Travis - Writing To Reach You

What this video is

Released 8 March 1999 as the lead single from Travis's second studio album The Man Who, 'Writing to Reach You' arrived at a culturally charged moment: Britpop had commercially exhausted itself by 1998, and there was an audience appetite for more reflective, emotionally direct British guitar music. The Man Who would go on to reach number one in the UK and win Best Album and Best British Group at the 2000 Brit…

Why it matters

A key artefact in the post-Britpop transition, this video codified the visual language of late-1990s British indie-rock naturalism: no performance staging, no studio artifice, just a singer in a field. It prefigures the pastoral, emotionally earnest aesthetic that would define early-2000s UK indie…

The director

British director born 1965, raised on Merseyside; studied American Studies at Swansea University and Louisiana State University. Transitioned into visual media via experimental theatre before entering music video directing in the late 1990s. Music video…