Making their mark

Hot off a 19-month world tour, Fran Healy, Dougie Payne, Andy Dunlop and Neil Primrose arrived at Ocean Way studios on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles high in confidence and with a stack of musical ideas in their locker.

They were working with the same producer, Nigel Godrich, and staying at Chateau Marmont, while also in town at the same time were friends such as the comedian Adam Buxton, Jason Falkner of Jellyfish and Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy.

What the band hadn’t bargained for, Payne recalls 20 years on, was Godrich rejecting almost everything they offered up.

“It sounds such a lovely, smooth record, kind of effortless, but actually it was quite a tricky one to make,” says the bassist, now 49. “I think Nigel had had a tough time making Kid A with Radiohead so he was in a kind of interesting place, quite different from when we worked with him on The Man Who. He was quite tough on us.

“We’d spent a lot of time in the preceding year working on new stuff and working up arrangements to ensure we were ready to go into the studio but everything we played Nigel would go ‘No, don’t like it’ or ‘I like the song but I don’t like the arrangement’. It ended up after the first week with me and Franny sitting out in the car park of Ocean Way going, ‘He hates us, he thinks the songs are rubbish, he’s going to walk. What are we going to do?’”

Fortunately in the second week, things began to gel. Payne remembers: “We scrapped all the arrangements that we had and we actually went to a shop called Black Market Music and bought a whole load of weird instruments, little beat boxes and drone generators, strange little keyboards and started playing around with them, then we started working from the foundations up with the songs.

“If you listen to the reissue of the album there’s this sound like a tanpura, almost like an Indian drone, that keeps popping up throughout the record. We set it up in the middle of the room and put a mic on it and it just comes in and out, it was almost like the atmosphere it created there. And then Nigel just got into his Nigel frame of mind because we had cheered him up a bit.

“Again it became similar to what happened with The Man Who, which is our pop sensibilities – we’re three-minute pop songwriters, all about melody – and his left-field leanings, it just throws us into a more interesting place.” Gradually through experimentation the likes of The Humpty Dumpty Love Song, Side and Sing began to “really coalesce”.

Payne recalls: “The backwards tubular bells at the start of Sing, that was the moment when we were like, ‘Oh, we’re onto something’. Nigel had been getting Andy to play certain notes on the tubular bells and he’d been recording them on back-to-back tape, and he turned the tape round and we went in and that was the intro then the song started and (we thought) ‘This is interesting, this is sounding quite magnetic’. Then it all flowed from there and we ended up having a good time in the studio as well, leaning into Nigel’s experiments like building a drum kit out of cardboard boxes for Flowers in the Window and that kind of thing.”

The album’s title refers to how the band felt they were perceived at the time. Twenty years later, the bassist says they were actually quite happy that their songs were better known than their creators.

“We liked it,” he says. “Even coming back to the first album, Good Feeling, the whole mantra was ‘it’s the songs first’. It was never about us as individuals or us as pop stars, it was purely about the songs.

“With The Man Who we were all over the place but we could walk down the street completely unmolested, we were completely unrecognisable, and that was how we liked it. The irony was with The Invisible Band it then made Fran really quite a visible presence and I think he then found that quite difficult to deal with.”

The Invisible Band 20th anniversary edition is out now. Travis play at O2 Academy Leeds on May 11, 2022. travisonline.com