Pilkington Supertramp

Crime Of The Century
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78952-108-5
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 88 Seiten

Some albums are simply undeniable watersheds in an artist's career. These can be artistic, or commercial triumphs (or both), but are seen by both the fanbase and even the wider world, as defining statements. Such was undoubtedly the case when Supertramp released Crime Of The Century in 1974. The band's two previous albums had searched for a direction almost as much as Supertramp themselves searched for a stable line-up. But so few copies were sold that the band were almost entirely unknown as they embarked on their third.
Like some serendipitous alchemy, the perfect five-piece line-up coalesced around the creative hub of Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies, and there was a tangible belief and confidence that had not been present before. They took time away from playing live and meticulously crafted Crime Of The Century, which immediately put them both into theatres and into the charts.
With the album celebrating its 50th anniversary and aided by the author's interview with Roger Hodgson, this book examines the making of the album, while looking into the music and lyrical content with some depth. It also examines the wider story of the band and the lasting legacy of the masterpiece that became Crime Of The Century.

The author
Steve Pilkington is a writer and broadcaster based in the North West of England. He has published books on artists as diverse as Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Van Der Graaf Generator, Iron Maiden and The Rolling Stones, and is a regular Sonicbond author. He has also written the official biography of guitarist Gordon Giltrap. Steve also presents a weekly internet radio show entitled A Saucerful Of Prog for Rock Radio UK, as well as writing CD booklet essays and regular content on the Velvet Thunder rock website. Crime Of The Century Rock Classics is his tenth published book.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pilkington, Steve

Leseproben

Chapter 1

The Road To ‘Crime’

A look at the back cover of Crime Of The Century reveals the expected credits and informative text, but also two words printed unobtrusively and without further explanation in the top left: ‘To Sam’. This small yet significant note is a respectful nod In the direction of Dutch millionaire and early Supertramp philanthropist of sorts Stanley August Miesegaes. Known affectionately as Sam, owing to his initials, it is no stretch that he was as instrumental and as vital a cog in the early Supertramp machine as any of the musicians involved in its coming together. From the moment he first saw Rick Davies playing with a band named The Joint, in Germany in the late 1960s, it was his belief and financial support which allowed the fledgling band to keep on the road and making music.

Rick Davies was born in 1944 in Swindon, Wiltshire, with a hairdresser mother and a father in the Merchant Navy. Oddly enough, for someone who would become synonymous with playing keyboards, the first instrument which fascinated him was the drums when he was given an old radiogram at the age of seven which included a few records. One of these was a song called ‘Drummin’ Man’ by the remarkable Gene Krupa and his orchestra, and it fired the young Davies’ imagination like nothing else he had ever heard. ‘It hit me like a thunderbolt’, he said later. ‘I must have played it 2,000 times’. Galvanised by this moment, he set out to learn to play the drums, which was his first instrument.

By 1959, he had become entranced by rock ‘n’ roll and, by now, was also playing the keyboards, though surprisingly, he was self- taught on that instrument as opposed to the lessons he had taken to learn the drums. The first band he joined went by the typically unimaginative name (of the time) Vince and the Vigilantes. By 1962, he was emboldened enough to start his own band for the first time, and although ‘Rick’s Blues’ wasn’t much of an improvement in terms of a band name, it was a significant landmark in his early career. Having, by now, switched to the electric piano himself, the drum stool in Rick’s Blues was occupied by a young man named Ray O’Sullivan, who would go on to his own success a decade later following his own switch to piano and a change of name to Gilbert O’Sullivan. Rick had, in fact, taught Ray the drums and also the piano, and they remained friends. O’Sullivan later became the best man at Rick’s wedding. Rick’s Blues disbanded when Rick’s father became ill, and he took a job as a welder, which he later confessed to absolutely loathing.

His musical ambitions would not be stifled, however, and in 1966, he managed to secure a place as organist in a band called The Lonely Ones. This was quite notable as he had, in fact, never played the organ in his life but assumed it would be much the same as any other keyboard and simply lied about it when applying. The Lonely Ones, at one point, included the later Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist Noel Redding, though he had already left the band by the time Rick came on board. In 1967, The Lonely Ones changed their name to the scarcely better ‘The Joint’ and began playing on the continent, where they would go on to provide music for several German films, which have been lost to the mists of time long ago. It was soon after this that he first encountered Sam, and his destiny was to be forever changed.

