Travis’s Dougie Payne on the band’s new beer, life on the road — and 5 things only a Glastonbury headliner knows

Number one albums, global tours and Glastonbury festival headline sets — there aren’t many thingsScottish rock band Travis haven’t achieved over the course of their near-30 year career. Except, that is, putting their name to a beer of their own.

Idolised by The Killers and paving the way for Coldplay, we caught up with Travis bass player Dougie Payne in the middle of the band’s ongoing UK tour in support of latest album, L. A. Times.

It’s a soulful album documenting the haves-and-have-nots of tinsel town among other themes, and its love letter to a long-lost drinking haunt, called Raze The Bar, acts as inspiration for the band’s collaboration of the same name with the brewers at London’s Signature Brew.

The 4.8% abv Raze The Bar lager — crisp with a lemon zest finish — joins the “beer discography” of the brewery that includes team ups with everyone from Mastodon to Hot Chip, and goes on sale this Friday, December 13th.

But it’s a far gentler brew that Dougie is enjoying — a nice warm coffee — as we sit down with him backstage in Leeds to discuss beer, a long career in the music industry, and the secret insights that only a Glastonbury headliner can reveal…

Shortlist: Hello Dougie! How are you today?

Dougie Payne: I’m in glamorous Leeds right now. We just had a show last night in London, a charity event for the Glasgow Hospice—a fundraiser and auction. Then we jumped straight into the tour bus and drove up to Leeds. We got here around seven o'clock at night, so the crew was up early, loading in. We had a little lie-in, and now we're in the Academy, which is a venue we've played probably about four times. It's a good spot.

SL: Are you in the backstage, green room area?

DP: I’m in a very empty dressing room, and the backstage here is a bit of a maze. I mean, these are the boring things about being in a band—entering a venue with your bags and going “I don’t know where to go”, wandering around the building randomly for about an hour.

SL: So, what's in your cup? We’re guessing it’s not Signature Brew just yet.

DP: Oh, it's just coffee for now. We don't drink before shows. I might have one beer, maybe half a beer, before we go on just to take the edge off. But that's about it.

SL: Let’s talk about the beer then! How did the Signature Brew collaboration come about?

DP: It started because of the song Raze the Bar from our new album L.A. Times. It’s a song about a bar, the lyrics mention a bar, so rather than deny that, we thought we'd lean into it.

We first worked with the Campbeltown Springbank Distillery on a Travis whiskey—it's a beautiful whiskey, I think about 28 years old. That came first, and then we thought, why not do whiskey and beer? So the Signature Brew people came up, we went to their brewery, and they were great guys—super enthusiastic about what they do and so knowledgeable. We had no idea how these things worked, but it was fantastic to go around, just to learn a bit about the process, and learn a bit about the complexities of flavour, and all these things that go into it that you don’t think about. And we thought it would be a great idea to have both a whiskey and a beer for Raze the Bar.

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SL: Did you get a say in what the beer would be like, or even the design of the can?

DP: Yeah, we did, we talked at length about what the beer would be like. When Travis first got together we used to rehearse above a pub (there’s a lot of pubs in our history!) called the Horseshoe Bar in Glasgow. Neil, our drummer, worked in the bar, and there was a little empty room that had been a studio of some description. And Davey the manager, he said “you know, you can use that room.”

So we would load in the gear, up these windy stairs, and go and play all day and get hot and sweaty, and then come down. We were on the dole at the time, but Neil was working at the pub. So we didn't have a lot of money, but we could maybe afford a pint afterwards, sometimes one each! It was always a pint of Tennent’s that we would have — a classic, crispy, cold, fizzy lager. A good point of Tennent’s is as good as it gets. I mean, people kind of think, “Oh, really?”, but it's fantastic. Everybody sold it. Like, in Italy it would be like Moretti is here.

SL: It's still your go to then, Tennent’s?

DP: Well, it is, actually, because it's not too strong. It's not like a Furstenberg or something like that, where you have two pints and you can't walk. It's nice and calm.

When we were talking to the Signature Brew guys were like, “Could we make it a little bit like that and like what you guys do?” Because they have these complex flavour notes, and they were like, “Yeah, we could do it a little bit like that. But what if we have a little citrus kind of zing?” It's slightly cloudy, it's got a slight kind of texture, slight opacity, which is not like Tennent’s. So it's its own thing, but it's kind of inspired by those early days of us together.

SL: And how about the design for the can? Were you involved with that?

