Travis 'Sing'

Chart Peak: 3

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Uplifting track 'Sing' scored a No. 3 for Scottish band Travis in June following hit singles 'Why Does It Always Rain On Me?', 'Turn' and 'Coming Around' into the UK Top Ten... the second Travis LP "The Invisible Band", recently won the much-coveted prize for "Best Album" at the 2001 Q Awards.

Now, I'm not the world's biggest Travis fan but even I know The Invisible Band was their third album: ironically enough it was called that as a reference to the band's anonymity, despite the ubiquity of their music around the turn of the century. Still, this is their only appearance on a Now album and it proved a logical time for that to happen as it was their highest-charting single and the culmination of a run of seven hits which each outpeaked its predecessor (only one of their first eleven chart singles had failed to do this, in fact).

Back when they first emerged in 1997, all the fuss was about a big, daft, glammy band who could take over as Oasis started to take themselves too seriously. Then they had their first Top 20 hits with 'More Than Us' and 'Writing To Reach You', and suddenly a formula was born: well-produced, sensitive, jangly semi-acoustic tunes along the lines of a more photogenic Teenage Fanclub. Their biggest hit of all is almost a blend of the two traditions, another harmless strumalong but with a somewhat inane chorus lyric that mentions the song title over thirty times (possibly a throwback to the aforementioned 'Turn' which pulls a similar track). Credit is due to produer Nigel Godrich for making the best of it and appending plenty of sonic trickery to try and distract from the fact that the song itself has so little to it, but the addition of banjo hardly disguises the resemblance to the theme from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy; ironically the single was released shortly after Douglas Adams died.

Whilst it's difficult to find anything much actually wrong with this track, as time goes by it becomes harder to understand why there was so much fuss about it. 

Available on: Singles