In 1985 the sensible thing for a progressive rock band to do was keep quiet about it. Supertramp had just lost the man who sang most of the hits, the charts belonged to synthesisers and hairspray, and the obvious move was a tidy record of four-minute singles. Rick Davies wrote six songs instead, gave most of the second side to a sixteen-minute suite about Cold War paranoia, opened it with a reading from Orwell and hired David Gilmour to play the solos. Brother Where You Bound is the least commercial decision Supertramp ever made, at the exact moment they could least afford it, and it is the best thing they did after Breakfast in America.

The short version

Brother Where You Bound is Supertramp’s eighth studio album, released in May 1985 by A&M, and the first made without Roger Hodgson, who had departed after 1982’s ...Famous Last Words... and formalised the split in 1983. The band is a quartet: Rick Davies on keyboards and vocals, John Helliwell on saxophone, Dougie Thomson on bass and Bob Siebenberg on drums. Davies wrote all six songs, words and music, and sings every one of them. It was recorded at Ocean Way Recording in Hollywood and The Backyard Studio in Encino, co-produced by the band with David Kershenbaum, engineered by Norman Hall and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Six tracks, roughly forty-three minutes. It reached number 21 in America and number 20 at home, with higher placings across continental Europe, and the opening track, Cannonball, gave the band their last American top forty single at number 28. Guests include David Gilmour and Scott Gorham on the title track.

Life after the falsetto

The split left Davies holding the band name and Hodgson holding the publishing on his own songs, which is a neat summary of what each man valued. What Davies had left was a rhythm section, a saxophonist and no second voice at all, and the sceptics assumed the answer would be a session singer or a Hodgson impersonator. He hired neither. He also did not start from nothing: the title track had been rehearsed for ...Famous Last Words... and pulled before the finish, and the closing ballad came from the same batch of demos. By most accounts the atmosphere around that last album with the classic line-up was poor enough that Davies preferred to hold back the piece he was proudest of rather than spend it there. Three years later he had a band that answered to him, an album with room for it, and a point to prove. Even then the group waited several months before touring, unsure whether an audience would show up for a Supertramp without both voices. The audience showed up.

The sound

Dark, wide and startlingly clean. The Wurlitzer chime of the Seventies is still there, but the foreground now belongs to grand piano, Fairlight and PPG samples programmed by Gary Chang, and Synclavier textures from Anthony Marinelli and Brian Banks. This is 1985 gear used with taste rather than enthusiasm: no gated snare, no chorus pedal on everything, just a very large room recorded very precisely. Helliwell’s saxophone takes over the space Hodgson’s tenor used to occupy and pushes the record towards jazz and blues, which was always Davies’s home ground. Guitar is scarce by design, with Marty Walsh handling most of what there is. And with only one singer, the argument that powered the classic albums is gone: nobody answers Davies back, so the mood settles into his register and stays there. That is the trade. You lose the contrast and gain a record that means one thing all the way through.

The songs

Cannonball is the hit and the outlier: seven minutes of hard funk built on a piano figure, horns and a sax break, written entirely in G minor because Davies wanted to know whether it could be done. Everyone assumed the lyric was about Hodgson; Davies said it was about a concert promoter he declined to name. Still in Love is the light one, carried by a Helliwell solo. No Inbetween opens on a bittersweet piano and keyboard figure and is darker than it first sounds. Better Days looks at the promises of Western prosperity and finds them unpaid, with flute from guest Scott Page, and fades out on the voices of the four candidates from the 1984 American presidential election, Reagan and Bush in one channel and Mondale and Ferraro in the other, drifting over Helliwell’s saxophone. Then the title track: sixteen and a half minutes, the longest thing Supertramp ever recorded, opening on a needle dropping into a groove, a reading from Nineteen Eighty-Four, scraps of newsreel, the last lines of Oranges and Lemons and a snatch of The Internationale, before the band arrives in unison and Davies delivers the vocal of his career. Scott Gorham of Thin Lizzy, then Siebenberg’s brother-in-law, plays rhythm guitar; Gilmour plays the solos, and plays them slightly against type, sharper and more agitated than the long Floyd sighs people expect. Ever Open Door closes the album in three quiet minutes, and after all that noise the quiet is the point.

Reception and legacy

The reviews were warmer than anyone predicted and the sales were not. Twenty-one in America is respectable and it is also a long way down from a six-week number one. AllMusic’s verdict has held up: the politics are heavy-handed and dated, the music is a pleasure, and the sound of the thing is remarkable. Norman Moore’s sleeve ran with an evolution motif that fit the title better than most Eighties artwork fit anything. Rene Daalder shot a long, bleak promo film for the title track in the derelict Pan-Pacific Auditorium with the actor Chris Mulkey, and it drew complaints for how unsparing it was, which at least meant somebody noticed. What did not happen was a follow-up in the same direction. Free as a Bird went towards dance rhythms and drum machines two years later, and the band never again gave sixteen minutes to a single idea. Among Supertramp fans the album has spent forty years being rediscovered, one sceptic at a time.

The verdict

Not the place to start — that is Crime of the Century, and if you want the pop peak it is Breakfast in America. Start here when you have heard those and want to know what happened next, because the received story of Supertramp ends in 1983 and this album is the evidence that it should not. Cannonball is a genuinely odd hit, Better Days is the one that grows, and the title track is the most ambitious sixteen minutes the band ever committed to tape. Davies, who died in 2025, made three more Supertramp albums and never again reached this far. It is the sound of a man with nothing left to compromise about, which is a strange gift for a band to receive from a break-up.

Browse the bookshelf in the footer →