DP: There were a lot of options for what the can was going to look like, and we went through lots of different versions of it. Signature Brew have their signature identity, visual identity with the Red Cross and the kind of labels. So those were two elements that kind of had to be in it. But then we tried a few graphic things. But then we realized that actually the album cover itself, it looked great. When we saw the mockups it was slightly weird and kind of like, “Oh!” . It's like when you were wee reading the back of the cereal box. It's one of those record covers that’s got a lot to it and it’s pretty overwhelming, you can ponder over it. I think it looks great, I'm really happy with it.

SL: So what's on the Travis rider these days?

DP: We have no particularly weird demands. There’s a nice bottle of red wine and a nice bottle of white wine for aftershow, some cold beer, and some healthy snacks. You know, not too many crisps, because, you know we’ve been at this a long time and have to look after ourselves! Lots of fizzy water. Nothing peculiar! We did go through a phase of insisting on having socks, because that's a terrible moment when you lose all your socks, but that seems to have stopped. When you come to venues, sometimes there's just, like, so much stuff, and it all goes to waste. It was beginning to feel a bit gross. So we've really cut it right down to what we actually need and everything that's not used we take onto the bus, and that will kind of keep us going for longer journeys. But yeah the waste could be a bit sickening sometimes, so we've trimmed it right back.

SL: How do you prepare for a tour now?

DP: At the moment, we're kind of so in the middle of it that I'm trying to think back to how we prepared. First off, I decide what I'm going to wear, and it's always exactly the same thing, and it’s been the same for about 10 years! So I get multiples of whatever I want to wear.

We don't rehearse for long — in all the rehearsal rooms, you would see other bands rehearsing for like, two months. It's just like, “What are you doing?” We tend to rehearse for about a week. You want it to feel alive, you know, for it to feel kind of exciting to you. And if you knock the shit out of it, sometimes certain songs can get a bit deadened. So we generally will run through the new stuff just to get used to it, and work out how we're going to do certain things if there's a new record. With the old stuff, we just bash through it a couple of times in the last couple of days. Then we just generally get on the bus and then we're off.

SL: We saw you with The Killers at the O2 in London, and it felt more like a headline slot than a support slot, the way Travis went at it. We know you’re mates with The Killers, but is there still that kind of sense of, “Come on, guys, let's show them how it’s done”?

DP: 100 percent! Fran [Healey, Travis frontman] and Brandon [Flowers, The Killers’ frontman] are very close, and they've been pals for a long time. We've known those guys for nearly 20 years, and they're great, lovely, lovely people, and they are a great band to tour with. But when Fran was texting Brandon he said, “Oh my god, this is going to be great, so great to be supporting you”. And Brandon was like, “Yeah! Man, so I'm excited about it”. And then Fran just went, “You do understand we are going to be trying to blow you off the stage”. And Brandon said, “I have no doubt about that”. So it was, it was a great tour!

We actually quite really like supporting — you've got your 45 minutes, it's really condensed you just go out give it both barrels. Super intense. It's that challenge, “Can we make this feel like a co-headline?” It's always been like that, even when we were supporting Oasis on the Be Here Now tour, and then later on in America, that was always the thing. We have to try to top all these guys. You want to be on stages with the best and go toe-to-toe with them. When we supported R.E.M in South America it was the same. You want to be at that level. It’s almost aspirational, which is strange after all this time.

SL: Your latest album L.A. Times has been really well received. How does the band feel about it?

DP: It seems to have gone down so well. The record was one of those slightly magic records that came together in the studio. It just seemed, not effortless, but it just seemed to happen, you know? The songs were great. When we went into the studio, everything we did and everything Tony Hoffer the producer did was amazing. Just seemed to elevate the songs and make them take off. It was a great recording session. I think people can feel that in this record. It’s reminiscent of The Man Who a little bit in how it was made. People just respond to that energy, because recording, it's not just about recording the noises, it's about recording what's going on between you, capturing the magic. I think it seems to have an emotional resonance with people, songs like Gaslight and Raze The Bar. It seems to have gone down really well on radio, which is still very important to us because we’re analog guys! So the fact that they've been hammering Gaslight in particular, on the radio, that’s just great. It means that the songs get a chance to live and breathe. And crucially, at the moment, of course, we're really loving playing the new stuff live.

SL: Do you have any favourites in the live set?

DP: I really love Alive. I really love playing that. I love playing Raze The Bar. Gaslight is a lot of fun. And all these songs, they seem to have made friends with the old songs. Sometimes you make a record, and you feel like you're trying to shoehorn in new stuff, to kind of fit in with the existing stuff that obviously people want to hear. But these ones, they seem to just slot it in really nicely. So we're playing quite a lot off the new record.

