Are They Too Nice to Rock Our World?

The name on the Wiltern Theatre marquee is clearly Travis--yet another best-selling British rock band that has had to struggle in this country to duplicate its overseas success.

But something is odd backstage--something that separates this British band from such predecessors as Oasis, the Verve and the Stone Roses. No one in Travis is quarreling . . . or threatening to quit . . . or even grumbling about how slow U.S. rock fans are to pick up on their music.

What gives?

“Meet the nicest band in the U.K.,” Travis’ leader, Fran Healy, says with an exaggerated smile.

“That’s what they call us back in England--but don’t believe it,” he continues, sitting in a dressing room after a late-afternoon sound check. “There were massive newspaper strikes in Great Britain in the ‘80s and journalism changed radically. The papers became more sensationalized. They’ll take one thing about you and exaggerate it.

“We tend to be good-natured and friendly so we end up as the nicest band in Britain. We’re not. At least, I’m not. I can be a real [expletive] sometimes.”

Whatever disclaimer Healy wants to make, there is something refreshing and openhearted about Travis’ music and manner.

In contrast to the aloof rock-star attitude of so many high-profile British rock bands of the last decade, Healy, the band’s singer and songwriter, reaches out to the audience on stage in ways that underscore the thoughtful and uplifting elements in the songs.

Travis’ music doesn’t have the sonic ambition or the aggressively spiritual themes of the early U2, but there are enough similarities between the community-minded Healy and Bono to make you at least toy with the idea of giving Travis the nickname U-Too.

The group’s “All I Want to Do Is Rock” is one of the great rock anthems of recent years, a song that exudes the optimism and desire of U2’s “I Will Follow.” Travis’ “Happy,” also from the group’s 1997 debut album, “Good Feeling,” is as unashamedly joyful as Bruce Springsteen’s “Out in the Street.”

But Travis also has its darker side--especially on its latest album, 1999’s “The Man Who,” with the melancholy undercurrents of “Why Does It Always Rain on Me” and the tender introspection of “As You Are,” which captures the feeling of being outside the mainstream.

These and Travis’ other high points make classic rock themes seem fresh and believable once more. They’ve also made Travis a huge star in Britain, where “The Man Who” was the biggest-selling rock album last year.

None of this, however, has helped Travis crack the U.S. in a big way. The group’s second album has sold only about 135,000 copies since its release here in January, compared to more than 2.2 million in the U.K.

Travis, however, has more than music going for it in its quest to break the U.S. market: a strong work ethic. Unlike the many British bands who spent little time touring in the U.S., Travis has been through Los Angeles three times already this year for shows.

“This band has a real commitment to playing in America, which is a different approach from most U.K. bands,” says David Massey, executive vice president of A&R; for Travis’ label, Epic Records. “Fran Healy is an incredibly focused guy who wants to communicate with people. He’s someone you can bet on for the long run.”

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As Travis plays its warm, engaging music at the Wiltern, you realize how much easier it would have been for them if they had arrived in the U.S. a decade or so earlier--back when such compatible acts as U2 and R.E.M. dominated the marketplace.

Now that the easiest path to rock stardom is to be angry, rude or dumb (or all three), it’s hard to convince fans that it’s OK to like a band that is “achingly sincere” (Rolling Stone), “heartfelt” (the New York Times) and “dreamy” (the Los Angeles Times).

Even most of Travis’ musical favorites are drawn from an earlier era.

“Just start with everyone at ‘The Last Waltz’ [concert]. . . . Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, the Band, Neil Young,” Healy, 27, says when asked about his influences. But Healy would rather talk about individual songs or albums than artists.

“With me, it’s the old story of put your faith in the art, not the artist, because the art won’t let you down,” Healy says.

During the concert that night, he offers an elaborate analogy, with bands, record companies and radio stations as the gunpowder that shoots songs into the sky. In a couple of years, he says, the record company, the band and the radio station may have all gone away, but the memory of the song remains.

“I believe that,” he says backstage. “Great records--just like heroic moments in sports--are like little pieces of magic that stay in your imagination like stars in the sky. Records like Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ or Bob Dylan’s ‘Blood on the Tracks’ are there to inspire us. They are the stars that you use to navigate your life by, and the ones you use to find your way home when you are lost.”

