After having watched Wyndham Wallace follow a Scottish rock band around on their Mexican tour with him trying to discover the "root of his resentment" for one of his least favourite bands, Travis, I'm still not sure if he actually got to the answer he sought even after all his dutiful research. Invited along and accompanying the band for some time, this film directed by Travis front man Fran Healy attempts to address why, despite the great success and chart placings throughout their catalogue and with a very strong fan base worldwide, why do critics for the most part not give Travis more credit as a recording artist or a live act for that matter.
Says Wallace, "There's a nice shot of me early on in the film, standing by the stage, taking a large swig of beer and looking utterly bored". He comments that seeing Travis play a set is likely to become a 2-trip-to-the-bar performance, at which I had to chuckle as the same thought had crossed my own mind even before the narrator made his comment, I would be up at the bar for this band, thought I. I felt the same and so the interest in watching this film grew and my attention fully pivoted toward it.
Frankly, I did know of and about Travis from having lived in the UK at the start of the 2000s, cruising the record shops there, seeing CDs, hearing radio play and I had not hated them, nor disliked them, nor even having been dismissive of them, they simply were not on my radar. Peripheral. Fringe. There is only so much listening time in a day and only so much room on the shelf for a collection. But, perhaps subconsciously, like music echoing around an elevator car, it is just inoffensive sound, pleasant enough, but not sufficiently edgy to get my personal interest piqued, and to be fair this aspect is broached in the narrative. And, that word "inoffensive" came up quite early in the film in the descriptive discussion of the band, recounting other critic's reviews and the like. Is Travis to me dross? No, too strong by far. Is it to me drivel? Possibly. Drippy? Yes, that's more accurate for me. Not in a wholly negative sense, simply as a descriptive, as in dripping sentiment. Neutral, in the same way I have never had much consideration for quite a few other bands: REM, Coldplay, Radiohead, yep, even Radiohead. I would prefer to have to hear 'Teenage Dirtbag' by Wheatus for all eternity than I would 'Creep'. Way it goes. U2 is the same. Generic music for generic listeners. Too big for the bar, remain in your arena seats please, keep the aisles clear. And I was a big U2 fan until 'The (Un)Forgettable Fire'.
This is where I offer up my thesis. It's not the band you dislike Wallace. It may be the fans. The generic, the mainstream, the obedient cookie-cutter fans. Intended or not, most of the males he interviews in the film are very similar in appearance, Mexican versions of a Manhattan stereotype of a mixed metrosexual: short tidy hair, well-groomed, with beard & mustache completing the look. Seemed like almost every guy he spoke to looked the same. This is the radio play audience though. The inoffensive citizenry among us. Easily offended voters? Attendees? Parents with children in earshot. Like that. And there is nothing wrong with that, being that. Someone has to do it... I am just offering an observation that may go to answering Wallace's query. You resent the fans, the preponderance of consumers, the buyers of Travis, the chart propellers. They are not the people who will get into a fight at the bar, not the folks who will heckle a band, who will never puke on the floor.
Not that anyone's tastes are in anyway superior to anyone else's. I like some pretty crazy stuff. I love some really outlandish stuff, even too much for some of my contemporaries to embrace or even listen to once. Not necessarily underground bands either because thousands upon thousands of people like the same bands I do, it's not a proprietary thing. But at the same time it is not always radio-friendly music, not widely digestible for the masses. In hindsight from watching 'Almost Fashionable', I realize I may just prefer extroverted lyrical content in my music, rather than inwardly gazing introspective musings put to music. Socio-political observational commentary rather than the personal exhaling of emotion. Alice Donut over Arctic Monkeys, Fugazi over Franz Ferdinand, Eddie Spaghetti over Ed Sheeran, Luka Bloom over James Blunt... I gave fellow Scot band Frightened Rabbit a chance, but no dice from me, uninterested. I like rock 'n' roll in bars, no children allowed in, and when the band gets too big for the bars, well, time to go see other bands coming up the ranks. Queens of the Stone Age comes to mind. I listen too/see a lot of Swedish bands now I'm based in a large centre, great integrity in the musical creation and real punch too. Action. But the UK almost treads down upon its uncelebrated, non-chart topping acts and there are so many amazing unsung rock & roll bands rolling the roads in Britain. However, surfing station to station on the FM dial reveals nearly nothing but mindless fodder, technically talented artists, but broadcast in such heavy rotation and with such level of exposure, and through the descendancy of reality-TV talent-contest programming, your ears get the urge to purge, to regurgitate the input they are subjected to. Perhaps it is a disdain for people who are able to repeatedly ingest James Blunt's 'Beautiful' over and over and over, sickly sweet Blunt, whose first name I surely thought would replace the word "berk" in Cockney rhyming slang... perhaps it is for those very fans that Wallace misplaces his dislike upon Travis. They are a good band, a great band really. While not carrying on the Glaswegian torch of say Simple Minds, they are nonetheless clearly competent and driven, wise and willing and enjoying their workplace, but simply furrowed into a genre of music that enough critical people with sway in the public sphere tend to shun as uncool or unworthy of their own particular greatness of opinion or affiliation. This too is addressed in the film, but, but the fans and possibly Wallace's absence of appreciation for their taste, for their audio spending, is what needed to be given a little more attention, offered as an outsider of similar mood looking in.
Wallace wraps it up: "By the end I'm far more at ease. I mean, I got swept up by the passion of the audiences, and when you're confronted by that you have to reassess your own feelings... I've spent so long trying to be a critic that I've forgotten how to be a fan".
