Supertramp

From the archive, how they made the 20 million-plus-selling Breakfast In America.

With anywhere between 18 and 20 million copies sold worldwide, Breakfast In America is arguably the biggest-selling prog album of all time after The Dark Side Of The Moon. Not that it was all-out prog – the sleeve featured a waitress pretending to be the Statue Of Liberty against a backdrop of crockery pretending to be the New York skyline; it was released well after prog’s original golden age; and it wasn’t what might be regarded as a quintessentially prog package: it only comprised a single disc and contained 10 tracks – lengthy tripartite song suites were notable by their absence. The total running time was a meagre 46 minutes, two of the songs coming in at under three minutes long, the rest being around the three, four and fiveminute mark, with only one clocking in at over seven minutes. Four of the tracks were lifted for single release, which wasn’t something you could say about, for example, Brain Salad Surgery,

while the remaining numbers became daytime radio staples throughout 1979 and beyond, in Britain, across Europe, America and Canada, Australia, Scandinavia – most of the known world. In fact, it is rumoured that by the end of that year even those in the furthest-flung corner of the end of the world were able to hum the refrain to

The Logical Song and knew every word to the title track.

That the album did so well was particularly impressive considering that it was Supertramp’s sixth long player, and its release came at the

John Helliwell

height of new wave and disco. Its domination of the single and album charts, and the airwaves, was quite unexpected by all concerned – by all, that is, except the band’s label boss, Jerry Moss.

“Jerry came down to the studio and said something about Peter Frampton – who was also on A&M – and us being likely to repeat his success,” recalls Peter Henderson, credited as co-producer alongside the band. “Basically, he said, ‘I think you guys are going to be next.’”

Supertramp had already been around for a decade by the release of their most popular record, having formed in 1969 around core members and songwriters Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson. After two albums – 1970’s self-titled debut and 1971’s Indelibly Stamped – and several line-up changes, the group solidified around vocalists/ keyboardists Davies and Hodgson, saxophonist John Helliwell, bassist Dougie Thomson and drummer Bob Siebenberg. This, the ‘classic’ version of the band, established themselves as a cult attraction.

The first album by the five-piece, 1974’s Crime Of The Century, was hailed as a minor masterpiece of acerbic songcraft and dexterous musicianship, and it featured many of Supertramp’s finest songs, including School and Bloody Well Right as well as Dreamer, their first UK Top 20 hit. And although the follow-up, 1975’s Crisis? What Crisis?, wasn’t quite so well received, it did posit Supertramp as premier purveyors of polished, prog-ish studio pop-rock with thoughtful lyrics, joining the select pantheon that also included 10cc and Queen. By the release of Even In The Quietest Moments… (1977), many of the bleak visions and dark portents about society expressed on the previous two records had come to pass in the form of punk, but Supertramp were able to weather the storm, and one of the songs, Give A Little Bit, became another huge and enduring hit.

But Breakfast In America eclipsed anything they had done before and skyrocketed the band into the commercial stratosphere. Supertramp were never a typical chart proposition or obvious stadium behemoths, with little of Gabriel-era Genesis’ live charisma, and none of the virtuoso pyrotechnics of Yes/ELP. If they resembled anyone it was Pink Floyd, in that they were anonymous musicians whose focus was the song, but they didn’t have the Floyd’s mythic allure. Instead, they were a motley crew – the bluff, working class Davies (from Swindon) and the public school-educated Hodgson (from Portsmouth), plus a Scot (Thomson), a Yorkshireman (Helliwell) and a Californian (Siebenberg) – who had been assembled for solely pragmatic reasons. They weren’t a gang of mates who had known each other since their school days, and there was none of that sense of shared history.

And yet, by Breakfast In America, they had built up a certain rapport, having spent much of 1973-4 living together in the wilds of Somerset, in a cottage called Southcombe where they were joined by family, friends, crew and pets, as well as unofficial sixth member Russel Pope, whom

John Helliwell considers to be