"We wouldn't be here sitting and talking about Travis if it wasn't for The Beatles," said guitarist Andy Dunlop, speaking by telephone from his home in Liverpool this week. "An important part of any rock musician's learning curve is The Beatles. When you take apart any of their songs, it stands up against anything that's around today and puts a lot of stuff that's around today to shame, still."
"Ode To J. Smith," Travis' sixth album due out in September, stems from the band's involvement in the project. Recording with The Beatles' engineer Geoff Emerick, the musicians were overwhelmed by the ease, speed and result of working the way that the Fab Four worked in the 1960s, said Dunlop.
"There's a certain economy of working with the old recording equipment. You get to make decisions much quicker, and you don't get as many chances at things, because you're working with tapes, not computers."
The album was recorded in Rak Studios in north London in just two weeks in February and March. It was recorded live in the studio on vintage equipment borrowed from the Abbey Road Studios, which makes the album a refreshing departure from its predecessor, last year's "The Boy with No Name," Dunlop said.
"I think what comes with it is the feeling of how we play live. When we go and play concerts, we are a much rockier band than we are on records. It's really upbeat, really rocky.
"'The Boy With No Name' was three years in the studio. There was a lot of tinkering with that record, a lot of polishing that went into it, whereas with this record we wanted to capture the energy of the four of us in a room together playing live."
Travis was formed by Dunlop with his art school friends, guitarist and singer Fran Healy and bassist Dougie Payne, in Glasgow in 1995, when the Britpop craze was still raging.
"It was an exciting time," he said. "Oasis were big and Blur were big. The Britpop thing was quite short-lived, it only lasted a couple of summers here. I think elsewhere people think it lasted a lot longer than it did."
While many musicians complain about the collapse of the record industry, Dunlop is positive. "I think music is an interesting place at the moment because the music industry has fallen apart," he said.
"I think over the last three years the power has been given back to musicians, with the whole MySpace thing and the growth of that. Bands can go out on their own right now.
"The era of independent music is rising again, rather than corporate music. It's not good time if you work for a record label, but it's good time for being in a band."
Travis performs on Wednesday at 8 p.m. at B1 Maximum, located at 11 Ulitsa Ordzhonikidze. Metro Leninsky Prospekt. Tel. 648-6777.
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