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Healy, as open and relaxed backstage as he is at the microphone, was born in the tiny English town of Stafford, but his parents divorced within a year and his mother took him to Glasgow, where they could be near supportive relatives.

An only child, Healy found comfort in painting and music. He talked his mother into buying him a cheap guitar after he heard Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” when he was about 14. But it wasn’t until later, after hearing Mitchell’s “Blue,” that he began trying to write songs.

The teenager’s interest was so divided between music and art that he ended up joining a band the same day in 1991 that he enrolled in the Glasgow School of Art. The band, Glass Onion, included two future Travis mates, guitarist Andy Dunlop and drummer Neil Primrose.

After two years, Healy found himself thinking more about music than art, so he dropped out of school.

With the addition of bassist Dougie Payne, Glass Onion evolved into Travis, and the band subsequently won a Scottish music contest, beating out more than 600 groups. The victory enabled the band to go into the studio and make a demo, which was played on Radio Scotland.

Niko Bolas, a producer-engineer whose credits include Neil Young’s “Freedom” album, heard the song and was intrigued enough to want to meet the group.

Travis was excited, but the band was unprepared for what happened at that meeting.

“He took us into the studio for four days and told us basically that we were crap,” Healy says now, smiling at the memory of the encounter. “He went around to each of us and told us what we needed to start doing to make people believe our music.

“It threw me because I thought I was doing OK as a writer. I was good at rhyming and at sort of putting words together. But I realized I wasn’t saying anything. He said you’ve got to tell the truth in music because people can tell you are lying. He said to write from experience. The whole thing was like a light coming on in my head.”

The first song Healy then wrote that he felt was worth keeping was “All I Want to Do Is Rock.”

Armed with that and a few other songs, the members of Travis moved to London in the summer of 1996, giving themselves six months to get a record contract. Within a month the band signed to Independiente, a new label with ties to Sony’s Epic label. The band recorded the “Good Feeling” album in four days with producer Steve Lillywhite, whose credits range from U2 and Peter Gabriel to the Pogues and the Dave Matthews Band.

The album got some early interest, but 1996 was the time of Oasis and Blur in England, and it was hard for other bands to attract attention. “Good Feeling” eventually slid down the charts. Undaunted, Travis did hundreds of shows over the next three years, some of them opening for Oasis, whose leader, Noel Gallagher, began championing the quartet.

In America, Epic’s Massey thought Travis had a hit in “All I Want to Do Is Rock,” but the label couldn’t get radio stations interested. “We kept hearing from programmers that the song wasn’t ‘right’ for their market,” Massey says. “All I knew was we had this great record and no one heard it. But we just had to be patient, because we knew this was a band that had staying power. We figured we’d catch ‘em with the second album, and that’s what is starting to happen.”

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It’s a sign of the respect Travis built in the record industry in England that Nigel Godrich agreed to produce the second album. Godrich had just co-produced Radiohead’s “OK Computer,” arguably the most acclaimed British rock album of the ‘90s.

This time, Travis spent months in the studio, and the results were remarkable. The songs showed considerably more poetry and depth, reflecting a far more personal and generally introspective tone. At this year’s Brit Awards, the English equivalent of the Grammys, “The Man Who” was named best album and Travis was named best band.

“Why Does It Always Rain on Me” opened several doors in radio for the band, and Massey believes “Turn,” the next single, will make even greater inroads. The song is about overcoming insecurities and doubts. “I want to live in a world where I belong,” Healy sings at one point.

In the album’s “Slide Show,” Healy returns to the theme of music as a guidepost in our lives. He even includes playful asides to Oasis’ “Wonderwall” and Beck’s “Devil’s Haircut.”

After the tens of thousands who cheer them at festivals back in England, Travis is playing to only about 2,000 at the Wiltern on this stop, but Healy sees the positive side of it. “It’s our biggest [headline] show ever in America,” he says enthusiastically.

“I think there was a lot of great stuff in America in the ‘80s, and it has left this great hole in the music scene,” Healy says when asked about the challenge of building an audience here.

“What you have now is something like Limp Bizkit on one side of the cliff and a lot of pop stuff on the other side. We’re down in the valley and we’re trying to say, ‘Come on down and check us out’ It might take time, but that’s OK. We’re on a mission.”

Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached at robert.hilburn@latimes.com.