Fran Healy is probably best known as the frontman of Travis. He released a solo album not too long ago and is currently touring with Foley Stewart, a young singer-songwriter. They played in the Szene Wien.

As usual with support bands, I hadn’t heard of or anything by Foley Stewart before seeing him life (well, I checked out one of his songs on youtube before heading out that evening).

He played only for a short while, but I did like his songs a lot – very promising stuff. And he seemed to be a nice guy, which never hurts.

Especially Dark Feeling is a really nice song (though I also liked Holy Nowhere a lot):

One can only hope that there will be more to hear from him and that there might even be an album at some point. I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

I have seen Travis live a couple of times already. Both times were rather big shows and I liked them a lot. But since the Szene Wien is not a particularly big club (I’m guessing there’s room for 150 people or so) and since Fran Healy is on his solo tour, I was curious to see how that would work out. And the answer is: it worked great.

He played surprisingly many Travis songs. If I had just released a solo album, I would probably try to distance myself as much as possible from the band that made me famous, just to make it my own thing. But Healy went the other way and played about 50/50. Suits me just fine, though I love the solo album as well.

Healy talked a lot, about his songs, the inspirations, how they came to be and most of them were really sweet stories – like the one where he tried to keep his son from interrupting his songwriting by including things he liked into the lyrics, like snails and airplanes – hence, Fly in the Ointment.

Or how he wrote Sing for his at-the-time-girlfriend-now-wife to get her to sing. Or how he tried to get the chords for Wonderwall and ended up with Writing to Reach You (which finally explains the Wonderwall line in that song) or how “pillars turn to butter” in Driftwood actually means Caterpillars turning to Butterflies.

He played a rather long show – almost two hours. And instead of doing the whole encore shtick, with leaving the stage etc. he just said, “well the official part is over now – why don’t you just shout out songs you still like to hear and that’s going to be my encore.” Which I personally appreciated a whole lot, though the whole shouting out songs got a little scary from my perspective – who would have thought that people can be that loud and insistent?

He also asked whether he should play Why Does It Always Rain On Me? or whether it’s gotten too old. He ended up not playing it, but we got Hit Me Baby One More Time instead.

In short, the atmosphere was good, Fran Healy was great and the songs are wonderful (also, a whole two hours of Scottish accent). It can only be recommended to see him live.