11 albums that changed Travis frontman Fran Healy’s life
The albums that changed Fran Healy's life and inspired Travis
As part of the launch of Travis' eighth studio album 'Everything At Once' in 2016, frontman Fran Healy spoke to MusicRadar about the albums changed his life.
Healy moved to Glasgow as a child from Stafford and grew up in the city. He lived in Hamiltonhill and the Wyndford before attending Holyrood Secondary School in the Southside, where he made his first appearance on stage.
He then later enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art after secondary school, where he met the other members of Travis—except for drummer Neil Primrose. The band rose to international fame during the nineties following the release of their second album, The Man Who, and their standout performance at Glastonbury Festival.
Here are the stories behind the 11 albums that changed Fran Healy's life.
TravisGreatest Hits - The Carpenters
"I’ll have to start with the first record I ever bought. I was an eight-year-old kid and I didn’t really know what I was buying. We didn’t have a record player, but I was at The Barras, this market in Glasgow. I had a wee bit of pocket money and I bought this album because I just thought the woman on the front cover of it was really beautiful. I bought it for my mum and it was just a random greatest hits by The Carpenters. I brought it home and we took it to my granddad’s, because he had an old stereogram. When I put it on, it was amazing. Her voice was so rich, and it really touched me, and I listened to it incessantly looking at this picture on the front of this woman’s face, this very beautiful relaxed-looking face. That was my first encounter with an album.”
SpotifyFaith - George Michael
“The next album I remember buying was Faith by George Michael, and I bought it on tape. I was aware of Wham!, but that was a girl’s thing so I didn’t go near it because I was a boy, but then he released the single Faith, and I just loved it. I then bought that album and it just remained on my personal stereo for ages and ages and ages."
SpotifyRock 'N' Roll Greats (Volume Two) - Various Artists
“The next one I can remember getting was a rock ’n’ roll compilation tape that had Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran on it. Again, I listened to it back-to-front, inside-out and every which way. I would have my headphones on or I would have it on my tape recorder and I’d play it and do guitar solos over it with my voice."
AmazonGreen - R.E.M.
“Green is like a record that is transitional. It’s going between the old R.E.M. and this newer later mainstream R.E.M. that would come a little later. Another great thing about that record is it was a door that took me through to their back catalogue. I got into R.E.M. in a massive way and, in a sense, if Travis were really anything, it was about connecting The Band and R.E.M. - I wanted to be in a band that crossed the music of those two.”
Rough Trade RecordsAstral Weaks - Van Morrison
"The singing, the songs and the instrumentation of it were all things I’d never heard before. That record was like a complete closed circuit, like a bubble. You’d just enter it and you’d be in that little world that it created. I think, when he made that album, he was probably at the peak of his songwriting, but choosing it was so random. It was more just the artwork that made me get it, which is why I think album artwork is so important, because it’s always maybe reflective of what’s happening inside.”
SpotifyBlue - Joni Mitchell
At this art course, I met a teacher called Gerry Kelly and he played me a song that he said he’d written, but I found out later that it wasn’t his song! I’m still mates with Gerry, actually. I’d been trying to write a song when Gerry came into the room and said, ‘What are you doing? I wrote this song when I was your age’ and it was a song called Urge For Going. I performed it at the art course on the last day, and everybody was crying at the end, and it was a moment where I was like, ‘Oh, this is cool!’ Anyway, it turned out to be a Joni Mitchell song, and Gerry then gave me her album, Blue. For me, every part of it is like an exercise in reduction. There’s nothing on it: just two instruments and a voice on nearly every song. Unless you’re told that, you don’t even notice. It’s so brilliant. There’s such a fullness to it. I still listen to that record to this day and it’s just been with me forever. Blue was a big eye-opener.”
SpotifyThe Last Waltz - The Band
“After Joni, another big moment was watching the film The Last Waltz. There’s an album that goes with it but, for me, it was more the film. It was The Band’s last gig, and you have everyone on it. You’ve got really disparate acts performing - Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan. That record then opened up the door to Bob Dylan, but it also opened up the door to The Band. I think I was more impressed by them than all of the other artists, bar Joni, who was brilliant."
AmazonBandwagonesque - Teenage Fanclub
“This came just before my art course. The Fannies are, I think, the best band that ever came out of Glasgow in my time. Beautiful people making brilliant music, referencing all the right references. They’re total music heads and they just love music. Again, they’re sponges."
Rough TradeSlanted and Enchanted - Pavement
“At art school, Toby Paterson - who’s now quite a big artist in the art world - came in one day after hearing John Peel, and he’d bought Slanted And Enchanted. No-one had heard anything like Pavement. They were so rough and so deliberately obtuse musically, and totally ironic and super-American."
Norman RecordsDefinitely Maybe - Oasis
“Definitely Maybe signified this moment where I had all of these things going on at the same time. I had Joni Mitchell, I had The Band, I had Oasis and R.E.M. With Oasis, it was the first time where I was like, ‘This is my band! I can totally relate to this big-time.’”
HMVThe Bends - Radiohead
“The Bends is for me, song for song, one of the best albums out there. It was the first time - as I learned later - that they first met Nigel Godrich, who was the assistant engineer alongside the producer, John Leckie."
Spotify