Scottish Rockers Travis Bring Chiming Beauty to First Dallas Show in 16 Years

“A lot of bands don’t make it this far,” Fran Healy observed Friday night before a cozy, passionate crowd inside the Factory in Deep Ellum. “One thing we’re guilty of as a band is that we don’t play the game — we’ve never thought about branding. It’s kind of shooting yourself in the foot; we live in a branding time.”

Those gathered in front of the stage cheered, before the flame-haired 51-year-old singer-songwriter punctuated his aside: “But fuck it — if it comes out of you, and it’s true, sing it.”

As the lead vocalist of Travis, a Scottish rock quartet whose influence is considerable even if its profile is not, Healy knows better than most the enduring value of genuine, vulnerable art. The group is entering its 35th year of existence — the “this far” to which Healy alluded — and can still spark a space with just a few notes of songs that are themselves more than a quarter century old.

The chiming beauty of “Driftwood,” “Writing to Reach You,” “Sing,” “Turn” or the band’s best-known tune, “Why Does It Always Rain on Me?” hung in the air like the most pleasant perfume — the sharp tang of nostalgia causing most of the elder millennials in attendance to reach for their phones to document the moment — and only amplified by the obvious joy the four men (Healy, bassist Dougie Payne, drummer Neil Primrose and multi-instrumentalist Andy Dunlop) took in playing the tunes.

The Factory curtained off the second level Friday, and the floor was roughly half full. It was a visual reinforcement of Travis’s somewhat cult status — modestly successful and slept on by far too many.

Although the band has remained active and prolific (its 10th studio album, L.A. Times, dropped just last year), it hasn’t passed through North Texas in 16 years — “Has it been that long?!” Healy cried Friday — and hasn’t had a song on the radio since the waning days of the Clinton administration. (The band, which last appeared at the Granada Theater in 2009, was meant to perform at the Majestic Theatre in April 2022, but Healy was injured, and the show was ultimately canceled.)

Still, the somewhat handmade nature of the 95-minute concert only endeared Travis further to those who braved the slicing cold (“You’re hardcore Travis people,” Healy crowed) to revel in the endearing goofiness embodied by Healy, who flitted between all corners of the lightly dressed stage, alternating between acoustic and electric guitar all night.

Healy, like any Scot worth his salt, delivered between-song monologues with discursive aplomb, oscillating between mild anxiety (“Honest to God, we come across the water to play, and we’re like ‘No one is gonna come.’”), playful self-deprecation (“We do different types of songs: Happy songs; wanna-kill-myself songs and ‘fuck you’ songs") and sweet sentimentality (“I want you all, just for the next song, to think of the person who loves you the most — bring them into your head, keep them in your head,” he said ahead of “Closer”).

In that way, the music itself was less a series of spikes — “Re-Offender,” “Selfish Jean” and “Raze the Bar” showed the band can bare its teeth and up the tempo when called upon — than a steady, generous serotonin drip.

Such pleasures, to Healy’s point, need not necessarily be branded and positioned just so. Just as the four friends in Travis have found their joy over the decades through making music together, so is it possible to find ample satisfaction in songs which have endured through all of pop music’s ups and downs — arguably outlasting any number of focus grouped efforts in doing so — and restore the soul, in all their shaggy, shimmering glory.