Dougie Payne of Travis interview: ‘The crowd being there is what it’s all about’

When we last chatted in 2018, Travis bassist Dougie Payne suggested that one of the reasons the band has lasted so long is that its members tend to take a break from seeing each other in between projects.

This time around, of course, that break was enforced for Dougie, singer Fran Healy, guitarist Andy Dunlop and drummer Neil Primrose.

Speaking to the Cambridge Independent from a very rainy Glasgow, Dougie, 49, says: “One of the weird things that’s kind of happened over the period that lockdown was really kicking in was that because Fran is living in LA now, and has been for a good few years, we were just off the road, never seeing each other...

“And actually we started having reasonably regular Zoom meetings, just the four of us, just to catch up, see what was going on... This was all instigated by the fact that Zoom had become such a big thing over lockdown and it became more feasible.

“So that was quite a strange little by-product of the whole thing. That was nice; I think maybe we actually started to miss each other a bit!”

Did the band make any music together via Zoom? “We did a lot of recording of sessions and stuff for radio and TV,” says Dougie, who also started making sculptures again for the first time since art school during lockdown, as well as home schooling his children and trying to improve his piano playing.

“So it was quite a learning curve – suddenly I had to become an expert in editing and filming things, and editing video and sending big files. It was a bit like retraining basically. We did a lot of sessions because we had finished the record, 10 Songs, just before lockdown happened, and then put it out in October [2020].

“So we didn’t get a chance to tour it at all, and we didn’t get a chance to do much in the way of promo and all that stuff, going to radio stations... We did a lot of recording remotely and sending files to each other, putting it all together and doing little videos for that.

“Then we started writing together, sending each other bits of music and just seeing what we could squeeze out of those little bits, and putting things together. There’s been lots of that going on.”

These forays into remote songwriting may well find their way onto a new album at some point. In the meantime, another area of focus for the band – which originally formed with a slightly different line-up in 1990 – is the 20th anniversary deluxe edition of its multi-platinum album, The Invisible Band, which was released last Friday (December 3).

It features the original album remastered by Grammy Award-winning engineer Emily Lazar, all the original B-sides and a selection of completely unreleased demos, live sessions and alternate takes.

A special limited-edition box set features the material across two CDs and two 180-gram heavyweight, ultra-clear vinyl LPs. The Invisible Band in Concert tour will cross North America and the United Kingdom in April/May next year, including a date at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on Tuesday, May 10.

This marks the first time the album will be played in full. “We’re going to spend the rest of this year writing and trying to put things together, and then when we get together – probably to do The Invisible Band tour at the start of next year we’ll see what we’ve got,” says Dougie, “and hopefully we’ll be in the studio recording some new stuff, maybe before we start the tour, or maybe after. We’ll see how we get on.”

Despite Fran living in Los Angeles, the group recently managed to get together to do a gig in Barcelona. “Fran came over to do some bits and pieces and we had this show that had been booked in yonks ago,” explains Dougie, “and then it got postponed and postponed and postponed – and then while Fran was in Europe, we thought, ‘Well, let’s try and see if this can work’.

“We managed to get all our visas and all the paperwork sorted and managed to get over there and did this little show in a theatre. It was a small show, no bells and whistles, no laptops, no keyboard player and no computers and lights, or any of that.

“It was just the four of us with hired gear, hired amps – not even our own guitars – and it was brilliant. We thought, ‘This is a great way to do it, it’s so simple’ and because we’ve been doing it for so long we can just turn up. We didn’t rehearse even and we hadn’t played for 18 months. We just went and played a bunch of stuff we hadn’t played for a long time and it was so much fun.”

Dougie adds: “The only thing you have to remember is how to play standing up! Because we were all sitting at our desks and our laptops playing sitting down, and then suddenly, you’re like ‘Oh, the fretboard’s quite a long way away!’”

The musician notes that he enjoys performing live and touring when he and his three mates are doing it, but that he doesn’t miss it when they’re not. “I like the occasion of a live show,” he says, “I like the audience obviously; the crowd being there is what it’s all about, but when you’re not doing it, you’re just not doing it.

“When you’re on tour, the show is the main focus of the day, every day, and the other bits are just the logistics that go around it, and when you’re not doing that you’re doing other things.”

Included on the new deluxe edition of The Invisible Band are a number of rarities including an acoustic version of The Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun and Swing, a previously unheard early working version of Sing, one of Travis’s best-loved songs.

“It’s funny because it was a B-side session with banjos and Fran had this song Swing,” remembers Dougie. “I said, ‘Come on Fran, you can’t call it Swing – people will think keys in the bowl!’ He was like, ‘What do you mean?’ and I was like, ‘Well, you know, swinging?’

“Fran sometimes had that really sweet innocence and he was like, ‘I don’t know what that is’ so I explained it to him. But as it happened he’d been half singing ‘swing’ and half singing ‘sing’ as we were going through it, so it just became Sing. So that was a lucky escape, I think.”

Dougie continues: “It’s a big song for us and more importantly it’s a big song for people and it’s part of the soundtrack to their lives. People have it at their weddings or at important moments in their life and that’s what songs are there for. That’s all they’re there for.

“It’s a nice moment in the set; traditionally we open the set with that one, which obviously we’ll have to do when we play The Invisible Band in full. People seem to really respond to that song because I think it’s quite an open-hearted, generous song... And it’s almost like a command – people want to sing and it’s almost like giving them permission when you’re in a room together.”

The unforgettable ‘food fight’ video for Sing was shot in the same Los Angeles mansion where another great music video – November Rain by Guns ‘n’ Roses – was filmed. “We’d recorded the album in LA and then it was decided that that was going to be the single,” recalls Dougie.

“Then [directors] Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who did [2006 film] Little Miss Sunshine, came up with the idea of the food fight and we spent three days in very, very smelly circumstances, covered in cream and fish, octopus – it was extremely funny. But actually the most fun thing was trying to recreate the food fight for Top of the Pops, that was really enjoyable.”

Dougie says of The Invisible Band: “It’s a great record, it’s an interesting record, and it’s a darker record than perhaps the singles would suggest, because you’ve got Flowers in the Window, you’ve got Sing, you’ve got Side, which is quite rock-y, but there are some really interesting, dark moments on it.

“It’s quite schizophrenic in a way; it’s got Dear Diary and Last Train... and Nigel [Godrich, producer] did a great job of making it sonically really interesting. It’s definitely got an atmosphere to it but it was a difficult one to make, initially.

“But it was surrounded by lots and lots of fun: being in LA, hanging out with our friends Jason Falkner and [rock band] Remy Zero and going to Hollywood parties and all of that stuff. So I look back on that time with real fondness. It was a really good time, and I think the record has that in it but also has that weird, dark underbelly that LA has.”

Dougie adds that The Invisible Band was the band’s “biggest record” Stateside, and it’s there that the tour is due to start in April. The band’s Cambridge gig will be the first date of its UK tour.

Travis will be performing The Invisible Band in its entirety – along with tunes from 2020’s 10 Songs and other hits from its extensive back catalogue – at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on Tuesday, May 10, 2022. For more information, visit cornex.co.uk. For more on Travis, and the deluxe edition of The Invisible Band, go to travisonline.com.

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