In March 1979 punk had happened, disco was everywhere, and progressive rock was about as fashionable as a Mellotron in a skip. Into that, five Englishmen living in Los Angeles released an album of keyboard-driven art rock with a saxophone on it. It went to number one in America for six weeks, sold four million copies there and three million in France, and won two Grammys. Breakfast in America is the record that proves the 1970s did not end on schedule — and it was very nearly a different album, with a different title, about two men who had stopped speaking to each other.

The short version

Breakfast in America is Supertramp’s sixth album, released on 29 March 1979 by A&M. It was recorded through 1978 at The Village Recorder in Los Angeles, co-produced by the band with the engineer Peter Henderson, who flew out to start it the day after his wedding. The line-up is the classic one: Rick Davies on keyboards and vocals, Roger Hodgson on guitar, keyboards and vocals, John Helliwell on saxophone, Dougie Thomson on bass and Bob Siebenberg on drums. Ten tracks. It topped the charts in America and eight other countries, produced four hit singles, and won Grammys for Best Album Package and Best Engineered Recording, with nominations for Album of the Year and Best Pop Performance. In Britain, The Logical Song and the title track were the only two top ten singles the band ever had at home.

Hello Stranger

The album started as something else entirely. Davies and Hodgson wrote separately but agreed the theme together, and the theme they agreed on was themselves: a record about the clashing worldviews of the band’s two songwriters, to be called Hello Stranger. Hodgson described the idea warmly — that certain songs worked as two people arguing across a table, that their lives had become utterly different but he loved him anyway, and that the contrast was what made Supertramp turn. Then they scrapped it for an album of fun songs, and Hodgson talked Davies out of the old title. What happened in the studio depends entirely on who you ask, and the three surviving accounts cannot be reconciled. Peter Henderson remembered everyone getting on well, in high spirits, buoyed by the tapes and by A&M’s reaction. Hodgson remembered a growing gulf, and a suspicion that Davies disliked much of his material and stayed quiet only because he knew he would be outvoted. And a Melody Maker journalist who spent three days with the band reported that he never once saw the two of them hold a conversation beyond a polite greeting. All three men were there. Take your pick.

The sound

Bright, immaculate and deceptively simple. The engine is the Wurlitzer electric piano, which is on almost everything and gives the record its particular chime, with Davies’s Hammond underneath and Helliwell’s saxophone doing the job a lead guitar would do in any other band. The songs are short and hooky — nobody is going anywhere for eleven minutes — but the arrangements are extravagant: the title track alone brings in tuba, trombone, calliope, tack piano and a pump organ. What holds it together is the contrast between the two voices: Hodgson’s high, nasal, boyish tenor against Davies’s raspy, cynical baritone, alternating song by song like two people who see the world differently and refuse to meet in the middle. Which is exactly what the abandoned concept had been about. They dropped the idea and kept the tension, and the tension is why the album works.

The songs

Gone Hollywood opens on a slow fade and follows a hopeful somebody to Los Angeles to discover that stardom is harder than advertised. It is Davies’s, and his original lyric was darker: the band leaned on him and he rewrote it brighter. The Logical Song is the one everybody knows: autobiographical, driven by Hodgson’s staccato Wurlitzer, a small perfect complaint about an education that answers every question except the ones that matter. It won an Ivor Novello, and Paul McCartney named it his favourite song of the year. Goodbye Stranger is Davies’s biggest hit and a nice piece of recycling — it began as the song meant to give the album its title and its theme, and he rebuilt it into a portrait of a life with no fixed address, closing on an extended Hodgson guitar solo. Breakfast in America is an English boy’s daydream of what an American breakfast with the right girl might be like, delivered on a fairground’s worth of instruments. Take the Long Way Home was the last thing finished: nine of these ten songs were arranged before the band walked into the Village Recorder, and this was the tenth. Lord Is It Mine is the quiet one, and Child of Vision closes the record on the same Wurlitzer that opened The Logical Song.

Reception and legacy

Rolling Stone called it a textbook-perfect piece of post-Beatles English art rock and treated it as a clear improvement on the band’s earlier meandering. Christgau found the hooks undeniable and the substance thin. Both were right, and the public settled the argument: four million copies in America, three million in France, where it remains one of the best-selling albums in the country’s history. The sleeve got its own Grammy, beating Talking Heads and Led Zeppelin. Mike Doud and Mick Haggerty built a Manhattan out of diner crockery sprayed white — cereal boxes, ashtrays, condiment bottles, cutlery for the piers, a breakfast plate for Battery Park — and put the actress Kate Murtagh in front of it as a waitress called Libby, striking the Statue of Liberty pose with a glass of orange juice for a torch and a folding menu for the tablet. One correction, because the misreading is universal: this is not a satire of America. Every member of the band has said the American references were coincidental and no such theme was intended, and Hodgson compares the assumption to the equally stubborn belief that Crime of the Century is a concept album.

The verdict

Not the place to start if you want the progressive Supertramp — that is Crime of the Century. Start here if you want the best pop album any progressive rock band ever made. The Logical Song is close to a perfect single, Goodbye Stranger is Davies at his sharpest, Take the Long Way Home is the one that grows, and the whole thing is over in forty-six minutes without a wasted bar. It was the breakthrough and, as these things go, the beginning of the end: Hodgson left four years later and the two voices never alternated again.

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