By 1973 Supertramp had made two albums nobody bought, lost an entire band, played every venue in England that would have them and run up a large debt to the Dutch millionaire who had been paying their bills. He forgave the debt and walked away. Their label gave them one more go, a manager and a farmhouse in the West Country, and Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson went in and wrote roughly forty-two songs. Eight of them came out the other side as Crime of the Century, and everything anybody thinks of as the Supertramp sound — the Wurlitzer, the saxophone, the two voices, the immaculate production — starts here, fully formed, on the third attempt.

The short version

Crime of the Century is Supertramp’s third album, released in the autumn of 1974 by A&M, and the first by the line-up everyone remembers: Rick Davies on keyboards, harmonica and vocals, Roger Hodgson on guitar, pianos and vocals, John Anthony Helliwell on saxophone and clarinet, Dougie Thomson on bass and Bob Siebenberg on drums, credited on the sleeve as Bob C. Benberg. It was recorded between February and June 1974 at Trident, Ramport (the studio the Who owned) and Scorpio Sound in London, co-produced by the band with Ken Scott, engineered by Scott and John Jansen, with string arrangements by Richard Hewson. Eight tracks, about forty-three minutes. It reached number four in Britain and number 38 in America, the band’s first showing there, and went gold in the States three years later on the back of a different album. Rolling Stone later placed it 28th on its list of the fifty greatest progressive rock albums. The dedication on the sleeve reads simply: To Sam.

The farmhouse and the forty-two songs

Sam was Stanley August Miesegaes, the Dutch millionaire who had bankrolled Supertramp from 1969 and, by the end, was owed a great deal of money for his trouble. He wrote it off and stepped back. A&M’s Dave Margereson took over as manager, sent the rebuilt band to a rented farmhouse in the West Country and told them not to come back without an album. What came back was a stack of around forty-two demos, from which eight made the record; several of the rest turned up on Crisis? What Crisis? and, almost a decade later, on ...Famous Last Words.... Every song is credited to Davies and Hodgson, which was a contractual arrangement rather than a description of events: by 1974 they were largely writing alone. Asylum is Davies’s, Hide in Your Shell is Hodgson’s, and School and the title track are the genuine joint efforts. Ken Scott, who had engineered at Abbey Road and produced Ziggy Stardust, put it plainly enough: two very different personalities, and the difference is what the music sounds like.

The sound

Enormous, patient and absurdly clean. Scott gives the record a hi-fi clarity that still embarrasses most things recorded since, and the band uses the space rather than filling it: harmonica alone at the start of School, a whole minute before anyone else arrives; the sound of a train pulled off a tape recorded at Paddington; Hewson’s strings arriving only where they earn their keep. The two voices are already doing the thing they would do for the next decade, Hodgson’s high boyish tenor against Davies’s blues-club growl, and Helliwell’s saxophone is already carrying the melodies a guitarist would take in any other band. What separates this from the later albums is the pace. Nothing here is in a hurry to reach a chorus. Songs run to six and seven minutes, stop, change key, come back different, and the whole record is loosely tied together by a mood of loneliness and strain that the band insisted was not a concept and everyone treated as one anyway.

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The songs

School opens with the harmonica and the schoolyard and builds to the piano break that made a generation of teenagers turn the volume up, and Davies deliberately hands it over to Bloody Well Right with a lyrical callback — the only thread he ever admitted to. Bloody Well Right is the funny one, wah-wah and sarcasm and two of Helliwell’s best solos, and it became the American hit almost by accident: it was the B-side of Dreamer there, and radio flipped the record. Hide in Your Shell is Hodgson at twenty-three, working out in public what he could not work out in private, and remains the one fans get emotional about. Asylum is Davies’s counterweight, theatrical and unsettled. Dreamer is the hit: written on a Wurlitzer at his mother’s house when Hodgson was nineteen, demoed with cardboard boxes for drums, and so hard to recreate in the studio that they eventually put the original demo on the multitrack and played along with it. Rudy is the seven-minute character study, complete with the Paddington train and a crowd taped in Leicester Square. If Everyone Was Listening borrows its idea from As You Like It and its clarinet from nowhere else. Then the title track: five minutes that end on a long piano figure and a string arrangement that keeps climbing after the words have stopped, and it is the best ending Supertramp ever wrote.

Reception and legacy

It took its time. Number four in Britain came in March 1975, months after release, with seventeen weeks on the chart behind it; the American gold disc arrived in 1977, when Even in the Quietest Moments... sent people back to find it. Since then it has been voted into every list going, from 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die to Rolling Stone’s prog fifty, and Classic Rock has called it a masterpiece of the form without qualification. Paul Wakefield’s cover did as much work as any of the songs. It was his first album sleeve: A&M’s art director Fabio Nicoli sent him to the studio to read the lyrics, he took a line from Asylum about being taunted in a cage, and imagined a prison window floating in open space. His first version had a face screaming behind the bars. He cut it down to two hands, which he decided read as resignation rather than protest, and shot the thing with his twin brother’s hands whitened with stage make-up, twelve exposures on one piece of film, the starfield made from a punctured sheet of black card. School, Bloody Well Right, Rudy and the title track stayed in the set for the rest of the band’s working life.

The verdict

This is the place to start. Breakfast in America is the bigger album and the better pop record, but Crime of the Century is the one where Supertramp are a progressive rock band without apology and without a single wasted track, and it is the only one of their albums that loses nothing at all to the passage of fifty years. Start with School, stay for Hide in Your Shell, and give the title track the last five minutes of your attention rather than half of it. If it works on you, Crisis? What Crisis? is next and is unfairly overlooked. If it does not, nothing else in the catalogue will change your mind.

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