SL: Travis has enjoyed a long and uninterrupted career. You're still together, the same gang for decades, you still seem friends. Lots of people in bands end up hating each other's guts after being this long in the business. What's held Travis together?

DP: Well, it's a really interesting question. It is quite unusual. We've been a band for 28 years — so nearly 30 years it's been the same four guys. Nobody left, nobody split, nobody has ever been chucked out. No exploding drummers! It's been the same four guys for that long, over the course of 10 albums.

I mean, 1000s of shows, hundreds of countries — it's a lot. The other night, we were trying to think of other bands that have maintained the same original lineup, that have never split up. And we couldn't really think of one apart from, maybe Coldplay, who came around a little bit after us. So it's a strange thing.

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I think my pet theory is that we've been a band for 28 years, but we've been friends for 34 years. We all met in 1990. Fran and I met in a pre-artschool course in a life drawing class, and we just made each other laugh. That was the thing, that we just bonded. Instantly we were on the train back to my house to hang out, and we had the guitars out. Andy [Dunlop, guitarist] and I met on my first day at art school. Neil and I met first actually — we worked in a shoe shop together. So in terms of the four of us, we all knew each other independently, and we were all pals. We all kind of came together because we liked each other

That five years or so before it was the four of us in the band, that's the nucleus of this thing, and the band orbits around that. Most of the time, it's the other way around— the band is the center that brings people together, and the relationships orbit that. That can easily spin out of control, because of the egos, making money and building success or whatever. But when you build the kind of core relationships that you've had since you were 17, that's the thing that kind of holds everything in orbit.

SL: That makes total sense — friends before business, right? We can’t not ask then… What do you make of the Oasis reunion? Do you think they'll hold it together?

DP: Ha! I think they'll be all right. I think they'll get through it. I mean, Noel said a good thing the other day in an interview where he said, you know, we're too old for any of that shit to get in the way. This is a lap of honour for the band. And I think, you know what? That's just about the right way to look at it. We had such a great time with that band on the UK tours and the American tours that we did with them. They’re both terrific people, great people, hilarious, like so funny, so smart. And really sweet, really lovely people. I'm very fond of both those guys.

Like for anybody of that kind of generation, when you were in your late teens, early 20s, and Oasis came out, it was like a bomb going off, in a good way. That first record is still an incredible piece of work. It's going to be intriguing to see how the shows go, see what songs they play. I mean I would kind of like it, if it was the classic line-up — Bonehead, Guigsy. But, you know, whatever — with Andy Bell, it'll be great. It will be a lot of fun.

SL: Lots of musicians these days are struggling to make money solely from their music — take Lily Allen and Kate Nash recently both turning to adult platforms like OnlyFans for example. Lots of the criticism is levelled at streaming services, and the low royalty rate they pay out. How do you feel about the state of the industry today, compared to, say, when The Man Who came out?

It’s changed. It's unrecognisable from what it was. But the thing is, technology and music have always been inextricably linked, from the birth of rock and roll, right back to wax cylinders.

But the technological revolution of the last 25 years has fundamentally changed the fabric of the world. It is a different world. The technological advancements of the second half of the 20th century were improving life in the real world. It was recognisable — you could say “Oh, that's a better car, that's a faster plane.” For the whole of the 20th century, it was a logical progression.

Technology now has actually created a different model. It's unrecognisable especially to my generation who are not digital natives. But everybody's struggling with it. It's kind of like the Wild West. Nobody really knows what the rules are. Streaming services are getting away with what they can get away with, because nobody knows the rules. So, yeah, the remuneration for artists is ridiculous. It's ridiculously small.

But it's still such early days. It's only been 10, 15 years, something like that since streaming took off. It’s brand new still, really. We're still working out what the rules should be and what is fair, and, of course, the people that are in charge of it, it’s just for rampant capitalism. It's ‘end of days’ capitalism. Just take everything you can, while you can.

Things will change, but how that change is going to be made manifest? I'm not sure. The music industry has always taken advantage of artists. The history of pop music is just a litany of artists and writers being ripped off. Every single story of every single band, they've been ripped off at some point — even the fucking Beatles! And that's just what the industry does to artists, because artists don't think like that. So it's just another layer of another example of that.

But the thing that will never change is live music. That's what really matters. Going to see shows, people buying tickets, a band is going to actually be playing. That's where music is alive. That's where it exists. And that's why, you know, after nearly 30 years, we're still getting up on stage, getting sweaty and connecting with the crowd. You know, it's about connection. That's what music's there for, to make people feel not alone, understood. That will never change.

