Earlier this year, Travis debuted a new single “Gaslight”, and announced their tenth studio album, L.A. Times, which was released on 12 July 2024. The album was written by Fran Healy in his studio on the edge of Skid Row, Los Angeles.  The cover of the album is a photograph of the band in Los Angeles taken by Stefan Ruiz, who also took photographs for the covers of previous albums The Man Who, The Invisible Band and The Boy with No Name. Travis also performed with The Killers on their seventeen date Ireland and UK tour in mid-2024.

MINI-BIOGRAPHY: Travis are a Scottish alternative rock band formed at Glasgow’ School of Art in the1990’s, composed of Fran Healy (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Dougie Payne (bass guitar, backing vocals), Andy Dunlop (lead guitar, banjo, backing vocals) and Neil Primrose (drums, percussion). 

The band released their debut album, Good Feeling (1997) and toured as support to Oasis in both the UK and USA around that time, with Noel Gallagher becoming an outspoken fan.

The band gained greater success with their second album, The Man Who (1999), which spent nine weeks at number one on the UK Albums Chart. The Man Who was certified 9 times platinum, representing sales of over 2.7 million in the UK alone.

Following this success, the band released their third album, The Invisible Band (2001), selling quadruple platinum and debuting at number one on the UK Albums Chart, spending a total of four weeks at the top spot. The album featuring such songs as “Sing“, “Side” and the McCartneyesque “Flowers in the Window“.

The band’s subsequent discography has included studio albums 12 Memories (2003), The Boy with No Name (2007), Ode to J. Smith (2008), Where You Stand (2013), Everything at Once (2016), 10 Songs (2020) and this year’s ‘L.A Times’.

Travis have twice been awarded best band and best album at the Brit Awards, the NME Artist of the Year award and in 2016 were honored at the Scottish Music Awards for their outstanding contribution to music, while at the prestigious Ivor Novello Awards, Travis took home the Best Songwriter(s) and Best Contemporary Song Awards.

The band are widely recognised by the media as having paved the way for other bands such as Coldplay and Keane to go on to achieve worldwide success throughout the 2000’s. In the lead up to their debut album, Keane supported Travis on their UK tour in 2004.

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Travis’s breakthrough year, in 2019, the band released two albums simultaneously: Live at Glastonbury ’99, plus an expanded edition of ‘The Man Who’.

Travis released a fifth studio album, The Boy with No Name, on 7 May 2007. Nigel Godrich was the album’s executive producer, while Mike Hedges and Brian Eno were also involved. The video for hit song ‘Closer’ from the album, featured a comedic lead role from actor and friend of the band, Ben Stiller.

Travis’s June 2016 tour of Mexico formed the backdrop for Almost Fashionable: A Film About Travis, a documentary directed by Healy. The film stars Wyndham Wallace, a music journalist and acquaintance of Healy’s in Berlin, who was invited to travel with Travis to Mexico because he had previously expressed his distaste for the band. The film had its premiere in 2018 at the 72nd Edinburgh International Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award. The documentary has also become something of a love letter from the band to their devoted worldwide fan base.

In June 2007, Travis participated in BBC Radio 2‘s project to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. All the album’s tracks were re-recorded by contemporary artists, supervised by the original engineer, Geoff Emerick, using the same four-track studio equipment. Travis contributed a rendition of “Lovely Rita“. The band wanted to be as faithful to the original as possible, even to the extent of recording the guitars in the stairwell of Abbey Road Studios to recreate the acoustics. A dream also came true for Travis when Paul McCartney played bass on one of Fran Healy’s solo album songs.