The Invincible Band: Travis talk Scottishness, going mad and their problem with the Kardashians.

Not that anyone is grumbling. About the hand cramps or their lead singer’s temporary absence. Travis, the 2016 model, are laidback and easy-going. Maybe they always were.

It’s warm enough to sit outside today and so, when Healy finally joins us, we do. For the best part of an hour we talk. About the new album, about the Kardashians, about the band’s past and the present. And about friendship then and now.

Then and now takes in a lot, of course. There have been 20 years, two No1 albums, five top 10 singles, two Brit awards, the high side of eight million record sales, one life-threatening accident and a few children since the band left Glasgow for London in pursuit of their dream.

They have travelled some distance from their Driftwood-on-the-radio-every-five-minutes peak, a time when they were loved and loathed in equal measure. But there is still petrol in the tank. Or maybe it’s air in the balloon. Ask them to describe the mood in the camp and drummer Neil Primrose (44 years old, 32in waist, 33in inside leg, currently living in the Trough of Bowland – it’s in Lancashire if, like me, you don’t know where it is) uses the word “buoyancy”.

They’re on the up, then? “We’re very proud of the record,” adds Primrose, the quietest member of the band. “There’s a real feeling of ‘yeah, we’re getting somewhere’.”

Around the table his fellow band mates nod in agreement. From left they are guitarist Andy Dunlop (43, Liverpool, “my trousers are biiiiig”), bass player Dougie Payne (quiff, 42, 31-inch waist, Glasgow some of the time, married to a film star called Kelly Macdonald, favourite track on the album Animals – “It’s kind of right where I live. It’s slightly glammy, slightly rocky, but it has got a heart to it”) and Fran Healy (thinks he’s 42, Berlin, man bun, 29-inch waist – which is frankly showing off – favourite song on the album is Idlewild, “because I’m not singing all of it”).

“I don’t think it’s ever felt as good as it feels,” suggests Healy. “It’s 20 years now since we moved to London and when we came down there was a really similar feeling in the band. We were really focused and really together.”

The difference is back then they were giving everything – all that youthful energy and brio – to the record company to circulate. This time they are putting out their new album – their eighth – on their own label. “This time we don’t have to give it over,” continues Healy. “We’ve kept it all within the band. We’ve produced the best amount of work we’ve ever produced and it’s all been within the four of us. I would say it’s better than it was 20 years ago because we are in charge of our own thing.”

The album they are signing today is succinct and to the point and very, very Travis-y. Melodic, warm guitars with added electronic sweeteners. If you liked them before you’ll like them now, I’d imagine, and I’m not sure Healy has ever sounded in better voice.

Everything at Once is an album that’s concerned with the stuff Travis albums are always concerned with: love, honesty, finding your place in the world. Quite why the Kardashians turn up in the lyrics to Paralysed, then, might be something of a puzzle.

As it happens it’s a song about our addictions to screens. “We’re all tied to this wee screen at the moment,” Healy says, looking at the phones that litter the table in front of us. “Everybody is and I am too. We’re more connected than we’ve ever been without a doubt in the history of civilisation. But the weird thing is we’re actually more disconnected than we’ve ever been. The more we do this” – he nods at the phones – “the less we do this. Meeting up. And even when people are out with each other they’re locked on this f****** screen.

“It’s not like waving a flag. It’s more like gently poking at it and saying: ‘Am I the only one who’s noticed this?’”

As for the Kardashian thing, he says, the lyric only mentions them because they’re symptomatic. “Everyone’s preening for the screen.”

Does he have a favourite Kardashian? Kim? Khloe? “Definitely not. They’re the epitome of what is possibly not right with what’s going on.”

“Previously,” Payne chips in, “it would generally be people with some kind of talent who would characterise the zeitgeist – Madonna or Michael Jackson or David Bowie. Now it’s people taking selfies.”

“It’s interesting,” adds Healy. “All those people you mentioned are attractive. But there was also some point to it. Now all you have to be is attractive in some way. I wouldn’t say they [the Kardashians] are but that’s what they’re held up as. And that’s it. There’s nothing else that’s important.”

“Isn’t being able to balance a champagne glass on your arse a talent?” asks Dunlop. “You’ve got to give her some credit.”

TRAVIS IN CONVERSATION 1: ON GLASGOW AND SCOTTISHNESS

If I say the word Glasgow, gentlemen, what comes to mind?

Primrose: “Your da.”

Dunlop: “Family. It’s still our spiritual home. That’s where you go back to find yourself.”

Payne: “Outside of friends and family and people the one word that popped into my head was creativity. It’s such a creative place, with all these musicians and writers and artists.”

Has the city changed much since you left?

Payne: “Dramatically. We moved away in 1996 and I moved back part time in 2011 and it was amazing the change that happened in that time. It just feels much more cosmopolitan. It’s still small so it’s still got that slightly villagey feeling. It just feels like a proper city.”

Primrose: “Sausage Roll Street has changed immensely. It’s unrecognisable. It used to be such a beautiful street, plus the art school.”

Healy: “Sauchiehall Street?”

Primrose: “Sausage Roll Street. But it’s just horrible now.”

Healy: “We played a few years ago at the ABC and I looked out the window and I felt a bit like George Bailey when he comes back to Bedford Falls. It was like, ‘What the hell’s happened?’ But every city has that strip.”

Dunlop: “But the stuff moves around. Now if you go to Argyle Street where the Crabshakk is and the Finnieston and the Gannet, all these great restaurants, it’s shifted round. It’s maybe the same amount of each thing but it just shifts around.”