It was noted, Wallace. This is a good film about rock and roll, about the politics of the rock and roll business, and about image and impressions in rock and roll, or in antithesis, the lack thereof. And it was amusing that 'Almost Fashionable' drew cheekily on the title of Cameron Crowe's 'Almost Famous', another epic tale of rock 'n' roll journalism nearly gone wrong... And honestly, Fran Healy had a fair point throughout the film - and he did win over Wyndham in the end!
Says Wallace, "There's a nice shot of me early on in the film, standing by the stage, taking a large swig of beer and looking utterly bored". He comments that seeing Travis play a set is likely to become a 2-trip-to-the-bar performance, at which I had to chuckle as the same thought had crossed my own mind even before the narrator made his comment, I would be up at the bar for this band, thought I. I felt the same and so the interest in watching this film grew and my attention fully pivoted toward it.
Frankly, I did know of and about Travis from having lived in the UK at the start of the 2000s, cruising the record shops there, seeing CDs, hearing radio play and I had not hated them, nor disliked them, nor even having been dismissive of them, they simply were not on my radar. Peripheral. Fringe. There is only so much listening time in a day and only so much room on the shelf for a collection. But, perhaps subconsciously, like music echoing around an elevator car, it is just inoffensive sound, pleasant enough, but not sufficiently edgy to get my personal interest piqued, and to be fair this aspect is broached in the narrative. And, that word "inoffensive" came up quite early in the film in the descriptive discussion of the band, recounting other critic's reviews and the like. Is Travis to me dross? No, too strong by far. Is it to me drivel? Possibly. Drippy? Yes, that's more accurate for me. Not in a wholly negative sense, simply as a descriptive, as in dripping sentiment. Neutral, in the same way I have never had much consideration for quite a few other bands: REM, Coldplay, Radiohead, yep, even Radiohead. I would prefer to have to hear 'Teenage Dirtbag' by Wheatus for all eternity than I would 'Creep'. Way it goes. U2 is the same. Generic music for generic listeners. Too big for the bar, remain in your arena seats please, keep the aisles clear. And I was a big U2 fan until 'The (Un)Forgettable Fire'.
This is where I offer up my thesis. It's not the band you dislike Wallace. It may be the fans. The generic, the mainstream, the obedient cookie-cutter fans. Intended or not, most of the males he interviews in the film are very similar in appearance, Mexican versions of a Manhattan stereotype of a mixed metrosexual: short tidy hair, well-groomed, with beard & mustache completing the look. Seemed like almost every guy he spoke to looked the same. This is the radio play audience though. The inoffensive citizenry among us. Easily offended voters? Attendees? Parents with children in earshot. Like that. And there is nothing wrong with that, being that. Someone has to do it... I am just offering an observation that may go to answering Wallace's query. You resent the fans, the preponderance of consumers, the buyers of Travis, the chart propellers. They are not the people who will get into a fight at the bar, not the folks who will heckle a band, who will never puke on the floor.
Not that anyone's tastes are in anyway superior to anyone else's. I like some pretty crazy stuff. I love some really outlandish stuff, even too much for some of my contemporaries to embrace or even listen to once. Not necessarily underground bands either because thousands upon thousands of people like the same bands I do, it's not a proprietary thing. But at the same time it is not always radio-friendly music, not widely digestible for the masses. In hindsight from watching 'Almost Fashionable', I realize I may just prefer extroverted lyrical content in my music, rather than inwardly gazing introspective musings put to music. Socio-political observational commentary rather than the personal exhaling of emotion. Alice Donut over Arctic Monkeys, Fugazi over Franz Ferdinand, Eddie Spaghetti over Ed Sheeran, Luka Bloom over James Blunt... I gave fellow Scot band Frightened Rabbit a chance, but no dice from me, uninterested. I like rock 'n' roll in bars, no children allowed in, and when the band gets too big for the bars, well, time to go see other bands coming up the ranks. Queens of the Stone Age comes to mind. I listen too/see a lot of Swedish bands now I'm based in a large centre, great integrity in the musical creation and real punch too. Action. But the UK almost treads down upon its uncelebrated, non-chart topping acts and there are so many amazing unsung rock & roll bands rolling the roads in Britain. However, surfing station to station on the FM dial reveals nearly nothing but mindless fodder, technically talented artists, but broadcast in such heavy rotation and with such level of exposure, and through the descendancy of reality-TV talent-contest programming, your ears get the urge to purge, to regurgitate the input they are subjected to. Perhaps it is a disdain for people who are able to repeatedly ingest James Blunt's 'Beautiful' over and over and over, sickly sweet Blunt, whose first name I surely thought would replace the word "berk" in Cockney rhyming slang... perhaps it is for those very fans that Wallace misplaces his dislike upon Travis. They are a good band, a great band really. While not carrying on the Glaswegian torch of say Simple Minds, they are nonetheless clearly competent and driven, wise and willing and enjoying their workplace, but simply furrowed into a genre of music that enough critical people with sway in the public sphere tend to shun as uncool or unworthy of their own particular greatness of opinion or affiliation. This too is addressed in the film, but, but the fans and possibly Wallace's absence of appreciation for their taste, for their audio spending, is what needed to be given a little more attention, offered as an outsider of similar mood looking in.
Wallace wraps it up: "By the end I'm far more at ease. I mean, I got swept up by the passion of the audiences, and when you're confronted by that you have to reassess your own feelings... I've spent so long trying to be a critic that I've forgotten how to be a fan".
It was noted, Wallace. This is a good film about rock and roll, about the politics of the rock and roll business, and about image and impressions in rock and roll, or in antithesis, the lack thereof. And it was amusing that 'Almost Fashionable' drew cheekily on the title of Cameron Crowe's 'Almost Famous', another epic tale of rock 'n' roll journalism nearly gone wrong... And honestly, Fran Healy had a fair point throughout the film - and he did win over Wyndham in the end!
- Left Hand Drive,