The kind of bigger thing, more than streaming services, is these juggernaut tours that are making literally billions of dollars, billions of dollars. They're sucking up all the money that would go into smaller venues, middle sized bands, grassroots stuff. All that money that people would spend on those musical things goes to these juggernauts. And it's not like going to a gig — it's like going to Disneyland. All that huge amount of revenue, it somehow has to get siphoned back into supporting young artists, supporting new bands, supporting small venues. The people that I'm talking about know who I'm talking about, ha!

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5 Things Only a Glastonbury Headliner Knows

1. It’s terrifying…

It's terrifying when you are standing at the side of the stage, you feel like you’re going over the top of the trenches.

It was more so even the year that we headlined, as it was the last year before they put the super secure fence around Worthy Farm. So, though there were 150,000 tickets sold or whatever, there were another 50,000 people that just snuck in. It was bonkers. When you looked out, it was like a medieval city — endless people, endless to the horizon.

We were standing at the side of the stage during the Pet Shop Boys who were on before us, and they had fire breathers and dancers and all the pointed hats and all the kind of bells and whistles. We were like, “...Holy shit!” They were great. They were amazing. But we were thinking, “Jesus Christ. This is just the four of us wearing fucking T-shirts”. So that got us extremely nervous. So we're waiting to go, our partners at the time, were all standing with us, and we went into our little huddle before we were going on, and they all started crying!

2. …But that quickly changes to pure joy

We were so nervous. But then we went up and the feeling, the change from that kind of terror to the utter elation of being on that stage, feeling that volume coming back at you and realising, “Oh, this is going all right!” That's the biggest change of emotion in the shortest space of time you'll ever feel. I mean, I don't care who you are, I don't care! I saw it happen to Elton John when I was watching his headline set on the telly. He was amazing. I thought it was fantastic, one of the best headliners I've ever seen. But I saw his face change — he came on, and he was nervous! Then you just saw that, a couple of songs in, he was like, holy shit this is amazing. Yeah, absolutely amazing.

3. The weather is part of the magic

It's all about the weather. Our Glastonbury history is intrinsically linked to the weather from the 1999 set when it rained while we were playing Why Does it Always Rain on Me. That was our breakthrough moment, getting into the public consciousness. And that leads me to number four, which is…

4. You never know how Well it's actually gone

We played that 1999 set and came off stage thinking it was terrible. “Oh, my God! We were shit!” And we didn’t know actually, it was great. It was an amazing moment. I mean, we came off thinking “thank God, nobody's ever going to see that, they're never going to show that on the telly.” And when we got home it was all over the telly! “Oh, Travis made it rain”, and all that! When you're up there you're in an alternate universe. That show was so good that we eventually released it as a live album!

If you're up there headlining, don't lose heart if you feel like it's going badly. I mean, Radiohead’s amazing 1997 headline performance. They came off stage thinking it was the worst gig of their lives, because everything went wrong. The sound was wrong. They couldn't hear themselves, Thom Yorke couldn’t hear his voice. Everything was going wrong, it was pissing with rain. But it's one of the great performances! So if you ever get up there, just dig in and you'll be alright.

5. ALWAYS meet your heroes

The best thing about it is that you get to watch it all, side of stage. You can go anywhere you like, you can meet as many bands as you like, and you can meet your heroes. Always meet your heroes. That's the lesson: Always, meet your heroes. You can hang out with McCartney, it's the best.

We kind of hung out with Paul a little bit. We were standing in the middle of the field watching the band in 2003, I was in floods of tears. There’s something about that guy, he's magic. He played the song Here Today, the song about Lennon. And, I mean, Andy had to hold me up. I was just like, fucking helpless. And then we went backstage, and there he was. He's like, “Come in! Have a margherita!” And we’re like, this is the greatest. It’s as good as it looks, excellent.

6. BONUS TIP: It’s always worth trying to blag it

One year Franny and I drove down to Glastonbury, we didn’t have tickets, we didn't have wristbands. We just drove down just to see what would happen. Classic kind of, you know, well…let's blag it! We had two cases of pink champagne in the boot, and used it to blag our way through security — it was like in golf, The Masters, having the green jacket. We were just kind of giving people bottles of champagne, then they would give us a wristband, and then another wristband, then we’d hit another security check, give over another bottle which would get another wristband like, “Oh, it's you guys”. Eventually we got to park Fran’s car right behind the Pyramid Stage! Absolutely amazing.

Image Credit: Per Ole Hagen/Redferns/ Getty Images