The New Cue #383 May 24: Travis' Fran Healy, Bnny, Vicky Farewell, Roxanne de Bastion, Paul Weller, Bill Mackay, Lankum, Amyl And The Sniffers
'Wee man, go and sing your song, it’s on the karaoke machine'
Good morning!
Welcome to your regular Friday fix of The New Cue, except there’s nothing regular about it, this content is otherworldly, in a sane world everyone would be talking about it, people would be stopping us in the street to show us their New Cue tattoos and some hardcore fans would have one of our faces inked onto their own faces but one fan wasn’t happy because he tried to get Niall’s face put on his face but he didn’t realise how big Niall’s head was and Niall’s face didn’t fit. It just looked weird.
But it’s not a sane world is it? Which is why you need to settle down, take a breath, and come and spend some time with your buddies at The New Cue. Don’t really use the world ‘buddies’ but think we’ve just about gotten away with it there. Today we’ve got the lovely Fran Healy telling us about the making of a Travis classic, two mind-blowers selections courtesy of Vicky Farewell and Bnny and all the new music recommendations you could possibly want, courtesy of your hosts. Here’s this week’s playlist:
And for the Apple Music posse.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
The Story Behind The Song
How we birthed a classic
Why Does It Always Rain On Me? by Travis, 1999
Shockingly, the second album by Scottish indie-rock titans Travis turns 25 today. Propelled by its yearning, acoustic singalongs, The Man Who was the album that made Fran Healy & co. huge. Chief amongst its hits was Why Does It Always Rain On Me?, one of those songs that was, for a spell around its release, properly unavoidable. A few weeks ago, Fran hopped on Zoom with Niall to look back at its creation and chart the track’s slow rise to being absolutely jeffin’ massive…
Hello Fran. I can’t believe it’s 25 years since The Man Who.
Is it 25 years?! Fuck, it is. Oh my god. It’s really strange. I’ve always been very sentimental around songs and the power of music, that thing that it does to you. It’s probably got something to do with physics, something really elemental. I was listening to I Remember by Molly Drake, Nick Drake’s mother, she’s talking about her husband possibly and at the end of it I had tears running down my face. There’s so much of the song that makes me well up and one of the biggest things is that she’s no longer here and yet just on the other side of that speaker, which is the microphone, she’s just sitting there looking out the window and singing that song but 70 years ago. So we’re here 25 years later that just flipped by, but it’s a time machine.
I’m sure you’ve never discussed the making of your little-known song Why Does It Always Rain On Me? before.
Never, this is the first time.
Great. It’s got a curious story to it, hasn’t it? I remember it as the flagship single for The Man Who, but it was actually the third single from The Man Who.
Third single and it was never really going to be a single. I had to have this discussion with Andy MacDonald [Travis’ label boss] because it just wasn’t the obvious single at the time. Everyone was thinking Writing To Reach You and Driftwood, ‘these are big songs!’, so we put Writing To Reach You out first and it did OK, then Driftwood came out and did a bit better and then it was the matter of the third single. I remember sitting in Andy’s office and my argument was, ‘It’s summer, it’s Britain, it’s gonna rain, Wimbledon is gonna be on, let’s pitch it to Wimbledon’. We were desperate! Eventually, Andy was like, ‘Great, we’ll do it’ and we had to do an edit because it’s quite a long song on the album so we shortened it. We sent Dylan, our plugger, off to all the radio stations with it and then Wimbledon came and it didn’t rain, we were like, ‘We’re fucked!’.
But we played Glastonbury and it did rain and it changed the whole course of our lives forever. The following year, everyone knew it. We headlined Glastonbury the next year! That’s how massive that song got, it was bonkers. It’s one of those songs that hit a nerve and you never know when that’s going to happen. Everyone in the music business likes to be a bit arrogant and say, ‘Well, I knew’ but you never know.
