Crime of the Century took six months and a farmhouse and forty-two demos. Its follow-up got a few weeks, no songs, two continents and a band that had just come off a long tour and wanted to sleep. A&M wanted the record while the iron was hot; Supertramp gave them one, called it Crisis? What Crisis? and put a man in a deckchair on the front of it, sunbathing while the world burned. Everyone in the band spent the next decade apologising for it. Everyone outside the band has spent the fifty years since wondering what they were apologising for.

The short version

Crisis? What Crisis? is Supertramp’s fourth album, released late in 1975 by A&M, with the same line-up and the same producer as Crime of the Century: Rick Davies on keyboards and vocals, Roger Hodgson on vocals, guitars and keyboards, John Anthony Helliwell on wind instruments and vocals, Dougie Thomson on bass and Bob Siebenberg on drums, again billed as Bob C. Benberg, with Ken Scott co-producing and engineering. The basic tracks were cut in the summer of 1975 at A&M Studios in Los Angeles — the first time the band had recorded in America — then continued at Ramport in London and finished at Scorpio Sound that autumn. Richard Hewson wrote the orchestra and choir parts. Ten tracks, about forty-seven minutes. It reached number 20 in Britain and number 44 in America, neither single charted at all, and it still went platinum in Canada and gold in France and Germany.

No time, no songs, no plan

The label had been waiting since 1970 for Supertramp to sell something and had no intention of letting the moment pass. The band came off the Crime tour and went almost straight into the studio, which left no gap for the one thing that had made the last album work: writing. They went in with leftovers from the Crime sessions and older, and at one point stopped recording altogether because they had run out of material and Davies and Hodgson had to go away and write two more, one of them Ain’t Nobody But Me. The only breathing space they got came by accident, when Hodgson injured his hand on the North American leg and the rest of the dates were cancelled. Hodgson later called the record a patch-up job and said they had learned how not to make an album; Thomson thought it disjointed and reckoned nobody in the band much liked it. Then, in the Eighties, Hodgson started calling it his favourite Supertramp album, and he was still saying so in 2015. Both statements are true, which tells you something about how bands remember their own records.

The sound

Looser, warmer and more varied than anything around it. Where Crime is a piano album with a plan, this one is guitars, twelve-strings, accordion, clarinet, whistling and an electric sitar, arranged by a band with no unifying concept and therefore nothing to protect. Scott’s production is as clean as ever, and the Los Angeles sunshine got into the tape somewhere between the acoustic strum of Sister Moonshine and the bar-room piano of Another Man’s Woman. What it lacks is the throughline: the songs do not talk to each other and the second side in particular wanders. What it has instead is the two writers at their most unguarded, Hodgson going gentle and Beatle-ish, Davies going bluesy and theatrical, neither of them building towards a statement. It is the least self-conscious album Supertramp made in the Seventies, which is precisely what the band held against it.

The songs

Easy Does It is two minutes of street noise, whistling and Hodgson at his most George Harrison, and it works as an overture to a record that then refuses to have a theme. Sister Moonshine is the one everybody defends: twelve-string, harmonica, Siebenberg’s floor toms and a melody Nick DeRiso reckons contains the seed of Give a Little Bit. Ain’t Nobody But Me is the emergency song written mid-session and one of the hardest things Davies ever put his name to. A Soapbox Opera brings in Hewson’s choir and orchestra and is the closest the album comes to Crime of the Century territory. Another Man’s Woman is the highlight for most people, blues piano and a long wordless ending that the Paris live album turned into a monster. Lady is the bouncy Wurlitzer single that would have been a hit three years later, Poor Boy is the odd little swing number with Helliwell’s clarinet and accordion, Just a Normal Day is the ballad where Davies and Hodgson share a vocal instead of trading them, The Meaning builds to the best band performance on the record, and Two of Us closes it quietly and can be heard, if you like, as one songwriter singing about the other.

Reception and legacy

The reviews were rough. Rolling Stone dismissed it and made a particular meal of the lyrics; British radio played it heavily anyway, and Record Mirror put it on its albums of the year list, which gives you the range. AllMusic’s retrospective went the other way entirely and praised almost everything the original notices had complained about. The title, contrary to popular belief, is not lifted from the newspaper headline that stalked British politics in the winter of 1979 — the album came first, by four years, and Davies took the phrase from a line in the 1973 film The Day of the Jackal. The sleeve was his idea too, sketched out in the studio waiting room while the sessions dragged: a man in a deckchair with a drink and a newspaper, entirely untroubled by the industrial wreckage behind him. Paul Wakefield, back from Crime of the Century, shot the backgrounds in the Welsh mining valleys and composited the sunbather in afterwards. It became one of the best-known covers of the decade, which is a reasonable outcome for a doodle.

The verdict

Not the place to start — that is Crime of the Century — but the first place to go once you have exhausted the famous four. This is the record for people who like Supertramp songs more than they like the Supertramp legend, and the absence of a hit single is exactly why it has aged so gracefully: nothing on it was designed to work on the radio in 1975, so nothing on it sounds like 1975. Start with Another Man’s Woman, then Sister Moonshine, then A Soapbox Opera, and remember that the man who called it a patch-up job also came to call it his favourite.

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