The Joint were working in Germany at the time, desperately pumping out production-line music for production-line films. This dispiriting compositional work would occupy them during the day, while scarcely more rewarding gigs took up their nocturnal hours. They were working – via the films – for a man named David Lluellyn, who Rick remembers getting them all of the movie contacts. One day, Lluellyn mentioned to the band that he knew a millionaire in Switzerland who was interested in potentially getting involved with them – an announcement which naturally sounded about as pie-in- the-sky as you could get – but since, as Rick said later, they were ‘living on soup’ at the time, any potential pie was worth following up on. Therefore, they gave him the go-ahead to approach this shadowy millionaire benefactor on their behalf, just on the off- chance that something would come of it, and one Saturday, Lluellyn went off to meet his Swiss Connection. Unfortunately for the band, he did not return for what Rick described as ‘about three months’, but when he did eventually resurface, it was with positive news. His wealthy friend was keen to meet up with them to see whether they could work together. They did, and ‘Sam’ Miesegaes had entered the picture.

The band enthusiastically went over to Sam’s house, where they stayed for a while, discussing his ideas for them, which involved ambitious plans regarding the fusing of classical and contemporary pop music, for example. Much of this came to nothing, as by Rick’s own admission, the band simply weren’t really good enough to justify the faith placed in them. What he did do on a practical level, however, was to provide them with a coach to ease their transport issues. Looking back in a Sounds feature in 1975, Rick was to comment:

One morning, Sam phoned me up at nine o’clock in the morning and told me to have a look out of the window, and I said, ‘There’s nothing out there except an old coach’. He said, ‘It’s yours, boys’, so we got in, and Andy (our singer) drove it around Finchley while we played football in the back. It’s only when we started playing the Marquee that it got to be a problem. We had to park in Oxford Street, and you’d see a huge chain of people on Wardour Street carrying equipment…

This happy spell under the patronage of Sam was to be relatively short-lived for The Joint, sadly, as he elected to withdraw his support not too long after the gift of the coach. Rick Davies went to talk to him and was told that he simply didn’t feel the band had the potential to fulfil his ambitions for them (something which Rick agreed with, as it happens). Davies, however, was a different matter, as Sam saw something in him that he perceived as lacking in the band as a whole. Again, in that Sounds piece, Rick noted that:

I went over to Sam’s to try and write my own music so I could get enough confidence to start something off my own back, and I stayed there just writing. Of course, all sorts of crazy ideas popped up from Sam, like ‘Rick Around The World In Eighty Tunes’, whereby we’d hire a few Land Rovers and go around the world! We’d sit in an Afghanistan village and be influenced by the music and then go somewhere else. It sounded fantastic, but it wasn’t real at all. So, I went back to London and I began auditioning for what was to become the first Supertramp.

The first person recruited for what would become the fledgling Supertramp – still with the financial backing of Sam, who wholeheartedly supported the project – was the man who would go on to be the other half of the band’s own ‘Lennon And McCartney’ – Roger Hodgson. Born in Portsmouth in 1950, Roger began to forge a close relationship with his guitar as a way of whiling away the time that he spent in boarding school, and as he reached his teenage years, he added keyboards, bass and even drums to his instrumental portfolio. Interestingly, at the time that he met Rick and was enticed into the formative Supertramp stable, he had also been contracted to release a single for DJM Records, recording it under the name of Argosy for some obscure reason. DJM (Dick James Music) was to become Elton John’s record label, and at the time, the still-named Reg Dwight was doing session work and writing songs for DJM. It was, therefore, unsurprising – yet no less impressive – that the Argosy single (entitled ‘Mr Boyd’) featured Elton on piano. The quartet was completed by drummer Nigel Olsson and guitarist Caleb Quaye, both of whom would go on to join Elton’s own band. It didn’t help, as the single sank like a stone – despite the fact that Roger remembers that ‘Tony Blackburn liked it’. With Argosy clearly not set for world domination any time soon, his whole attention could be directed towards the new venture with Rick.

Speaking to Velvet Goldmine in 2007, Roger had some interesting reflections on how his songwriting partnership with Rick developed:

It was very much that the magic or the essence of Supertramp was the kind of yin-yang polarity of Rick’s songwriting and my songwriting and our two musical styles. I mean, Rick was five years older than me, so he had grown up on the music of jazz and blues. That was his background, and that’s where he gravitated towards, whereas I grew up on The Beatles and pop rock. But actually, when we played together, there was an incredible empathy between the two of us, when it was just the two of us, and it was very magical, especially earlier on when there weren’t too many other people around and it was, literally, just the two of us. And I think as we developed as songwriters, we started writing, obviously, totally separately, but I think just having that competition, healthy competition, we wanted to give the best of ourselves, and having another writer in the band kind of gave that sense of competition that really did bring out the best in us.

Quite surprisingly, when Roger originally got involved with the band, his instrument was the bass –...