Travis is too busy for an identity crisis

THE music of the Scottish band Travis is a lot of things -- it can be rainy-day reflective, Brit-pop sparkly or yearningly anthem-like -- but it is not generally thought of as tough-guy music. That made it especially amusing last week when the band members jogged to the stage of the Wiltern Theatre in boxing robes while the theme from “Rocky” blared and spotlights strafed the crowd. Once onstage, the grinning rockers held their fists aloft and bounced in place, enjoying the soundtrack and a bit of pop-culture shadowboxing.

Like Rocky Balboa, Travis came out of nowhere and, after weathering a beating, the comeback is under way. The acclaimed band surged to the top of the U.K. scene in 1999 and seemed poised to make the big career jump across the Atlantic, but then watched as others (most notably Coldplay) took that trip for them.

That raises the question: Is Travis a band that can’t be missed, or simply a band that missed its chance?

Backstage at the Wiltern, a few hours before the show, there was no sign that Travis is grappling with an identity crisis or issues of career frustration. Far from it; the major question on the mind of singer Fran Healy was the exact distance between the venue and the nearest Pinkberry. (“I got addicted,” he confided, “in New York.”) Healy was wearing a Greek fisherman’s cap to cover his bed-head hair, and his left arm has more than a dozen wristbands from months of gigs, including the group’s set in March at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.

Healy’s public persona is that of a kind soul and one of the more thoughtful songwriters of his generation, and in person he is both. The 34-year-old is a first-time father -- he and his wife, German photographer Nora Kryst, have a son named Clay who will be 2 in March -- and that seemed to be weighing on him far more heavily than some sour reviews and sales reports for “The Boy With No Name,” Travis’ first full studio album in four years.

“This is the longest I’ve been away from him, out on this tour,” Healy said. “It’s driving me mad. My wife sent me some new video, and I just stared at it and got so upset,” Healy said. “I was thinking, ‘My God, he’s not that infant anymore, that’s gone now.’ You realize that throughout your life these things come and go, these moments. We just don’t die at the end of life and everything stops -- bits of life are constantly leaving you along the way and that’s kind of dying a little at a time. My son, now he’s a different person, like he’s shedding this invisible skin . . . “

Healy is no brooding philosopher -- he’s more like an effervescent poet with a guitar and a Scottish disdain for pretense. The music of Travis may reach at times for the same blood-tremble emotion of Coldplay or even U2, but Healy and his mates in the Glasgow band are quite happy with the anonymity they have off stage and even celebrated it by naming their third album “The Invisible Band.”

Their fifth album, “The Boy With No Name,” came out in May (the title was a reference to little Clay, who wasn’t named until a month after his birth) and at the Wiltern show there was a robust crowd response to the new songs. For Healy, songs such as “Battleships” (about relationships) and “My Eyes” (about his son) sound “more substantial in some way” to his ear than the band’s earlier work. The reviews have been mixed but Healy says he doesn’t read them because, good or bad, they don’t make his job any easier.

“It’s always been as hard as it is,” he said. “When you’re in it and struggling and everything feels like it’s crap, you have to remind yourself that it was like this when you were 16 . . . it usually comes to me in the very dying seconds of despair. That’s when you figure it out. You’ve got to stay at that bus stop and wait for the bus to come. Most people are like, ‘Ach, I’ve been waiting for hours,’ and they walk up to the next stop. And their bus goes past.”

The next Coldplay?

One of the band’s music-industry supporters who attended the Wiltern show looked around, shrugged and said in a resigned voice: “I thought they were going to be the next Coldplay.”

You hear Travis and Coldplay bundled together often in music circles and not just by fans. Not only has Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, referred to himself as a “poor man’s Fran Healy,” but this year he went on a BBC music show and introduced a new Travis single as a song by “the band that invented my band and lots of others.”

You could understand if that sort of flattery brings a smile to Healy’s face -- but you also wouldn’t be surprised if you noticed he was grinning through gritted teeth.

Travis may have set the template, but the band has sold a total of 913,000 albums in the U.S., while Coldplay is now north of 11 million units sold in the all-important market.

Even back in the U.K., Travis has found its old niche filled by others. The group that came out of nowhere to be named the best band of 1999 by NME and Melody Maker now has floated back down to Earth and dealt with reviewers who shrugged or scoffed at its new music. NME, for instance, dismissed the new music and went on to blame Travis for the “impotent aural gruel” of James Blunt, Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody and other examples of today’s “adult-orientated indie” music.

“To me,” Healy says, “the best critics are the kids who come to see the shows.”

Healy was a just a kid when he joined Travis in the autumn of 1991 on the same day he enrolled at Glasgow School of Art. Within two years, he was sure his future was onstage and he walked away from the classroom.

Healy and the band caught the ear of music critics in 1997 with their first album, “Good Feeling,” and its undeniable anthem “All I Want to Do Is Rock.” In 1999, they built on that with the acclaimed album “The Man Who,” which became the bestselling rock release in the U.K. that year. Their 2001 follow-up, “The Invisible Band,” had the joyful, arcing hit “Sing” and the band seemed poised to make the leap across the Atlantic to the all-important U.S. market.

During that fame ramp-up, Healy spoke like a humble servant to song even as he attracted some fairly potent fans. Paul McCartney has praised his work publicly, as has Noel Gallagher of Oasis, and if that weren’t enough to suggest that Healy was channeling some major Beatles mojo, Elton John hailed Healy’s work as “mesmerizing” and compared the 2003 Travis album “12 Memories” to “Revolver.”

The praise hasn’t turned Healy’s head. Backstage last week, the only name dropping he did was a giddy non sequitur: “Hey, I just heard that Dave Grohl used some of our songs at his wedding.”

The show at the Wiltern was marvelously received by the crowd and the highlight was when Healy turned off the P.A. and filled the room with his un-amplified voice on “XXXX.” Later, he remembered he saw Tony Bennett pull the same trick.

“He was my grandfather’s favorite, so I went to see him after my grandfather died. It was amazing. He did that and now it’s stuck in my head.”

It was time for the band’s sound check and to find that elusive Pinkberry order but Healy had one last stream of thoughts on his place in music and music’s place in him.

“There’s something about singing that’s magic,” he said. “I always say you sing because there’s some things you can’t say; you can’t talk everything. There’s something about the emotion of singing, the melody and simplicity of it, the fact that you’ve put the song and yourself out there . . . I just want to make amazing albums. I just want to keep making records we can take on the road and play. I want to just try to be honest and try to find the melody that no one else has found yet. It’s like those mathematicians trying to find that elusive equation that makes everything make sense.”

geoff.boucher@latimes.com