The Travis front man's faint feeling

He may front Travis, the biggest band to come out of Scotland in years, but Fran Healy's no egomaniac, writes STEPHEN DOWLING, just as the group release their third album The Invisible Band.

Fran Healy cigarette smouldering in his hand, says: "I don't think my talent lies in writing the song, I think my talent lies in being fearless in the discovery of a song. You find them, you don't make them. You just make them tangible."

Welcome to the resolutely humble world of Healy, leader of Travis, sensitive songwriting soul in the classic style, and somewhat unwilling rock star.

He is the man whose angelic voice, gleaming guitar chords and unstoppable choruses have made Travis the biggest Scottish export since shortbread in tartan tins. Only, in his eyes, he's none of these things. Healy is merely a vessel - it's the songs doing the driving.

A few million proud owners of Travis' second album, 1999's slow-burning global hit The Man Who, might disagree. They might disagree even more once they hear The Invisible Band, an album that buries any thought of Travis' success being a once-in-a-lifetime achievement.

But for Healy, career-defining success just gets in the way. Nestled in an armchair in his London hotel room, drummer Neil Primrose at his side, Healy sucks on a cigarette, a glint in his eyes and a white Mohican streak running through his hair in one of the most ill-advised haircuts in recent rock history.

Not that unkind remarks in the style press are likely to leave any major bruises. For Healy's way of dealing with Travis' sometimes dizzying accomplishments has been to quietly deflate his own ego.

"Being a songwriter, being in a band, you're diving for pearls," he says, his voice a thick, treacly Glasgow brogue. "You go down, you look around, and the visibility's not clear. So you can pull up something and it's just a rock. You go down and get another one and this can take two years.

"Eventually you've got 12 pearls, a string of pearls and that's the album. You've got to have the courage to keep going down and it gets harder every time."

Third time around, and Travis' sound has taken no radical new turns. Nigel Godrich, Radiohead's co-producer for their last three albums, has again added his icy, ethereal trademark to Healy's fragile voice and simple, soothing melodies.

The Invisible Band may sound like one of the most misguided album titles of all time. But there's a grain of truth in it that goes far beyond the tiny Travis figures (Healy, Primrose, bassist Dougie Payne and guitarist Andy Dunlop) lost amid sun-dappled trees on the sleeve artwork.

Despite Why Does It Always Rain On Me becoming one of the biggest songs of 1999 and 3 1/2 million copies of The Man Who colonising stereos all over the world, three-quarters of Travis could happily walk down the streets of London unmolested.

They may be able to supermarket shop in peace and quite probably never need to worry about where the next pint or rent cheque is coming from (the soon-to-be-married Healy spent much of the band's early career writing tunes on the dole in Glasgow), but The Invisible Band's genesis wasn't entirely untroubled.

A back-breaking slog around the world left little time to enjoy how well things were going back in Britain.

"It was beginning to take its toll," Healy says. "We just finished at the right point. We'd done Britain and started in America a year after Britain, it was almost starting all over again. If we'd stayed in Britain, you're so aware of your popularity. But if you're not there for it ... "

And all the while the constant stream of interviews, radio sessions and all the other commitments that come with playing tours started to grate for this amiable character.

"You're up at 10 o'clock and you talk all day, talk shit - well, it begins to sound like shit because you say the same thing over again.

"When we came back from America I just sat in my house. I couldn't even speak to Nora [his fiancee] - all of our relationships had suffered. It took me until February to finally feel Franny again, which you need to be able to get back to."

It didn't help that by the time the band played their last gig on the tour, at a 5000-seater stadium in Los Angeles, the faithful Godrich was hardly in a supportive mood.

"At the last show at the Universal, we spotted Nigel sitting in the audience grimacing at the new stuff we were doing. He said to me, 'You're really going to have to deconstruct all of these songs'."

Healy's response - controversial with his band-mates - was to take the tour-weary band straight back into the studio.

"I wanted to go back into the studio and everyone was frazzled and wanted to go home, and I said, 'C'mon we've got to go and do this. Dylan did it, Dylan went straight into the studio and recorded Blood On The Tracks - this could be the same thing. We've been on the road for 18 months, we've just got to push it that one little bit.'

"Nigel was like, 'It's not even worth going over this threshold here, if we're not going to make a better record'," Primrose continues. "We were like, 'Of course we will.' The first five days were like torture, he thought we were shite, we thought we were shite, we just couldn't get it together. It was off-kilter."

Healy agrees. He thinks back to last year's visit to local shores, at the height of Travismania.

"When we came down to New Zealand, I had my 27th birthday in New Zealand, I was just wandering around.

"I thought, 'I'm in one of the biggest bands in the world, I should be excited, and I'm just like a zombie, what's all this about?'

"The strange thing is, it's all on this record somewhere, and had we had maybe a month off after coming back from the last American gig and then gone into the studio we'd have made a different album. We'd have had time to relax."

Another 18 months of touring beckons - another year and a half of living with an album and its attendant promotions more than with family and friends. And then?

"We'll do this 18 months and then we'll have a break," says Primrose, already looking forward to it by the look on his face.

But Healy says quickly, to Primrose's despair, "Maybe not even then, that's what I'm thinking."

The songs are back in charge. And Travis are falling into line.

* The Invisible Band entered the New Zealand charts at number five this week.