Travis, the multi-award-winning Scottish band, tonight arrive at The Halls in Wolverhampton. Supporting their latest album, ‘L.A Times’, released in the summer, to an eager crowd of a mixture of old fans and new. They must be new as they wouldn’t be old enough to be able to have seen their initial rise to fame. Singer, Fran Healy sporting a shocking orange hair colour, and oversize glasses, looking like a weird Harry Potter, knows how to get an audience going, and doesn’t waste any time. With a nicely weighted set of obviously the new material and the more well-known and classic Travis songs, like the second up ‘Driftwood’, which sets up the audience for a sing along, not the last of the night either. The newer stuff held up well especially, ‘Naked In New York City’ and ‘Raze The Bar’, which is about a now closed New York bar that was frequented by most of the bands and musicians that were playing the clubs and bars at the time.

Yes, we got all the big hits, ‘Sing’, ‘Turn’, ‘Flowers in the Window’, and a nice cover of ‘Baby One More Time’, which we didn’t see coming, and left the crowd in The Halls happy to go into the miserable rainy Midlands night, singing, “Why Does It Always Rain On Me?” …or us/them, get it?

Photos by Geoff Griffe
Review by Jenny Griffe