Fran Healy was born in Stafford in 1973 and raised in Glasgow. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art where he joined the band Travis (originally known as Glass Onion), becoming their singer and principal songwriter. They released their first album in 1997 but it was their second, 1999’s The Man Who, that provided their breakthrough, selling more than 3.5m copies worldwide. Healy, who lives in Los Angeles, released a solo album, Wreckorder, in 2010. His 10th album with Travis, LA Times, came out earlier this year and the band’s Raze the Bar UK tour runs until 21 December.
1. Music
I discovered [New Jersey-born singer-songwriter] Mk.gee in March on a recommendation from Andy McDonald, our A&R man, and he just blew me away. He’s a brilliant guitarist and his guitar sounds are unlike anything I’d ever heard before. His voice is very melodic and sweet, but it’s juxtaposed with this insane, jarring production and abstract lyrics. He seems to be deliberately remaining in the shadows at the moment, quite literally at his shows – I went to see him in Los Angeles in April. But he’s really cool and different than all the other shit going around. He is, I would say, the absolute real deal.
2. Installation
teamLab Borderless, Mori Building Digital Art Museum, Tokyo
This is so hard to explain, but you can’t forget it. It’s an immersive, interactive audiovisual experience in a Tokyo building where up is down and down is up. Basically they have projections that you can interact with. You go into a room and you’re suddenly in a tank with all these weird fish swimming around and you can touch them and they swim off. Then you’re at the top of sloping room that looks like it’s sloping in the opposite direction. By the time you come out, it feels like you’ve taken a heroic dose of magic mushrooms.
3. Bar
Treasure Club, Orchard Street, NYC
This is a “best kept secret” type of bar in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The cocktails are great, the staff are great, the music is brilliant and so is the art. Art in bars is usually a few shitty prints on the wall but here the owner has filled the place with great stuff and it’s all brilliantly curated: there’s a Dennis Hopper photograph that was used for a Smiths album cover, and a bucking bronco painting by the street artist Richard Hambleton. It’s a really fantastic bar.
4. TV
I really don’t like the superhero genre any more – the Marvel films have squeezed that cloth till it’s dry – but my son persuaded me to give this a go and it’s great. Set in Gotham City, it’s about the rise of the Penguin to become the crime boss we know from the Batman series. Colin Farrell gives a very subtle performance in the title role – he feels like a real guy, not a cartoonish villain – and Cristin Milioti is brilliant as the Hangman. It really does a lot of service to the genre: it’s a whole new cloth to squeeze out.
5. Restaurant
Los Angeles has its ups and downs but the restaurants are amazing, and this is one of those wow places. The room is beautiful, with a massive kitchen that’s open so you can see the chaos of creation. The ceilings are very high with vines hanging down. The staff are extremely knowledgable. The food is southern Mediterranean, with hummus and perfectly puffy pitta breads. One visit I had a dish pairing tomatoes with strawberries, which was amazing, and oyster mushroom skewers with a magic green sauce on top. The place is buzzing and there’s always interesting people sitting around.
6. Photography
William Eggleston: The Last Dyes, David Zwirner gallery, Los Angeles
William Eggleston is the godfather of modern American colour photography. He roamed around the US south and west in the 1960s and 70s taking pictures of quite mundane things, but always beautifully composed, and he developed them using a process called dye transfer, which is like the Rolls-Royce of processing. This exhibition shows the last of these dye transfers, and they’ve never really been seen before – it’s like finding a Beatles album that no one knew existed. All of it is just mind-bogglingly good, and the Zwirner gallery itself is beautiful.
