For many music fans, Travis occupies a malign place in recent history. The band is a crucial link between Oasis and Coldplay, joining the unselfconscious schlock of Britpop to its narcoleptic, eye-gougingly inoffensive successor. But taken on its own terms, Travis’s sap approaches sublimity—in addition to mocking Britney Spears and making one of the most (I’m guessing unintentionally) disturbing videos of, like, ever, Travis wrote a few of the all-time great wussified rock songs. “Why Does it Always Rain On Me?” still instantly comes to mind whenever it y’know, rains on me, and “Turn” has an epic, swinging-for-the-fences quality that makes it an exercise in earnestness rather than Coldplay-style self-debasement.
Enough justification for a six-night run at Joe’s Pub, the most ridiculously (some would say uncomfortably) swank rock venue in town? Meh. Probably. Travis frontman Fran Healy and lead guitarist Andy Dunlop are used to playing festivals back in Europe, so the intimacy of Joe’s Pub provided the chance to see a couple of rock stars work a crowd of a couple hundred rather than a couple hundred thousand. Which they were pretty adept at doing: Healy’s operatic, even Bono-like voice works well with the kind of simple, acoustic riffs around which most Travis tunes are constructed; the bare, even folksy quality of a song like “Driftwood” was more apparent here than it’s probably ever been. Healy also seized on the show’s intimate format in giving the back story to just about every song in the Travis catalogue (basically if you’re a huge Travis fan, this would have been the greatest night of your fucking life). This usually wears thin, especially on a Tuesday night. But a couple stories were interesting: like did you know that Healy deliberately copped the chords to “Writing to Reach You” from “Wonderwall?” Or that he was inspired to write “Flowers in the Window” after watching his bassist struggle with a drunken case of the dry heaves? Well now you know.
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