*sings* Ooh ooh, oh...
The first song that I remember hearing and singing inside...
you know when you sing a song over and over again
in your head?
And that song was Heart of Glass by Blondie.
When it was at its peak like it when it went to number one,
it was around about the time when I was walking to school,
and I remember singing it in my head.
And it's connected with really, really
traumatic memories for me
because of, you know, going to school for the first time.
And leaving my mum and all these things.
And the thing that goes through my head is the
*sings* la da da, da da da da da
and *sings* ooh, ooh, oh
Those two melodies were like a mantra
going round and round in my head non stop.
And they were like a weird soundtrack to this fear
of, you know, going to school for the first time.
And so began 12 years of absolute 'I'm in prison'.
When I was about 13 or 14 years old,
I got my first acoustic guitar.
The reason I got that guitar was that
I saw Roy Orbison on a
Jonathan Ross show called The Last Resort.
It was a Friday night show,
and Roy Orbison came on and sang Pretty Woman.
This is years before the movie was out.
And it was actually a very random performance.
I met Jonathan Ross, like, I don't know 15 years later,
and I asked him about that night.
He remembered it because they couldn't
find anyone to come on the show.
They were looking through all of the who's in town
and Roy Orbison was playing, I think at the Hammersmith Apollo.
And they got him to come on the show and play.
And had I not seen that, I don't know if I'd be here right now.
I got hypnotised and asked my mum to change my present
at Christmas to the acoustic guitar.
And of course, I tried to play the
*sings* Pretty Woman riff
But I still can't play that.
I went to an art course in Scotland
when I was about 17.
There was a great crowd of guys and girls there
and really good teachers.
A teacher called Gerry Kelly from Glasgow,
who is the best art teacher in the world.
He's kind of like the Pied Piper.
He's a keystone for me.
He'd put on records. And it was Joni Mitchell
was the artist he played and the album was Blue.
It's something about it.
I don't know the honesty of it or the the quietness of it,
and the simplicity of it.
And I thought, I've never heard like music like this before.
I'd never heard songwriting like that before.
It was all very, like blokey and macho
You know, stomping around the stage like Bono,
or strutting about like peacock like Michael Hutchence
or prancing around the stage in a theatrical way like Jim Kerr.
Kicking the air like Jim Kerr!
It was all that up until that point
and then Joni came along and that opened the door
to this other, write about what you're feeling inside
type of, style of songwriting.
That's when I started to look more this way
and want to express my feelings a bit more.
Because there was a lot of things,
you know, I think there's a lot of stuff
you have down underneath that needs to come out.
And I think song, songwriting or poetry or art,
these are ways to frack it out of your system.
So I was going from the schoolboy sort of thing,
which was U2, INXS, Simple Minds
to something a bit more.
I don't know. It just felt a bit more.
It was a four piece band from Athens, Georgia REM.
REM became the template band for me
around about that point
because they had something.
Yeah, they had something more.
They had a little bit more than just...
I liked Michael Stipe's behaviour on stage.
I think he's one of the best frontmen.
It wasn't macho, it was something else.
It had elements of macho, but it wasn't...
but just like salt.
You know, it was a sprinkle of macho,
but there was other stuff going on there.
I mean, you won't really hear that in Travis's music.
But it's there.
The way music sounds right now is because
you don't really have songwriters writing songs anymore
you have producers writing songs, and singers.
When those people write songs,
they're writing from above the neck.
There's nothing coming...
There's no fracking going on.
If it's been written from above the neck,
it'll just tickle your brain and that will be it.
But if it's been written from below the neck,
the hairs on your arms will stand up,
you'll get a very physical response to it.
You'll cry or you'll stop in your tracks,
and you'll pull the car over and you'll be like,
Whoa, what was that?
It's almost like the closest we've got to a real magic spell.
I don't really hear much at the moment
that I'm like, 'Wow, that's moving me.'
But actually, there's an artist from France called Pomme
that I really was into. I still am.
It's all in French, so I don't know what she's saying
but it was definitely coming from below the neck.
You can tell.
This is the thing, it's not the words.
We put words on melody to...
It's like... You know, the mRNA vaccine, right?
They put it in these lipid nanoparticles
to get it into your system.
Lyrics are a lipid nanoparticle.
That's how you get it into your system.
And the music as well.
It's like, it goes in through your ears.
But the real medicine is this invisible thing,
which is the thing that cures you.
That's the thing that goes into your system
and makes your hairs stand on end
and fracks your emotions and brings them up.
Yeah, lyrics are not the point.
The melody's the point and the emotion in the melody.
There's something, there's something else.
There's a tone to it.
And that's the thing that makes people react.
And it's the thing that comes from below the neck.
And it's beyond language.