Fran Healy

(Q)-State your name and date, along with place of birth please.
Fran Healy-My name is Francis Healy and my date of birth, July 23,1973. I was born in Stafford, England.

(Q)-That is in Scotland?
Fran Healy-No that’s England.

(Q)-With your music on your disc, “The Invisible Band”, the song is king, meaning that the song and the music, throughout the entire recording, is a priority, first and foremost.

Fran Healy-The idea basically is that bands can let you down. Because bands are people. Music can never let you down. If a song or a piece of art is good and true and honest and is written with no sales consciousness then it will have a much longer life, because the song will never ever let you down. It will never let you down. People will. And I think, that’s the way the album was done. I love songs.

(Q)-Travis has found a voice over the pop music which is so popular in the United Kingdom, through recording and releasing beautifully crafted songs. You’re wonderfully expressive as a songwriter and a vocalist. With Travis success in the United Kingdom, now the focus is on the song and not solely on the public image. Unlike many pop artist’s who rely on their public image for building a career. Thus, the song is King once again in the United Kingdom. Agree?
Fran Healy-No.

(Q)-Why?
Fran Healy-You know something? I wish I could actually say that I agree totally with that. However, right now, the song is not that way. It is not that way at all. We’re among very, very few bands, we’re in a very small room at the moment. We’re surrounded by junk music. We’re surrounded by junk food meals. We’re surrounded by junk culture.
(Q)-In the United Kingdom?
Fran Healy- In Britain and the western world as well man! We’re surrounded by junk culture! So many people in the western world are surrounding by junk culture man.

(Q)-Would you provide an example please?

Fran Healy-I love Starbucks coffee, it’s the best coffee, it tastes so good! The way I see that is, that they’ve got a great recipe for making good coffee and they’ve just covered the world in it. If you take that as an example of the pop music scene right now, Starbucks is the coffee equivalent of say, Elvis Presley. Right? It tastes great because there’s good quality in it, it makes everyone happy. Load and loads of people buy it right?

(Q)-Right.
Fran Healy- Now a days, what you find is like?. take McDonald’s for instance. It started off somewhere in America, some guy made a really great hamburger and it tasted really, really great. They made millions of these McDonald’s all over the world. And that has somehow made…there’s no meat in it (the hamburger) anymore, you don’t get any nutrition anymore, it’s just a bad bun and it may as well be cardboard for a burger. And now a day songs and music is like that because the record industry is making so much money, so much music is made consciously, and if it’s music that is made consciously, it will have no impact on your subconscious and that’s where music has always had it’s impact. How many times have you listened to a song and you’ve been lost for words actually to describe, what is in the heart of the song, that exactly made you cry or made you weep. If you try and put down onto paper, you find it is rather difficult at times now isn’t it?

(Q)-In your opinion, why is that so?
Fran Healy-It’s difficult to describe the color blue.

(Q)-What is the key idea then?
Fran Healy-This is the idea. The song is the currency of the music business that has been forgotten about. It’s like, something changed years ago and people have forgotten about the song. People like myself and a few others like Noel (Noel Gallagher of Oasis) and a few others have said, “Songs remember these things?”.

(Q)-Why?
Fran Healy-If you take a firework and you think of the casing of the firework right? Then you take the warhead of the firework, that’s the song right? That’s this little song, in the warhead, the little sort of cone at the top. And, then there’s the casing, filled and packed with all of that gunpowder. And that gunpowder is the marketing of the band, the radio station, the record companies, it’s the media, all of that stuff packed in there tightly. Then someone lights the firework and it shoots into the night sky and explodes and for miles around everyone can see this beautiful glitter, this massive, big umbrella of colorful light and everyone comes around and sees this and they’re aghast. They’re like, “Oh! My goodness.” And this glitter gradually fades away like the band fades away and the record company fades away because the record company goes bankrupt and the radio station changes their name. All of this stuff disappears. Now, I’m getting to the point, when you look to the sky at the point where the point of this explosion happened, there’s a little star and that star is the song. And the song, like the star, we use these songs, to navigate through life, like sailors do when they’re at sea. Now, you look up there to the sky and there’s all the stars or these songs, to navigate through life. We just used to get that star up there. Now these days, people are lighting off these fireworks and they don’t have any songs, just a big giant explosion. All you see is glare and when that fades away from the sky, there’s nothing left in the sky and that’s the idea you know?

(Q)-Do you want to be invisible and let your songs be your mask? How do you handle the intense publicity that being a key band member in Travis, provides you with, in the United Kingdom, these days?

Fran Healy-You know what? People don’t give us any hassle. We’ve always maintained our privacy. Our record company did some marketing research and to their horror, eighty per cent of the people they surveyed didn’t know what we looked like. It says a lot more about our songs. If you put five pop stars in a lineup and you ask the average person to identify them, then lined up their five songs and asked that same average person if they could identify that song (by listening to the song) with that specific pop star, the fact is most people would get five out of five on the songs and I don’t think many people would be able to identify the pop stars(image).

(Q)-Why?
Fran Healy-The fact is there’s so many pop stars now, there’s just a mass saturation of them, every band looks the same, every band sounds the same, there are very few real stars, real people who up in the sky who we can navigate through. Stars like Muhammad Ali.

(Q)-Noel Gallagher of Oasis told me about eight, ten days ago, what he wants inscribed on his gravestone is, “Noel Gallagher Songwriter”. Now, Noel perhaps didn’t set out to become famous, but nevertheless it occurred. It can happen.

Fran Healy-You can never prepare yourself for that and it hasn’t happened to us thankfully.

(Q)-The perfect instrument is our voice. In concert you share your voice and the band’s music with many different individuals. Do you then reach out and hopefully touch one individual at a time?

Fran Healy-When we go onstage every night we want to play and sing to each and every person in that room. That’s fact that we share as a band.