Do you think part of the magic of the song was that you weren’t thinking of it or treating it like it was going to be the big single? It’s got such a gentle, slow sway to it…
Maybe. When it came out as a single, something, it’s like a cosmic wind of luck, it blows on it, it blows on you, and everyone else doesn’t get it but that year was us. When it happens, you realise if you stop and think, ‘This doesn’t happen often’.
What’s it like being inside something like that?
That whole summer was strange. It’s a bit superstitious. We brought the album out and it did OK, went to Number 9 and then started to slip back down the chart. In April or May, posters for the V Festivals started to pop up and we were playing it. I remember seeing the poster and it said, ‘22nd August Weston Park’, the Stafford venue. I was born in Stafford and at the time I lived at 22A Weston Park in Crouch End, right? I was like, ‘That’s a bit weird, creepy and strange’. When we eventually played that show on the 22nd August, that was the day our album had gone from Number 30 and started to climb back up the charts and it got to Number One that day, when we played Weston Park near to where I was born. Really spooky stuff.
When it got big like that, you’re very aware of it, it’s like birds are landing on your shoulders and shit, it’s a bit Disney! The album was getting somewhere and that song just hit the mark with the public and took everyone by surprise, and then it got absolutely hammered and probably got overplayed on the radio!
Yeah, it was everywhere…
It’s funny now because it’s not our biggest song. Our biggest song is Sing, or our most-played song rather. I think Why Does It Always Rain On Me? is our second most played song.
When did you write it?
It was written in 1997 in two bits. It was written in January, the first part of which was in Israel. I went there to go somewhere sunny and it rained and I sat in the room miserable and wrote that little bit, “Why does it always rain on me?”, to cheer myself up. I thought, ‘That’s quite good’, but it sounded like a verse, it didn’t sound like a chorus. Three months later I wrote the, ‘I can’t sleep tonight’ bit and I was like, ‘Well that definitely sounds like a verse’ and I remembered I’d written something that might click with it and went through my brain and found it and stuck it on the end. It was never a slam dunk. Driftwood, we were like, ‘This is mega, this is massive!’. But this one took a while to poke its way out of the shell.
Where’s the weirdest place you’ve heard it?
When we went back to the Horseshoe Bar in Glasgow. That’s where we rehearsed. It’s this huge bar that everyone drinks in, whether you’re an accountant, or an architect, a binman or a busman, 17 years old and still at school, taking your tie off and putting it in your pocket, it’s that kind of bar. A great bar. We’d gone back to it showing someone – it might have been Q Magazine – where we used to rehearse and we were coming back down and we were coming through the second floor and every night they have karaoke there and the manager was like, ‘Wee man, go and sing your song, it’s on the karaoke machine’. I’m like, ‘Really?’. He was like, ‘Go on!’, so he opens up the karaoke machine in the middle of the day and all the old ladies would come in for their lunch cos it was a cheap, good bargain lunch, so you’d get the purple rinse brigade in. I sung Why Does It Always Rain On Me? and at the end of it, I put the mic down and I was walking through the chairs towards the band and this wee woman reached out and she was like, ‘Son, you’re awfully good at that, that sounded exactly like it does on the radio’. I was like, ‘Thanks a lot!’.
Cheers Fran!
You’re welcome!
ND
Travis’ tenth album LA. Times is out in July. Here’s the latest single from it, Raze The Bar, featuring guest spots from Chris Martin and Brandon Flowers:
An Album To Blow Your Mind #1
Bnny picks experimental rock crew’s fifth
Last month Bnny – aka Chicago singer-songwriter Jessica Viscius – released her excellent and slightly downbeat new record One Million Love Songs. Had a break-up and looking for a cross between jagged indie-rock and alt-country to soundtrack the heartbreak? Dive right in:
That’s The New Cue’s Chris Catchpole on the cover, by the way. Here’s Jessica on why she finally fell hard for Blonde Redhead’s 2000 fifth album…
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