Musician Of The Year – Travis Maximus

This year, Travis Scott bounced back into the spotlight with the summer's biggest album and a mega-tour to match. And yet, he says, he's still striving for something even grander. Hits the road with one of the most dynamic entertainers of our age.

- By Chris Heath. Photographs by Jack Bridgland

TRAVIS SCOTT PROWLS around the top of the huge, rambling faux-stone construction that will, in a few days, begin serving as the stage for his Circus Maximus tour. Sometimes he sings, sometimes he stops. As he does so, he visits different parts of the structure, which seems part battlement, part ancient ruin, part lonely asteroid, part coral island risen out of the sea, strewn with a miscellany of roundish faux-stone heads of varying sizes and facial expressions. It's surprisingly jarring to see Scott perform his songs without the full-on total commitment that is his trademark style, but right now is clearly about something else. It feels like he's trying to figure things out that only he can figure out, working out the rules in a world he created.

After a while he steps down from the stage, walks outside, and gets into a car where he requests that a Radiohead album be put on (it's In Rainbows), and then be turned down. I compliment him on the stage. "Yeah, you fucking with it?" he nods. "I got to dial it in some, but it's getting there. It's something new."

I inquire what he wants people to be thinking as they look at it.

"I just want people to be in just a good zone," he says. "Really not so much thinking, more just doing. It's like: You don't come here to think, you come here to let loose." And the heads?

"I mean, those are just, like, Disney World type of ideas," he replies.

I think he's saying that too much shouldn't be read into them, but I tell him I can't work out whether they're friendly or terrifying.

"No, it's all good vibes," he says. Then he reconsiders, a little.

"I don't know-terrifying is all subjective. I didn't want it just like corny, just like all like googly-goggly. Because life isn't just, like, all bright. It has its ups and downs, you know."