After Free as a Bird flopped in 1987 Supertramp simply stopped, without a farewell tour or a statement, and stayed stopped for ten years. When Rick Davies came back in 1997 he did not chase the charts. He hired Jack Douglas — the producer of Aerosmith’s best records and of John Lennon’s Double Fantasy — put the Wurlitzer back where it belonged, wrote a nine-minute opening track and let the band play. The title is either a promise or a joke, depending on your mood. What it is not is false advertising: this is the most Supertramp-sounding album anybody made after 1982.

The short version

Some Things Never Change is Supertramp’s tenth studio album, released on 24 March 1997 by EMI, their first record of new material in a decade. Rick Davies sings and plays keyboards and wrote all twelve songs bar the two he co-wrote with Mark Hart, who is on vocals, guitars and keyboards. John Helliwell is back on saxophone and woodwinds, Bob Siebenberg on drums, Carl Verheyen on guitar, with Cliff Hugo on bass, Lee Thornburg on trumpet and trombone, Tom Walsh on percussion and Karen Lawrence among the backing vocalists. Jack Douglas produced, Jay Messina engineered, Fred Mandel produced one track. It was recorded at Ocean Way in Hollywood and The Backyard Studios in Encino, mixed at Manhattan Center Studios in New York and mastered at Gateway in Portland, Maine. Twelve tracks, sixty-nine minutes — the longest album they ever made.

The reunion that was not

Two men were missing. Roger Hodgson had been gone since 1983 and was not coming back, and everyone in 1997 knew it, including EMI’s marketing department, which was not enormously keen to lead with the fact. The other absence surprised people more: Dougie Thomson, the bassist since 1972, who had played the whole classic run and the 1988 tour, did not take part and never played on a Supertramp record again. Cliff Hugo took the bass chair and did the job well enough that nobody sensible complained. What Davies had instead was time, a proper budget and a producer with an actual pedigree, and the difference from the last two albums is audible in the first thirty seconds. Where Free as a Bird had chased 1987, this chases nothing. It sounds like a band in a room. The 1997 tour that followed was long and well received, and produced the live double It Was the Best of Times in 1999.

The sound

Warm, jazzy, unhurried, and recorded beautifully — Douglas and Messina give it the depth and space that the Eighties records conspicuously lacked. The Wurlitzer is front and centre for the first time in fifteen years, Helliwell has a horn section to talk to rather than a synthesiser, and Verheyen and Hugo are serious players given serious room. If you want a comparison, it is closer to Steely Dan than to Crime of the Century: rhythm and blues arranged with jazz manners, several songs stretching past six minutes because the players had something to say rather than because a concept demanded it. The catch is the one that never goes away. There is no Hodgson tenor to answer Davies’s growl, and Mark Hart, talented as he is, is not a substitute for that argument — nobody was. Twelve tracks in one register is two or three tracks too many, and the album would be sharper at fifty minutes.

The songs

It’s a Hard World opens with nearly ten minutes about a man waiting for a break that is not coming, and it is the best thing Davies wrote after Brother Where You Bound: brass, jazz, a slow-burn build and a lyric with real teeth. You Win, I Lose is the single and the ear-worm, the trademark Wurlitzer bounce with a wry lyric, and it charted modestly in Germany and Canada. Its video is the oddest artefact in the Supertramp story — directed by David Hogan and starring Anna Nicole Smith and Udo Kier, which is a sentence about a progressive rock band from Swindon by way of Los Angeles. Get Your Act Together and Live to Love You are the straighter ones, the latter carrying a lovely clarinet solo. The title track is funk with a good guitar break. Listen to Me Please went out as a second single and reads, to most listeners, as a song about what managers promise musicians. Sooner or Later is the long jam, co-written with Hart. Help Me Down That Road is the blues. And the Light dates back to a demo from the Hodgson years. Give Me a Chance is Hart’s vocal, and C’est What? runs eight minutes and earns most of them. Where There’s a Will closes it on piano and a choir, more or less a gospel number.

Reception and legacy

It barely registered on the charts and it did not need to. Among the people who kept following the band it is the consensus best of the post-Hodgson albums, and even the reviewers who cannot forgive the absence tend to concede the playing and the sound. Prog Archives regulars, who are not a soft crowd, rate it well and single out the same tracks every time: It’s a Hard World, You Win, I Lose, Listen to Me Please, And the Light. The complaint is always length and always sameness, never quality. Two of its songs made the Retrospectacle anthology in 2005, which for a 1997 Supertramp album is a small vindication. Five years later Davies made Slow Motion, took back the lead vocals he had shared with Hart here, and that was the end.

The verdict

The one late Supertramp album worth going out of your way for. Not because it recaptures anything — it does not, and it has the sense not to try — but because it is a properly made record by excellent musicians who no longer had anything to prove to anybody. Start with It’s a Hard World and give it the full ten minutes. If it lands, the rest will too; if it does not, You Win, I Lose is still the best three-and-a-half minutes Rick Davies wrote in the second half of his career. Play it after Brother Where You Bound and before Slow Motion, and the last twenty years of this band suddenly make a lot more sense than the rankings suggest.

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