It must be odd to have been a band’s co-founder and joint frontman and to know that when thousands of people came to see you, they did so on condition that not only did you play songs you neither wrote nor sung, but had also initially agreed not to perform. That was what happened to Rick Davies, who formed Supertramp with Roger Hodgson in 1970. Hodgson left the band in 1983 – on the agreement that he took his songs, and Davies took the name. But touring as Supertramp is impossible without The Logical Song or Dreamer or Breakfast in America, and so, to Hodgson’s irritation, Davies played the songs.
It was fitting though, because the tension between Davies and Hodgson was very much the driving force of Supertramp. Davies loved jazz and blues, whereas Hodgson was in love with pop. And it was in the combination of their two impulses that Supertramp found their greatest success. If you were to define a “Supertramp sound” it would be Hodgson’s keen tenor backed by Davies’ burbling keys: Hodgson may have written the band’s biggest hits, but Davies supplied their shape. And he had plenty of his own songs to sing.
And, notably, there was an issue of class. Hodgson was a newly minted private schoolboy, whereas Davies was the son of a hairdresser and a merchant seaman, and grew up in Swindon: his own schooldays were a struggle, bar music classes. His musical epiphany had come not with the Wurlitzer he became associated with, or with any keyboard: at the age of eight, in 1952, he heard Drummin’ Man by Gene Krupa and “it hit me like a thunderbolt”. By the end of the 50s, he was in a local rock’n’roll band; by 1962 he’d formed his own and switched to keyboards. After the usual struggle of the jobbing musician, he placed an ad in Melody Maker in August 1969 and met Hodgson. After a few fruitless months as the unfortunately named Daddy, they became Supertramp at the start of the new decade.
Supertramp were one of a number of British groups of the 70s who seemed to exist entirely on their own terms, never quite one thing or another, a little like 10cc: were they an arty pop band or a poppy art band? And like 10cc, whose roots were in the 60s beat boom, they had to find their way to this sound. Their first two albums were underformed and underwhelming prog; they only found their way in 1974’s Crime of the Century.
Supertramp didn’t seem remotely like a rock band. They weren’t pictured on their album covers. Their TV appearances were undramatic and interviews unremarkable: “Since their first success this group have rarely presented a strikingly interesting public image,” wrote NME’s Tony Stewart in 1977. That kind of unremarkable grown-upness became very unfashionable in the peacocking 80s.
Hodgson’s solo career didn’t thrive any more than Supertramp did after he left in 1983. He wanted to head for poppier pastures; Davies wanted the music to become thornier. For both, commercial success would be a thing of the past. It was Davies’ reclaiming of the old songs that caused public disagreement between the two, and after the reformed Supertramp played London’s O2 Arena in 2010, the absent Hodgson complained about it being advertised using his songs. That behaviour precluded any full reunion of the group, he said, though he added that he remained in touch with Davies and they often talked about working together again.
Beneath the glossy surface of Supertramp – the slickly syncopated pop that you could later hear in Scissor Sisters – was a strange and quirky group. Davies’ own songs could be funky and peculiar – Bloody Well Right, from Crime of the Century starts with a minute of bluesy vamping before Davies begins his sardonic narration in his gruff voice over crashing power chords, before a chorus that is halfway between the Supertramp sound and a disgruntled shopkeeper confronting an awful Monday morning.
Their strange snarkiness was very apparent on 1975’s Crisis? What Crisis?, an album that inadvertently helped changed the course of British politics, when its title was co-opted by a Sun subeditor to headline a piece about prime minister James Callaghan’s response to the mounting winter of discontent in 1978/79 on returning from a holiday.
Davies’s standout song on that album was Ain’t Nobody But Me, which personified much of his musical character within Supertramp – over a jaunty blues piano riff, resolving into a 50s ballad pastiche chorus, he sang of an appalling man being tied to someone even more appalling, so “ain’t nobody but me gonna lie for you”; Another Man’s Woman was equally misanthropic. Supertramp was not just a band of nerds making clever-clever rhymes.
The inability to settle, the unwillingness to be straightforward, meant Supertramp were left behind as times changed – it’s easy to forget now that they were one of the biggest bands in the world at the end of the 1970s. Without a convenient genre to bracket them in, they couldn’t be the pioneers or godfathers of anything.
With no legends of unruly behaviour to keep people talking, they became another footnote in pop history. Except, that is, to those who still loved them. Those who embraced the quirks and the perverse cross between squareness and esoterica. They were the people still filling arenas to see Rick Davies and Supertramp for the best part of 30 years after Hodgson left the band.