Healy: “The word that comes to mind for me about Glasgow is ‘earthed’. A lot of places you go you feel the earth’s been lifted. It’s disconnected. But with Glasgow, whatever that is, it is uncuttable. You can’t cut the earth from it. It’s constantly grounded and you carry that around. Wherever you go that doesn’t leave you.”

So how does your Scottishness manifest itself?

Dunlop: “When I’m drunk nobody can understand me. Even these guys.”

Payne: “I don’t really feel a sense of Scottishness. I feel more Glaswegian than Scottish. I think that’s different.”

Healy: “Um, I think it’s like modesty but not false modesty. It’s this idea that everyone’s equal. You treat everyone as an equal. You don’t look up or look down. You’re just eye to eye no matter who you’re talking with, whether it’s your bandmates or your dentist, whoever.  I think that doesn’t change.”

Not even with success?

Dunlop: “I think that Scottishness thing defined the band from the start. Nobody’s going to walk in in a fur coat and leather trousers and get away with it …”

Payne: “I think we did.”

Dunlop: “But we didn’t get away with it.”

Payne: “He had leather trousers. I had the fur jacket.”

Dunlop: “And everyone’s like, ‘What the f*** are you wearing?’ You don’t get above your station almost. So when success came it changes you … it screws with your head in different ways. But we didn’t run with it and suddenly go: ‘We’re rock stars.’ I think we’re exactly the same as we were when we started because we wouldn’t let it happen.”

The story of Travis goes like this. Teenagers meet up, jam a bit at the art school, form a band called Glass Onion, drop some members, invite other members to join (“Franny’s very persuasive,” says Payne. “He eventually turned up at the front door with a bass. It was Esther’s bass, Neil’s wife”). They then go to London because they couldn’t “get arrested” in Glasgow, make a record or two, play Glastonbury in 1999, where it rains while they play Why Does It Always Rain on Me?, go back the following year to headline.

Cue success and a year or two of full-on work and madness that’s like being hit by a tsunami, Healy says. “You’re travelling so fast when it hits.”

“I don’t think you notice at the time,” agrees Dunlop. “You don’t notice the build of it. You look at younger bands and they’re getting that two-year shitload of work when their album becomes big and you’re looking for the point where they lose their mind. Because there is a point where you lose your mind. You don’t feel like you’re going to lose your mind. Just one day you go, ‘F***, I’ve lost my mind.’”

“We all lost it at different points,” says Healy. “There were always three of us there to prop the other guy up. I would say for me personally it wasn’t the most enjoyable time. I remember sitting on the sidewalk in Paris in the middle of this cyclone of press, having a cigarette and thinking, ‘This is the first moment I’ve had alone in the last six months.’ That was the moment where I reached Peak Travis, I think.”

And then Primrose dives into a swimming pool and everything changes.

In 2002, after a week of festival appearances, the band were relaxing in France when Primrose went for a swim and hit his head. Dunlop and Payne had to help pull him out of the water. Thankfully he was playing drums again within weeks. “It was 14 years ago. I don’t think about it so much,” Primrose says. “I still have residual issues, but I am so lucky compared to other people who have had spinal injuries.

“Weird things happen to people. You could be just riding along on your bike and then you could be a quadriplegic.”

Even so, the accident was a forced reboot for the band, as Healy explains. “When, Neil, you had that accident which I think to this day – although a moment that was incredibly unlucky for you – was incredibly lucky for us, because we had stopped looking at each other as friends and we had started looking at each other as work.

“We all went, ‘Us first and the band second,’ because we realised the success of the band wasn’t all the No1s and the Brits. It was the fact we were mates at the core of it and that’s what held the band together.”

And so in the years that followed they took time off, met or married partners, had kids, grew up a bit. Music was no longer the be-all and end-all. But it didn’t go away. Neither did they. Everything at Once is just the latest evidence.

TRAVIS IN CONVERSATION 2: ON MUSIC AND THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

How has your relationship with music changed since you were teenagers?

Payne: “Personally my relationship to music is still one of total dependence. I am absolutely dependent on playing it and listening to it. It’s nourishment.”

Dunlop: “I find it harder to find room for new music. I’ve got the things I like, there are things that will break through the barriers, but it’s more difficult the age I am now. There’s music I love. Songs that will make me openly weep …”

Such as?

“Bat Out of Hell. When we were making this record me and Dougie had a game called the Road to Hell where you play songs and each song has to have a connection to the previous one and you’ve got to end up with Bat Out of Hell and every night you’d end up singing Bat Out of Hell at the top of your lungs.”

Payne: “It could take a few weird hours.”

Fran, I think I read a quote recently where you say that the music industry was more middle class than it ever was.

Healy: “No, I said the industry is middle class. Full stop. I met that actor Clive Owen. He was at the Berlinale [Berlin International Film Festival]. He’s working class, I’m working class and I said it feels like you’re at these things and it feels like we shouldn’t really be there. We got in through the back door because you are surrounded by people who had a different beginning.”

Has the door closed for the working class?

Dunlop: “In some ways it’s harder. In some ways it’s been democratised by the ease of putting things out. I think it’s harder to be heard because there’s so much noise.”

Healy: “But is it? You just have to listen to the portals that matter and it’s still radio and there’s only so many places on a playlist and there’s only so many bands you can put in the shop window. There are more places, but none of them matter. Radio is still king and I kind of like that.”

Time for pictures. They cross the road chatting to each other. Travis have been around for more than 20 years. Like Healy said, the best thing about that is they are still all friends.

Oh, they’ve grown up a bit but, really, Dunlop concludes, they’re not that different. “We’ll go home and we’ll be men and dads and then we get back together and … we still tell jobby jokes.” Sometimes men are just boys when it comes down to it.

The sun is still shining when I leave them.

Everything at Once is out now. Travis play the 02 ABC, Glasgow on Friday.