Inside the Darling Harbour Theatre Sydney, the lights dim and a familiar hush settles over the audience. There’s a calm anticipation in the room tonight, the kind that comes with songs people have carried for decades. Travis will take the stage to celebrate The Man Who in full. Fun facts: the band’s name traces back to Travis Henderson, Harry Dean Stanton’s wandering figure in Paris, Texas, while The Man Who quietly borrows its title from Oliver Sacks’ book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
Josh Pyke opens the night, stepping out alone with songs that have long soundtracked Australian summers and quieter moments alike. His set leans into clarity and craft rather than spectacle, reminding the room why his catalogue continues to resonate. A great storyteller, he regales the crowd with stories about his children who he says preferred to stay at home playing video games, rather than watch their dad in concert tonight.
When Travis take the stage, The Man Who unfolds as both a time capsule and a living document. Released in 1999, the album marked the moment the Glasgow band moved from promising outsiders to a defining force in British guitar music, spending nine weeks at number one in the UK and finding an especially devoted audience in Australia, where it went platinum.
Formed in the early 1990s at Glasgow School of Art, Travis have always traded in melody and emotional clarity over volume. From Good Feeling through The Invisible Band and beyond, their career has been shaped by consistency, earning them Brit Awards, Ivor Novello recognition and a reputation for influencing a generation of bands that followed.
When they take the stage Travis immediately tear into Writing to Reach You, with Andy Dunlop dropping to his knees to wrestle a serrated solo from the guitar, the moment cutting through the theatre’s polish with a welcome rough edge. Fran Healy, hair wild and eyes bright, looks every bit the distracted mad professor as he pauses proceedings to explain that tonight isn’t just a performance but a guided one: a PowerPoint presentation designed to map how these songs came into being. Suddenly we’re transported to a freezing Glasgow flat in December 1995, Kafka in hand, Healy trying to reverse-engineer Wonderwall a photo of Noel Gallagher flashes onscreen, as he explains the genesis of Writing to Reach You.
The stories keep folding into the music. As You Are is introduced via a poem handed to Healy by an elderly man on a train while travelling with his mum, the original note projected above the band as Dunlop thrashes out jagged lines, burying his head into one of the towering Orange amps. Healy drifts through memories of Millport and its looming nuclear power station, early rehearsals at Glasgow’s Horseshoe Bar, and the resistance they faced trying to convince their label to release Why Does It Always Rain on Me?. The band pitched it as a Wimbledon-timed single, because it always rains at Wimbledon…only that year it didn’t. But they were redeemed at Glastonbury in 1999 when the heavens opened mid-song, sealing the band’s breakthrough. Another slide appears: a cassette labelled luv, recorded for a girlfriend who, by Healy’s account, was unimpressed by the gesture. It’s funny, self-aware, and oddly revealing. By the end, it feels like a living archive of how small, half-formed moments harden into songs that last. It’s a reminder, too, of how long it’s been since Travis last spent real time in Australia, and how welcome it would be if this visit didn’t stand alone for another two decades.
Images and words Deb Pelser
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