Interview: Travis bassist Dougie Payne on 'lording it up' on London nights out with Blur's Alex James, what has made the Oasis reunion special and the secret to why his band has never split...
Travis bassist Dougie Payne spoke to Contact Music about the band's upcoming appearance at Alex James' Big Feastival festival, the hedonistic nights the band enjoyed with the Blur rocker in London back in the '90s and why album anniversaries should be celebrated.
Turn, Driftwood, Sing, Re-Offender, Flowers in the Window, Why Does It Always Rain On Me? are just a handful of the great songs Travis have given the world. Hitting the number one spot on the UK Official Albums Chart in 1999 with second album The Man Who, Travis led the next wave of British indie bands that followed the Britpop explosion matching the chart success of the groups they admired such as Oasis, Blur and Pulp.
Now, 10 albums and 30 years on, Travis are enjoying a creative resurgence thanks to their last LP L.A. Times and are constantly adding mew fans thanks to their festival appearances which will see them perform at Blur rocker Alex James' Big Feastival music festival on Sunday (24.08.25).
Contact Music caught up with Travis bassist Dougie Payne to talk about the band partying with Alex back in the '90s, his thoughts on the Oasis reunion tour and the band member who is bringing the "heart and soul" to the concerts, why Travis will always celebrate their iconic albums and why his friendship with singer Fran Healy has kept the band together.
Contact Music: You’re part of a great line-up at Big Feastival, will you guys get to hang out for the weekend and check out the other bands as well as perform?
Dougie Payne:
I would hope so! We're playing on the Saturday. There’s also Alex’s Britpop Orchestra and me and Fran are going to jump in for something so I think we’ve got to go out and hang out in his big barn, that should be quite fun.
Of course if you’re going to hang out in Alex’s barn you’re going to have to have some of his famous cheese…
This all happened because about a year ago, I guess, Fran and I were doing Sunday Brunch, one of those, and Alex was on it. He was showing off his wine, not his cheese. It was his sparkling wine that is brilliantly called Britpop. We just got talking and he was talking about the festival and he said, ‘Do you know what? You guys should come and do it.’ We were like, ‘You know what, that’s a great idea, that’ll be a lot of fun. Hopefully they’ll be lots of music, lots of fun and hopefully some cheese and wine as well.
Have you guys known Alex since the ‘90s?
We’ve known Alex for a long time. We kind of came up a little bit after the Blur guys. It was 1996 when we moved to London. When we were signing on Blur were absolutely at their height so we were hanging out in The Good Mixer hoping to bump into them. Then a few years later we’d had a bit of success and we were suddenly in The Groucho Club and Alex was there and we were all part of that scene so we knew each other from back in the day.
Alex James has hosted The Big Feastival since 2012
That was a huge moment for guitar music in the UK, you must have some great memories of hanging out in The Good Mixer in Camden and The Groucho Club? You must have hung out with great and the good of indie back then?
It’s weird, because for me, personally, it was a bit of a whirlwind. I had just graduated from art school in ’95 and I was just a massive music fan. Everything that was happening was just really exciting just as a fan just watching it on telly and buying the records, seeing Oasis and Blur and Suede and Pulp and all those people do their thing. It was just like, ‘Wow, this is incredible.’
Then in late ’95, early ’96 I joined the band, Fran asked me to join the band and I did. By June ’96 we were living in London and we were signing on and we had housing benefit and suddenly all these people were real and we were rehearsing in The Fortress in Farringdon in the room next to where Suede were and the Manics were on the other side. Suddenly, that world had gone from being, like, fiction to being my life. I was in it. It was utterly bizarre.
Then we got signed in late ’96 and then by ’97 we were supporting Oasis on the Be Here Now tour. Looking back, it seems like it was just a complete whirlwind and it all happened so quickly. It was like going from watching the TV to being in it. It’s kind of bizarre and quite hard to get your head around.
Then in 1999 Travis gave that amazing Glastonbury performance…
Yeah, 1999 was the Glastonbury where it rained during Why Does It Always Rain On Me? and that was when The Man Who started going back up the charts and eventually got to number one. The next year we headlined the Pyramid Stage. In 2000 we headlined the Saturday night and David Bowie was headlining the Sunday night, it was madly fast.
Travis frontman Fran Healy at Glastonbury 1999
Do you have a memory of a great rock ‘n’ roll night out from those times?
We used to call it lording it up at The Groucho Club because we were the new kids on the block. We were slightly overawed and feeling a little bit out of place.
There was one night when there was Damien Hirst, Alex James, Keith Allen and my friend Douglas Gordon, who is an artist from Scotland, and my brother-in-law was there and he’s a massive Clash fan and then Joe Strummer turned up. We were just standing at the bar and Joe and I got talking, we were talking about something really tech-y about Pro Tools or something, it wasn’t very punk. My brother-in-law Sandy couldn’t believe it was Joe Strummer, because he’d grown up with The Clash, they were his favourite band. So he came up and I was like, ‘Joe, this is my brother-in-law.’ And Sandy was kind of like welling up a little bit, he was going, ‘Joe, I’ve got to buy you a whisky.’ And Joe was like, ‘No mate, I’ve got to buy you one.’ It then just turned into one of those great nights where everyone was on tremendous forma and nobody was being a d**k, it was so much fun, and super positive. They were good times.
