World” title bestowed several times a year by the fickle British music press. The list of “Greatest Band in the World”s since I started paying attention includes Suede, Blur, Pulp, Elastica, Radiohead, The Verve, and, of course, Oasis. Of these bands, Travis most resembles Oasis in their sound (which nevertheless is much more folky than that of the feisty Gallagher and Co.), except that they strive to be polished and likeable rather than gritty and confrontational. Maybe this is because Travis are Scottish – a people who in my experience are unfailingly charming, Begbie from Trainspotting and Mike Myers caricatures notwithstanding.
Travis were just as polished and likeable in person as they are on their records, The Man Who and Good Feeling. In fact, sometimes I wondered if I weren’t just listening to the records cranked up a notch in a room with a couple thousand strangers (not far off the mark, in some cases – my height-blessed companion pointed out from his clear view of the stage that the piano and some of the guitar solos were on tape). Travis played all the best tracks from their albums, nearly note-for-note, added some relatively recent compositions, and even included a crowd-pleasing cover of “Take a Load Off Annie,” all prefaced by frontman Fran Healy’s brand of disarming awshucks stage patter. The crowd loved it, and they obviously loved Travis dearly – I couldn’t believe how much of the somewhat frattish audience knew all the words and were pumping their fists to this melodic rock music, which is about as far from Limp Bizkit rawk nonsense as you can get.
The show was frontloaded with great stuff. Take, for example, Healy’s intro to my favorite Travis song, “Writing to Reach You,” early in the set. Healy explained that he had written it after being dumped by his girlfriend, sitting in the coldest flat ever on Christmas day, then “confessed” that he had nicked the chords from Oasis’ “Wonderwall.” It was so sweet it had me grinning from ear-to-ear even before they launched into the song. And a few songs later came everyone’s favorite Travis song, “Why Does It Always Rain on Me?,” the anthem for a legion of moody adolescents and adults. Sheer bliss for the audience, complete with the most note- and word-perfect “You sing!” audience rendition I’ve ever heard at a show. If things could have stopped there I would have been one of the happiest campers ever to grace Pontiac (think about it - the Lions haven’t won a Super Bowl, ever, so what else do the folks have to be happy about it?).
But, in the end, it was all too well-scripted for me to abandon myself completely to the good vibes in the room (damn this pesky critical brain of mine). As the show went on, I realized I had been suckered. Each Healy intro (some of which must have lasted more than five minutes) had the same endearing, confessional quality, but rang false. By the time he brought out a Shel Silverstein book, read a poem, and confessed that he prefers poems to books because he’s mildly dyslexic, I realized, “Hey, he’s making these same confessions every night!” Now I’m sure this sounds blatantly obvious (“Well, duh, c-option!") to those of you who see big-time rock acts on a regular basis, but for someone used to ramshackle club shows, it was a bitter realization. From then on, I was distracted, looking for something, anything, which would give some indication that this show was a little different from the one they’d played the night before or the one they’d play the next night.
I didn’t get it. Even when Healy came out for his solo acoustic spotlight encore number, and had to start over after the first chorus, it still seemed like something he was reading off the setlist (“Fluff first chorus, tell audience you’re going to start again”), and that he’d done it a million times before.
Maybe I’m just being a spoilsport. After all, everyone around me (except my companion, my soul mate, who’s even more hypercritical than me) was having a great time, and the Pontiac night was filled with the whoops of joy that come from getting a good dose of rock and roll medicine. But I left the show not whooping but somewhat saddened, because even though musically Travis is a worthy heir to “The Greatest Band in the World” mantle, they’re utterly lacking in the spontaneity which marks true rock and roll.
* I should explain that British indie and American indie are two separate things. American indie is an aesthetic, describing bands who make music for independent record labels which is often more experimental (or at least less by-the-numbers) than most Top 40 music. British indie usually refers to a certain kind of guitar rock – you’d probably call it “alternative” if that term still had a shred of meaning here in the U.S.
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Epinions.com ID:
c-option
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Member: Christine
Location: Ann Arbor, MI
Reviews written: 36
Trusted by: 64 members
About Me:
Serving up chronic dissatisfaction since 1973.
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