Rock Star at Banks Lyon

It’s not every day that you get to interview a real honest to God rock star. Neil Primrose, drummer in Scottish  rock band Travis, is properly globally famous. I mean, they’ve won a bucketload of BRIT awards, have toured globally, have sold ten million records and, if you believe Wikipedia, one in eight British households owns a copy of their album The Man Who. It is certainly true that it went ten times platinum. Unless you have spent the last ten years, running screaming from anywhere with a radio tuned into anything other than Radio 4, you will have heard their songs Flowers in the Window, Why does it Always Rain on me? and Sing, I promise.

As a result, it was with some trepidation that I picked up the phone to call Neil. I’d got the introduction via Rodney Banks-Lyon, of Lancaster’s Banks Lyon Jewellers, who’d asked me if I fancied interviewing him as he was a regular customer and had offered to help. Although Rodney promised me I’d like him, my mind had immediately raced ahead. Best not phone too early – Neil would probably not be up until mid-afternoon, at which time he’d be having his butler bring the Rolls Royce round so he could drive it into his swimming pool. Best leave plenty of time – I’d probably have to go through battalions of PRs and assorted hangers-on whose main role in life would be to make sure that his groupies were sorted in order of star sign. Best not phone too late – what time does a rock and roll party start?

Neil with his band “Travis”

A deep but softly spoken Scottish voice answered the phone. I was straight through. He suggested where we could meet. “There’s a nice tea shop in Wray.” A what? Interviews are meant to take place in the Presidential suite of a city centre hotel, or in a gloomy corner of a self-consciously trendy bar – surely not a tea shop… To my relief we settled on Banks Lyon’s as he was popping into Lancaster anyway.

I thought I’d get the photographs out of the way first as even people who are used to having their picture taken can become annoyed by it. Not Neil. As he chatted watches with Rodney, he lit up with unfeigned enthusiasm for the subject. It’s obvious that he’s into his watches and he discussed both what he’d got on order and the market in general with real knowledge. Pictures out of the way, we retired round the corner to The Borough for a cup of tea and a slice of cake – what else? I thought I’d start by asking him why he’d moved to Lancashire.

“It’s down to my wife really, who spent most of her childhood in Hest Bank and we came back here so we could be closer to her Mum and Dad. We’d been living in London for about six years or so and had become disenchanted. It’s no place to bring children up – that was the most important reason for coming up here. It’s all about the quality of life, the peace and quiet, the countryside. When you travel round the world and come back to Lancashire, you realise that you’re fortunate. It’s real and it’s honest. People don’t tend to embellish everything – you’re not part of that constant social networking thing you get in cities. I think I’m quite a down to earth guy and for my kids to be grounded, I’ve got to be grounded.

It’s clear he’s all too mindful of what can happen to those in his line of business who aren’t, and how savage and fickle the world in which he moves can be. “It’s a real shame but people want you to do well and then watch you fall from grace. Look at the thing with Amy Winehouse at the moment, with Gazza. It is, of course caused by them being wasted but it is predominately caused by the British obsession with celebrity. I have to engage with the press – if you don’t play the game, you don’t get invited to the next one”.

But it appears that coming home to Lancashire is really of paramount importance in enabling him to deal with all of this. “When I’m away I really look forward to hearing the birds singing outside my window when I get back. No light pollution. No smog, Taking your kids to their little school in the morning, although I do have to acknowledge that my wife does all that brilliant Mum thing while I’m away. I even look forward to being able to do things for myself – like cooking for my family. When you’re in this business, you always have people around to do things for you – it’s a very false security. When you get a bit older, that whole coming out of a nightclub at five o’clock in the morning smashed out of your head thing gets a bit boring.

“We’ve just made a great record [Ode to J. Smith], very quickly and very cheaply and have done it off our own back. It’ll be released in late summer on the internet first and then in the shops, at least if they’re still selling music in the shops by then. They’ve just announced that Woolworths have stopped selling CD singles so how are kids meant to buy music now other than compressed files off the internet? I’ve just bought forty eight vinyl albums from Oxfam in Lancaster and I much prefer the sound quality.”

Banks Lyons brings him into Lancaster pretty frequently too. “I’m not a great fan of jewellery on men but I’ve always liked having a nice watch. Getting into motor racing [Neil also races Porsches] has only accelerated things as the two are inextricably linked. Rod’s great. I think in the North West of England, he does a bloody good job supplying some pretty rare and esoteric things. Nick Mason [Pink Floyd’s drummer] wrote that after he’d gone on tour, one of the first things he did was to buy himself a Rolex Daytona and that’s something I totally understand.”

But the Rolex is one of the very few external things that marks out one of Lancashire’s most extraordinary residents. Having been fortunate enough to spend some time with him, it seems obvious that he would have suggested meeting at somewhere as normal as a tea shop. He likes how real and honest Lancashire and Lancastrians are. He doesn’t realise how well he fits in…