Festivals all over the continent were defined by crowds singing along to the likes of Why Does It Always Rain On Me and Driftwood, while the albums from which those songs came, 1999’s The Man Who and 2001’s The Invisible Band, sold almost four million copies between them.
In the pre-Coldplay world, Travis were kings.
A few more albums followed, then – suddenly – nothing.
The group who’d named their third album The Invisible Band, because they felt their songs were famous, not them, disappeared without fanfare.
“We toured the last record, An Ode To J Smith, for two years, and then all went our separate ways,” explains Travis frontman Fran Healy.
“We did it so we could hang out with our families and our kids.”
He points out that since he, Andy Dunlop and Neil Primrose formed the band in 1990 (bassist Dougie Payne joined in 1994), they’d spent virtually every day together.
“It’s like you become a quarter of yourself, or take on a quarter of the other three’s personalities,” he recalls.
“These past two-and-a-half years, we all caught up with ourselves, so when we did come back together, we needed to get to know each other again.
“We had to spend time catching up with the people we hadn’t been able to become when we were in the band together.”
A lot’s changed since An Ode To J Smith.
Healy and his family moved to Berlin, and all four band members are now proud parents.
For Healy, much of the break was spent doing nothing but looking after his seven-year-old son, Clay, “being a taxi service”.
He did release a solo album in 2010 called Wreckorder and performed a short tour to go with it.
“I had the songs and I knew they wouldn’t go on a Travis album,” he says of the venture.
Dunlop, meanwhile, used his time to learn about classical music and musical theory, Primrose continued to race cars (“he just loves driving,” says Healy, adding that the band’s drummer would get a job as a UPS driver if the vans were fast enough), while Payne looked after his kids and travelled back and forth from Scotland to New York while his wife, actress Kelly Macdonald, filmed the gangster epic Boardwalk Empire.
“None of us saw each other in the time off. We’ve spent so much time together, it’s OK not to. I mean, we’re married to each other, but we’re also married to real people, that we can kiss and hold hands with and stuff,” adds Healy, smiling.
He says they didn’t really sit down to talk about taking a break – it just seemed a natural step.
When it came to writing what would become Where We Stand, they started rather unconventionally.
“You know that thing where you draw the head of someone on a piece of paper, fold it over, and pass it on to someone else and they have to draw the next part of the body without looking at what you’ve done?” he asks.
“Well, that’s sort of what we did for the album.”
On all their previous albums, Healy, a self-confessed benevolent dictator, would write and record demos of all the tracks, and then take them to the rest of the band to flesh out and add their parts. But he didn’t want to do that anymore.
They tried a new method, in which one of them would record 10 minutes of music, then the next person would go in and record something to go alongside it, while the third would go in and record, this time not able to hear what the first person had done. The fourth member would then go in and record, only able to hear what the third person had put down.
Healy admits they ended up with a lot of “garbage”, but they did take two songs from it, Where You Stand’s closing pair Boxes and The Big Screen. More importantly, it got them working in new ways.
While so much has changed since Travis withdrew from the spotlight, Healy reckons some things are exactly the same.
“It feels like it did in 1996, when we were coming to London for the first time to write songs, at the height of Britpop,” he says. “We’d written in quite a solitary place, conserving energy and we were ready to go.
“It’s a bit like that now. We’ve recharged, refuelled, and we’re ready to go again.”
Travis are emerging from the shadows raring to hit that Britpop stage once again.
Travis’ seventh album, Where You Stand, was released on August 19.
