Travis - The Boy With No Name

Scottish band Travis have a new album, will this a be return to the form of their first album?

One thing that I do like about this album is the cover art. It reminds me of New York or Chicago in the 1920’s. Which is a brilliant thing.

I’d love to have been a gangster back then. I’d have been called Bobby ‘Two-Guns’, and obviously I would’ve had two guns to shoot my gangster enemies with. I also would’ve had two gangster molls. The first one would be proper bang on, I’d keep her behind closed doors though so nobody knew about her, and give her a good seeing to after I’d collected protection money from the local greaseball grocery store and paid off the cops. My second moll would be some sort of cripple with a serious disfigurement and speech impediment. I’d drive around in my gangster van, with her in the back, in a cage. The public would think I was a gangster with a heart, whilst my enemies would fear me and think I was a lunatic for going out with a handicapped.

Obviously I wouldn’t kiss her or anything like, in case I got the AIDS, and after doing my rounds I’d put her in a kennel or such like in my back yard whilst I went to bed with moll number one. I can just see it now, pulling up at the local butcher to pick up my protection money with mong moll in tow, “Hey Mr. Two-Guns, I’ve got some raw liver for your girl”. Brilliant.

Anyway, I digress.

I have a soft spot for Travis. Even though they’ve never actually made any music that I like for about 8 years. The fond memory I have is from when they had their first album out and they “Blackflowered” Oasis at the Arena on the “Be Here Now” tour.

Since then it’s been pie fights on Top of the Pops, the video with the press-ups, the video with the giant egg, and the video with a car in it (I think). Fuck knows, it’s all been fairly middle-of-the-road crap.

So it’s safe to say that I wasn’t entirely optimistic about listening to this. Travis are the type of band that people who don’t even like music listen to. They’ve become a horrible, horrible, horrible, abject corporate beast, whose songs are safe enough to be played on local radio and populist enough for buskers to earn a few quid off, in between “Wonderwall” and “House of the Rising Sun”.

But I’m not one to judge……..honestly. I was more than happy to give this a chance, but only because of “Tied To The 90’s”, “More Than Us” and “Happy”.

To be fair, I did try and like this album, I honestly did. But fuck me, it’s just fucking depraved. You know them horrible computer drums that David Gray used in “Babylon” and Damien Rice used in his re-working of “Cannonball”? Well, they’re only using the same PC for the song called “Big Chair”. What sort of name is that anyway? Is it about Ronnie Corbett?

They’ve got a song called “Battleships” as well, which I thought might be decent, but it’s got nothing to do with bombing F3 and G4 (if only). It’s just rubbish.

This whole album is just the most nauseous nonsense out of all of the nauseous nonsense they’ve produced in recent times. It’s what housewives will iron to, it’s what hideously boring couples will fall in love to, it’s what drab couples will listen to when they go for drives on Sunday afternoons because sex has become too monotonous.

In fact, maybe this album is brilliant, it’s going to save the relationships of the criminally mundane, it’s going to give wankers something to tap their steering wheel to when they’re stuck in traffic, it’s going to help mother put creases in little Johnny’s school shirts.

But, when I thought it couldn’t have got any worse, and after really giving it a chance, there’s a duet with K.T. Tunstall, the Queen of Lesbos. Honestly, is there any need? And the sound of it, approaching my mind like a radio-friendly juggernaut, is the most terrifying noise I’ve heard since, well, we’ve all heard our parents “at it”, haven’t we?

So there you have it. Travis return, with more heartless, soulless, routine banality.

If I really was a gangster, I’d get all of Travis, all of those couples, all of those business men, all of those ironing mothers, up against a wall, and get my crippled, handicapped moll to gun them down.

And you know what, if she did, I’d even kiss her in public. Because, unlike Travis, I do have a heart.


The album is out on the 7th of May. Here is Travis' "More Than Us"....