Someone carried a gutted grand piano up a Colorado ski mountain, left it out overnight and photographed it in the morning under fresh snow. That is the cover, and it is not a painting or a montage: the piano was really up there, and the sheet music propped on it says Fool’s Overture but is actually The Star-Spangled Banner. Everything about Even in the Quietest Moments... is like that — elegant, deliberate and quietly absurd. It is the last album Supertramp made before the world decided who they were, it contains their first proper hit and their longest piece of progressive rock, and the two of them sit four tracks apart on the same record without either one flinching.

The short version

Even in the Quietest Moments... is Supertramp’s fifth album, released in April 1977 by A&M, with the classic line-up intact: Rick Davies on keyboards and vocals, Roger Hodgson on vocals, guitars and keyboards, John Helliwell on wind instruments, Dougie Thomson on bass and Bob Siebenberg on drums, still credited as Bob C. Benberg. The band produced it themselves. Peter Henderson engineered — the first of four Supertramp albums for him — and Geoff Emerick, the man who engineered Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road, mixed it. Michel Colombier handled the orchestral arrangements with the band, and Gary Mielke programmed the Oberheim. Seven tracks, four of them over six minutes. It reached number 16 on the Billboard 200, the band’s first American top twenty and their first gold record there, and topped the chart in Canada and the Netherlands. Give a Little Bit went to 15 in America and 29 in Britain.

Up the mountain

The band had moved to the United States by this point, for the usual mixture of tax and weather, and Hodgson wanted out of Los Angeles to make the record. So they booked the Caribou Ranch, a studio on a mountaintop outside Denver, and discovered what thin air does to a human being. Voices came out wrong. Helliwell could barely play the saxophone at that altitude. Davies’s account is admirably dry about it: they finished the thing back in Los Angeles at the Record Plant, where the sax parts, the vocals and a good deal of the overdubbing were redone and the album was mixed. Every song is credited to Davies and Hodgson, as always, and as always that is a contract rather than a fact. Davies wrote Lover Boy, Downstream and From Now On. Hodgson wrote Give a Little Bit, the title track, Babaji and Fool’s Overture. Each man sings his own.

The sound

Acoustic, spacious and unusually still. This is the one Supertramp album with no Wurlitzer on it anywhere — the instrument that defines the band is simply absent, replaced by grand piano, twelve-string guitar, string machine and Colombier’s orchestrations, with a Fender Rhodes making a brief appearance in the middle of From Now On and then leaving. Take the Wurlitzer away and the group sounds like a different proposition: quieter, more English, closer to a chamber record than a rock one. Emerick’s mix gives it enormous air, which suits an album whose best moments are made of birdsong, clarinet, a single piano and a voice. It is also the last time the band would let a song take eleven minutes to say what it had to say. Two years later they would say it in three and a half and sell four million copies.

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The songs

Give a Little Bit is the twelve-string hook that saved the band’s commercial life after the Crisis? What Crisis? dip, and it has outlived every argument anyone ever had about it. Lover Boy is Davies’s joke at the expense of the seduction manuals advertised in the back of men’s magazines, and it earns its long central section. The title track was mostly written at a soundcheck and works as a love song addressed either to a woman or to God, depending on the listener; Hodgson has never chosen between the two. Downstream is Davies alone, voice and piano recorded together in one take, and it is Siebenberg’s favourite on the album precisely because there is nothing on it but a man and a piano. Babaji comes out of Hodgson’s time in India and is named for the figure he had gone looking for. From Now On builds from a low mutter to a gospel singalong with a Helliwell solo in the middle. And then Fool’s Overture: working title The String Machine Epic, five years in the writing, eleven minutes long, opening on a collage of a Churchill broadcast from June 1940, Big Ben, sirens, a flageolet playing Venus from Holst’s The Planets and a reading from Blake, before Hodgson finally arrives at the piano and the band builds the biggest thing they ever built. It closes on a fragment of Dreamer, which is either a joke or a full stop.

Reception and legacy

It did what Crisis? What Crisis? had failed to do and put Supertramp back on the radio without asking them to become a pop group, and it went gold in America within months of release. In 1978 Paul Gambaccini’s World Critic Lists, voted for by four dozen critics and DJs, placed it 63rd among the greatest albums ever made. AllMusic’s later verdict called it elegant yet mildly absurd, which is a fair description of a band who put a piano on a mountain and then filled the record with birds and clarinets. Mike Doud art-directed the sleeve, two years before the sleeve he art-directed for Breakfast in America won a Grammy; Bob Seidemann took the photograph at the Eldora Mountain Resort, up the road from the studio. The band toured it across North America for four months and seventy-odd shows starting in Regina in April 1977, and two of these songs, From Now On and Fool’s Overture, survived onto the Paris live album two years later, when they were a much bigger band playing to much bigger rooms.

The verdict

The connoisseur’s Supertramp album. Crime of the Century is the better record and Breakfast in America is the bigger one, but this is the one that rewards the most attention, and the fans who rate it first are not being contrary. Start with Fool’s Overture and give it the full eleven minutes; then go back to Downstream, which does almost as much with a hundredth of the equipment. If Give a Little Bit is the only thing you know from it, you have heard the least interesting song on the album, and that is the strangest compliment a hit single can be paid.

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