ROGER HODGSON
VENUE ROYAL Albert hall, london DATE 23/05/2019
“THE SET’S SO PACKED WITH IMPECCABLY PERFORMED ART-ROCK/PROGPOP LANDMARKS THAT ONLY A CURMUDGEON WOULDN’T GRIN ALONG.”
After opening with a jaunty Take The Long Way Home, white-suited Roger Hodgson addresses us with the affable charm of a benevolent uncle. We’ll have a lovely time, he assures us, losing ourselves in the pleasures of music and forgetting the strange times we live in. His prediction proves correct. A breezy, easy-going sound wears the arrangements’ complexities lightly as multiple classics from the Supertramp canon bejewel this first of two nights at the famed venue, which he confesses makes even him slightly nervous.
The tour’s billed as the Breakfast In America
40th Anniversary celebration, but he dips into most corners of his catalogue. Of course there’s an elephant in the room: he left the band in 1983 and doesn’t play the old Rick Davies numbers, so when a lovely rendition of If Everyone Was Listening moves on without graduating into
Crime Of The Century, we miss the latter. Overall though, the set’s so packed with impeccably performed art-rock/prog-pop landmarks that only a curmudgeon wouldn’t grin along.
He gets things rolling with some big-hitters:
School and Breakfast In America display respectively the darker (railing against
authority) and sillier (worst chat-up line ever) sides of his writing. Of the globally massive second, he laughs that, having been 19 when he wrote it, “thank God I learned how to write love songs better”. He adds that everyone liked it except his girlfriend. Understandable, on both counts. When he asks if anyone remembers Crisis? What Crisis? there’s such a loud cheer that he shrugs, “Silly question” before delivering Easy Does It (complete with audience participation whistling) and a shimmering Sister Moonshine. Hide In Your Shell works its intricate mid-section well before
The Logical Song is dependably dynamic.
After an intermission, the band return to the palm-tree-dressed stage for a second half that relaxes into some lesser-known material, the most dramatic of which is Death And
A Zoo. Across the evening, you realise the absence of a loud lead guitar is key to tonight’s deft, gentle feel; Hodgson moves between acoustic and keyboards, while solos are taken by the saxophone-woodwind maestro or the second keyboardist. The rhythm section are restrained, sensitive. 69-year-old Hodgson’s high voice remains strong and Jon Anderson-like, and the coup de theatre when he ascends to the Albert Hall’s central organ to play a number solo – “another bucket list tick” he smiles – is touching.
Dreamer gets everyone on their feet before the finale of Fool’s Overture – the 11-minute prog opus that isn’t quite as engrossing as you sense he thinks it is – sits them down again. Yet on the encore of Give A Little
Bit and It’s Raining Again, the man in white’s knack for magnetic hooks is clear. A delightful respite from reality.