Performance: Travis

Auckland Town Hall

Review: Russell Baillie

It's a funny old week when you get two of the biggest things in British pop here within days of each other.

And after the tabloid terrors of Robbie Williams, whose only exceptional talent is knowing how to be famous and get us all to play along with the idea, Travis provided a much-needed reality check.

Actually, it was more than that. Playing to a less-than-capacity but very happy town hall audience, the biggest British - okay, let's get it out of the way, Scottish - band of the past year were honest-to-goodness charmers.

No, they might not exactly be reinventing the wheel musically with their two-guitar (one soft, one loud), bass and drums line-up. But last night theirs was a quiet triumph of the common touch - songs as concise celebrations of the everyday which you can holler along to.

Well, that's if you're up to competing with Travis frontman Fran Healy and his voice. With his face screwed into painful contortions his voice trilled sweetly; he sometimes resembled Radiohead angst-master Thom Yorke on Prozac.

Though it seemed Healy was very happy in his work, especially in the between-song dissertations which, rather than the usual rock star prattle, were often as lyrical and lovely as the songs themselves.

Now, we could complain that their hour-long set plus encore did spend rather too much time on stuff that wasn't on last year's breakthrough album The Man Who, with older songs All I Wanna Do Is Rock and Good Feeling offering a rather meat-and-potatoes entree to the night.

However, extras like new songs Safe and Coming Around (with its 12-string jangle resembling Scots compatriots Teenage Fanclub, aka the Travis-that-never-made-it) kept things fresh and the encores which included their now-infamous acoustic cover of Britney Spears' Baby Hit Me One More Time kept things entertaining.

While those The Man Who tracks were grand and gorgeous - the anthemic Turn was heroic, but in a good way; Why Does It Always Rain On Me a buoyant singalong; and an emotive As You Are was an early heart-stopper. Actually, Travis did the heart good. And provided proof that you can be big - and British - and still be beautiful.