Within the space of a few years Supertramp went from niche prog underperformers to radio-friendly hitmakers. Michael Heatley looks at the band's classic years, with the help of founder member Roger Hodgson, plus bursts from saxophonist John Helliwell
 

For 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. Which self-respecting baby-boomer isn't word perfect on It's Raining Again, The Logical Song, or Breakfast in America?
  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. By the time the third line-up coalesced around the core of Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies, it was hit or bust. Fortunately, 1974's Crime of the Century delivered both creatively and, perhaps more importantly, commercially.
  The three named hit songs were written by Hodgson, who left the band in 1983 and has toured as a solo act ever since. 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. 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.
  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. "They blasted the doors down in every direction for me," he enthuses. "Every new album, I'd never been more hungry to hear what they were going to come up with next. That was a very exciting time. Music was forging ahead in different directions, and their experimentation in the studio was second to none. So that was the example I took into Supertramp. 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."
  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. 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. Yet the pair were never to bond socially, and the space between them would grow as their decade and a half together progressed.
  First album Supertramp (1970) was recorded soon after Roger met Rick and they put together a group of musicians. 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.
  "We were trying to find our feet," Roger recalls. "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 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."
  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. "It was the first time Rick and I wrote separately, but I wouldn't say the songs were that great, especially lyrically. It was a stopgap album in a way... We didn't have an idea of where we wanted to go. 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 Stock and Secret Affair.
  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. 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. And that rise would begin, after a three-year hiatus, with Crime of the Century.
  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 had developed as songwriters. There was a lot going on in our personal lives and my songs changed... to express what was going on inside of me. That was the change. Suddenly songs became autobiographical, personal."
  This was also the point at which their millionaire financier Stanley August Miesagaes (popularly known as Sam) bailed out, writing off a reported £60,000 investment. Roger says: "We were fortunate to have Sam at the very beginning. He bankrolled the band, if you like. We had equipment to play with, but we still had to pay our way in every other way. He didn't know the first thing about the music industry, so it was a very eccentric time. For example, we actually bought an old coach, we were in the front in aircraft seats and loaded a Hammond organ in through the emergency exit in the back, five feet off the ground — it was nuts!"
  Rick and Roger almost got off the bus too. "I'd always wanted to head off to India, so we were going to part company. But we did have some songs that I thought were different and good. I had written School and Dreamer and Rick had Bloody Well Right and, I think, the beginning of Crime Of The Century, so I though, 'Let's give it one more shot.'"
  The pair came off the road, lived by selling any equipment they had left, and went to see A&M Records to see if they could make another album. "We walked in and they said, 'Who the hell are you?' And we said 'Well actually, we're signed to you.' They checked their records and found that we were... Dave Margereson,  who was A&R at the time, heard the demos we'd made and said he thought there was something there. He got behind us and we looked around for musicians. Dave put us in a farmhouse in Somerset for two or three months to get to know each other, and that's where we wrote the songs for Crime."
  The disparate new boys were Scot Dougie Thomson on bass, American Bob Siebenberg on drums and bluff Yorkshireman John Helliwell on sax and clarinet. "Something clicked, and we felt we'd found the band — something that was very different." The garrulous Helliwell would also become the on-stage MC, filling the gap left by Davies and Hodgson's shyness.
  The newly reconstituted Supertramp came up with a classic in their third long-player, which celebrated its 40th birthday in 2014 in various reissued formats. It was as much an album of the year as Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon had been in '73 — art rock at its pristine, perfect best, from the bluesy harmonica intro of School to the dramatic, pianoforte title track that brought the album to closure.
  "The songs that Rick and I were making... were pretty special, and the result was streets ahead of anything we'd done up to that point." It reached No 4 in the UK with assistance from the hit single Dreamer, and like all their albums, would see individually written songs credited to Davies and Hodgson jointly — a bone of contention in future years.
   Crime was really a breakthrough," Hodgson explains, "because for the first time we had carte blanche from the record company to be in the studio as long as we wanted and we had [producer] Ken Scott, who mentored us. We were doing off-the-wall things every day and ultimately came up with an album that was groundbreaking for the time. There were no computers back then, so we were doing everything manually. We needed four pairs of hands for all the faders we had to move. And we had to mix a lot of the songs 10 or 20 seconds at a time because they were so complicated. We didn't hear what we'd done until we heard the finished album right through and were, to coin a phrase, 'gobsmacked'. It was pretty stunning."
   Supertramp were suddenly playing the Hammersmith Odeon rather than the pubs and clubs of previous years; they had a record company that believed in them and a manager that was managing them properly. "It had started to take off, but it was a gradual climb. We had to make it work in all the other countries; it wasn't as instantaneous as today. This was before the internet and everything else, so really you had to go to all these countries and build it up." Even so, a No 38 Billboard chart showing was a sign of Stateside success to come.
  But, as the title of the follow-up, 1975's Crisis? What Crisis?, suggests, they would find it tough to better their masterpiece. "Crisis was not an easy album. It's actually my favourite collection of songs, but I was not happy with the way the album came out at all. It was hard; there was a lot of pressure on us. Even though the cover is more of an environmental comment, the title came from Rick. He was out in the kitchen doodling and came up with this sketch... and Crisis? What Crisis? was very much to do with what was happening in the studio!"
  "To tell the truth, the band was probably at its most unified when we were making Crime. There was a real magical feeling, we were a team. Crisis, we tried to repeat the same chemistry, working with Ken Scott and everything and it didn't work as well. The mixes were very disappointing, for me especially." When Crisis — its UK No 20 position a relative disappointment - was toured, its cover was recreated on stage with table, beach umbrella and unoccupied lounger.