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Artist News Releases
Travis announce new album, Ten Songs
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 4 June 2020
Travis have announced that they will release their new album ‘Ten Songs’ this autumn, and have already released the first single, ‘A Ghost’.
The single comes accompanied by a video painstakingly created while on lockdown by frontman Fran Healy with some help from his teenage son Clay.
He explains: “The video for ‘A Ghost’ started out as a mocked up picture of me and three ghosts playing the last chorus of the song in a deserted alleyway. It looked cool so I took that image and back engineered a story out of it”.
“Just when everything was ready to shoot, the world went into lockdown, so we had this great song with no way to make a video”, he continues. “Frustrated and in an act of desperation, I decided to draw it. Before I was a singer in Travis I was a student at Glasgow School Of Art so I am a good draughtsman, but I’d never done animation”.
“I did a test to calculate how long it might take me”, he adds. “Sixteen hours for each ten seconds of footage. It worked out that it would take around 30 days, which landed exactly on the deadline date. So I drew and drew and drew and drew. 2500 drawings later, it was done”.
But that wasn’t quite the end, he goes on: “One day, I was watching a sequence back and when it got to the end of what I had drawn, it flashed and went into live action. It looked great. This was the moment I realised I could shoot the mock up picture of me playing with my band of ghosts in the alley way”.
“This helped in three ways”, he says. “First, filming the last 47 seconds would save me ten days of drawing. Second, I could recruit my fourteen year old son, Clay, as the cameraman. He has a drone camera so could shoot it remotely and could use it as part of his school video project. Third, most importantly, we could film it socially distant”.
“It was the most bizarre video shoot I have ever worked on”, he concludes. “You realise how important proximity is to getting things done when it’s taken out of the equation. But we did it and it turned out great. [Although] Clay has to wait till we release the song to hand in his video project”.
You probably want to see that video now. But first let me just tell you that the album is out on 9 Oct through BMG. I’ll only forget if I don’t say it now. Anyway, here’s the video:
