![]() Roger says: “We were fortunate to have Sam at the very beginning. This was also the point at which their millionaire financier Stanley August Miesegaes (popularly known as Sam) bailed out, writing off a reported £60,000 investment. Suddenly songs became autobiographical, personal.” There was a lot going on in our personal lives and my songs changed… to express what was going on inside of me. Though Roger had been writing songs since he was 12, he believes the shift of creative gears between Indelibly Stamped and Crime was because, “Rick and I developed as songwriters. And that rise would begin, after a three-year hiatus, with Crime Of The Century. It’s instructive to note that every Supertramp album from then on would be graced with thought-provoking artwork that often won critical praise and even awards – an example of the band’s “self-improving” philosophy that fuelled their rise. The cover image of a topless tattooed woman had nothing whatsoever to do with the music and was the idea of one of Rick Davies’s friends. So it was a collection of songs that, to me, was mediocre at best.” The other musicians involved included bassist Frank Farrell, drummer Kevin Currie and sax-player Dave Winthrop, later of Chicken Shack and Secret Affair. It was a stopgap album in a way… We didn’t have an idea of where we wanted to go. “It was the first time Rick and I wrote separately, but I wouldn’t say the songs were that great, especially lyrically. Second album Indelibly Stamped, released in 1971, followed the departure of guitarist Palmer (later a lyricist with King Crimson, billed as Richard Palmer James) and drummer Robert Millar. We came up with a very interesting album that sowed the seeds, if you like, but we had far from found ourselves as a band – or even individually as songwriters.” “The way we came up with the songs was that Rick would write some chords, I’d come up with a melody and a third gentleman, Richard Palmer, wrote the lyrics. “We were trying to find our feet,” Roger recalls. Roger was playing bass, rather than guitar, and the band, initially called Daddy, took a new name from The Autobiography Of A Super-Tramp, a classic on-the-road book written a half-century previously by William Henry Davies. Yet the pair were never to bond socially, and the space between them would grow as their decade and a half together progressed.įirst album Supertramp (1970) was recorded soon after Roger met Rick and they put together a group of musicians. ![]() Vocally, too, Roger’s high vocal tones (he was, years later, approached to front a version of Yes) made an attractive contrast to his gruffer, keyboard-playing partner. The pairing was an interesting one: ex-public schoolboy Hodgson’s penchant for pop and psychedelia contrasted with blue-collar counterpart Davies and his jazz/blues leanings. One of the reasons we chose Ken Scott (as producer of Crime Of The Century) was because he’d worked with The Beatles and David Bowie, and we liked his adventurousness too.” ![]() So that was the example I took into Supertramp. Music was forging ahead in different directions, and their experimentation in the studio was second to none. “Every new album, I’d never been more hungry to hear what they were going to come up with next. “They blasted the doors down in every direction for me,” he enthuses. When a Melody Maker “musicians wanted” ad brought Davies and Hodgson together in 1969, The Beatles had already convinced Roger of the possibilities pop music offered. It’s unlikely Hodgson and Davies will ever reunite, but at least fans can still enjoy both sides of a legacy that’s sold 60 million albums and counting. He visits the UK in April 2016, while the current Supertramp, headed by Davies, had been due to tour Europe last November but the shows were postponed due to their leader’s health problems. ![]() The three named hit songs were written by Hodgson, who left the band in 1983 and has toured as a solo act ever since. Fortunately, 1974’s Crime Of The Century delivered both creatively and, perhaps more importantly, commercially. By the time the third line-up coalesced around the core of Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies, it was shit or bust. Yet wind back a decade earlier and you’d find an infinitely less-promising story – a band, briefly funded by a young Dutch millionaire, with a rotating-door personnel policy which resulted in two unsuccessful albums recorded by radically different outfits. ![]() Which self-respecting baby-boomer isn’t word perfect on It’s Raining Again, The Logical Song or Breakfast In America? F or most of the world, the Supertramp story can be summed up in the handful of “greatest hits” that have been radio staples since the late 70s. ![]()
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