We’ve been enjoying the rebirth of the ‘90s thanks to the Oasis reunion, did you and the band get to go to any of the shows? I know you are friends with Liam and Noel….
I’ve been too busy! Andy Dunlop's son went to one night at Wembley, but Andy (Travis guitarist) didn’t go. We haven’t seen any of it.
They’ve been dominating not only the summer but everybody’s Instagram feeds, from what I’ve seen it sounds great.
I’m delighted that Bonehead is back, I think that’s great and gives it all a lovely feel to it. Bonehead is kind of the heart and soul of the whole thing.
Liam is singing great, his voice sounds back to its best. It seems to be a very happy thing. It’s good to have them back.
As Travis are long-time friends of Oasis was there every any chance you could have got on the Oasis Live ’25 tour?
I think every other band was trying to get on that tour! But it was all set in place. The whole thing is such a massive behemoth that it’s all set in place. Before they announced anything it was this is what’s going to be happening.
Fran was texting with Noel a little while ago and it was all very friendly and they were having a bit of a laugh in the texts but I’m not going to tell you what they said!
We did the Be Here Now tour and then we did the American tour. We toured with those guys across the States in 2000, that was when Gem [Archer] and Andy [Bell] had just joined the band. That was a great tour. That was a lot of fun. On the first tour we were slightly overawed, they were the biggest pop stars on the planet then and we were kind of like, ‘Wow.’ We were absolutely brand new, we had just released one record. It was all impressive.
On the American tour we hung out properly and it was just a good laugh. They’re the funniest people, super sweet, so funny. They were so generous and so kind to us. I love those guys.
Liam and Noel Gallagher reunited for the Oasis Live '25 tour / Credit: Simon Emmett
Travis isn’t a band that has split up and got back together what do you think has kept you guys together?
I guess it’s probably the fact the four of us were friends before we were in a band together. Fran and I met in 1990. So I think those five years of being friends before we were in a band together that’s the nucleus and the band revolves around that.
I think with a lot of groups it’s the other way round. They form the band and then the relationships are based within that structure. We knew each other before we were in each other’s pockets and I think that gives you a little bit of awareness of each other and an awareness of where each other’s buttons are if you know what I mean; what to push and what not to push. It also makes you a little bit more aware of when you need time apart. It’s counterintuitive but time apart keeps you together.
Obviously when you’re touring a massive hit record around the world you are living in each other’s pockets aren’t you?
Yeah, absolutely. It can get a little claustrophobic. But when you’ve got the basis of being pals in the years before that you can’t take yourselves too seriously. The ego can’t run away because you’ve basically known each other since you were children.
You’ve got to have a bowl of M&M's of every colour rather than just one…
[Laughs]… Yes. Exactly. We don’t make demands.
Your last album L.A Times was very well received last year, you must have been delighted with how that record turned out?
We were very pleased when we came out of the studio. We were like that was good, it felt very positive and it hangs together well as a record. A lot of the songs we’ve been playing live from it like Alive and Raze the Bar feel like they’ve been there forever.
Sometimes the new songs don’t necessarily make friends with the older stuff. They don’t quite get along, they don’t mesh well. But we’ve been playing about half the album, it’s a good record to play live.
Thinking about album number 11?
We are thinking about it. We’re going to go into the studio and see ... We will see what happens.
We’re all obsessed with anniversaries, you’ve got a couple of big anniversaries coming up. Back in 1997 your first record came out and then 1999 was when The Man Who came out which was a phenomenon at the time. Would you guys think about celebrating those LPs with special tours?
I see no problem with doing that. It’s quite interesting to do. We’ve done it. It was meant to be the 20th anniversary of The Invisible Band but because of COVID we had to delay it so it ended up being the 21st anniversary. We did that and it was really interesting to do because with that record there were songs that we had never played live and there were songs that we hadn’t played for 20 years. It was really interesting to go back and re-visit that record because you don’t go back and listen to yourself, well I don’t anyway, I listen to other things. I don’t put on our records for fun when I’m at home.
It was doubly interesting to play that record as a live set and it actually held together pretty well. I was quite surprised because with that record you’ve got Sing, Side and then Flowers In The Window within the first seven songs so you’re getting big songs out of the way. So it was interesting thing to try and make a live show work from that point of view. I really enjoyed it, I loved playing that record so I’m not averse to doing that again with another album.
When you think of the pacing and the tracklisting of The Man Who that would be a great set from start to finish…
Yeah. I think there’s talk with people in Japan or Australia who want us to do that at some point next year. That might already happen, but we shall see.
The Big Feastival takes place between 22 August and 24 August at Alex James' Cotswolds farm. As well as Travis, the line-up also includes Nelly Furtado, Mabel, Faithless, The Wombats, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Rizzle Kicks, Caity Baser and more as well as culinary displays on the Big Kitchen stage.
Head to www.bigfeastival.com for more information and for camping, weekend and day tickets.
