Two years after handing the world a sixteen-minute Cold War epic with David Gilmour on it, Rick Davies made a dance record. Not a rock album with dance rhythms — an actual late-Eighties pop record, with house remixes, a brass section six players deep and a lead single that went to number one on the American club chart. Free as a Bird sold almost nothing, reached 101 on the Billboard 200, spent a single week in the British chart at 93, and ended both Supertramp’s seventeen years on A&M and the band itself. It is the album everybody skips. It is also stranger and better than its reputation, and it has always had defenders.

The short version

Free as a Bird is Supertramp’s ninth studio album, released in October 1987 by A&M and their last record of new material for the label. The band is Rick Davies on vocals, keyboards and timbales, John Helliwell on saxophone and brass, Dougie Thomson on bass and Bob Siebenberg on drums, joined by Mark Hart on keyboards, guitar and vocals as a full member for the first time. Marty Walsh plays guitar, Steve Reid percussion, and a six-man brass section led by trumpeter Lee Thornburg is on much of it. Davies wrote everything except Where I Stand, which is Hart’s. It was recorded at The Backyard Studio in Encino and Ocean Way in Hollywood — the same rooms as Brother Where You Bound — produced by Davies with the band, engineered by Norman Hall, mixed by Tom Lord-Alge at Larrabee Sound and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Nine tracks, about forty-four minutes.

The end of the A&M years

Brother Where You Bound had been a statement: Davies proving that Supertramp without Roger Hodgson could still be ambitious, and being rewarded with number 21 in America and a shrug. Free as a Bird is what happens next, when a man who has proved his point decides to stop making it. The obvious reading is capitulation to 1987 — the synthesisers, the programmed feel, the club mixes — and the obvious reading is not entirely wrong. But Davies had been writing rhythm and blues since before the band existed, and what he actually reaches for here is not the Top 40 so much as Latin and jazz and funk, played by real horn players. Mark Hart’s arrival matters too: he brought a second voice and a song, and he would stay with Supertramp for the rest of their working life. The World Migration Tour of 1988 followed, then the Live ’88 album, and then the band stopped. Davies did not make another Supertramp record for a decade, and Dougie Thomson, who had joined in 1972, never played on one again.

The sound

Glossy, rhythmic and completely of its moment. The Wurlitzer is back but it is buried under programmed drums, sequenced synth and Lord-Alge’s enormous late-Eighties mix, and the record leans on groove where every earlier Supertramp album leaned on melody. The brass is the best thing on it — Thornburg’s section is genuinely tight, and when the horns and Helliwell’s saxophone get room the album sounds like nothing else in the catalogue. What it never does is build. There is no long piece, no key change into open country, no moment where the band takes off; every song stays exactly the size it started. Davies’s voice, as ever, is a pleasure. The production around it is what dates, and it dates hard: this is the only Supertramp album whose sound belongs to a specific eighteen months rather than to the band.

The songs

It’s Alright opens on a Latin-jazz lilt and is the one track Lord-Alge co-produced, which tells you where the label thought the money was; it became a European single in 1988. Not the Moment and It Doesn’t Matter are the pop middle, competent and unmemorable in roughly equal measure. Where I Stand is Mark Hart’s song and his audition, and it holds its own. The title track is the one worth the admission: gospel-tinged, generous, with the closest thing to a Supertramp chorus on the record, and it went out as a single in December 1987 with a video. I’m Beggin’ You was the lead single and the album’s only real success — house-inflected, remixed to extended length, and a number one on the American dance club chart in early 1988, which is not a sentence anyone expected to write about this band. You Never Can Tell with Friends is Davies bending big-band jazz into rock the way he always has. Thing for You produces an unannounced reggae lilt from nowhere. An Awful Thing to Waste closes the album with a middle section that recalls the groove of Cannonball, and even the album’s harshest critics tend to make an exception for it.

Reception and legacy

It failed commercially in a way none of their records had since 1971, and the reviews were unkind at the time and have not softened much: Ultimate Classic Rock’s ranking puts it at the bottom of the discography, and fan polls agree. The counter-argument exists and is worth hearing. Strip away the era and what is left is Davies writing about loss of control and the small mechanics of a life, in Latin, jazz, funk and gospel settings, with one of the better brass sections in Los Angeles playing them. The sleeve deserves a mention on its own: the front is Mariette Lachaud’s 1954 photograph of Georges Braque at work in his studio on one of his bird paintings, with the bird itself die-cut so the colour of the inner sleeve shows through, and the LP was issued in four different colours — blue, green, pink and yellow. It is a beautiful object wrapped around a record almost nobody bought.

The verdict

The last place to go, and only once everything else is exhausted. Nothing here will change your mind about Supertramp, and if you came for the Wurlitzer and the two voices you will find one voice and a drum machine. But it is not the disaster the rankings suggest, and it is the sound of a songwriter who had already made his serious statement two years earlier and fancied a bit of fun before the lights went out. Start with the title track, stay for An Awful Thing to Waste, and treat I’m Beggin’ You as the strangest footnote in the band’s history: the only Supertramp record to top an American chart, and it was the one they played in nightclubs.

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