The title was meant as a joke. By the time the tour ended it had become a prophecy, and the burning match on the cover looked less like a design choice than a diagnosis. This is the last Supertramp album with Roger Hodgson, the last by the line-up that made Crime of the Century and Breakfast in America, and the sound of two songwriters who could no longer agree on what record they were making — so they made half of each.

The short version

...Famous Last Words... is Supertramp’s seventh studio album, released by A&M in October 1982. The line-up is the classic one: Roger Hodgson, Rick Davies, John Helliwell, Dougie Thomson and Bob Siebenberg. The band co-produced with Peter Henderson, their long-serving soundman, who also engineered. Nine tracks. As always, every song is credited to Davies and Hodgson — but for the first time the lyrics printed on the inner sleeve are colour-coded by author, which tells you everything. Hodgson wrote five, Davies four. It reached the top ten in both Britain and America and went gold in the States, with It’s Raining Again reaching number eleven and My Kind of Lady number thirty-one. Then Hodgson left.

Two albums, two houses

Breakfast in America had gone four times platinum and given them their first American number one. What followed was a nine-month tour of a hundred and twenty shows, which Hodgson later said very nearly killed the band and certainly killed his appetite for it. By the time they reconvened, he and Davies were living in different parts of California and had arrived, separately, at two entirely incompatible plans. Hodgson wanted another pop album in the mould of Breakfast in America. Davies wanted a heavy progressive record built around a ten-minute piece called Brother Where You Bound. Hodgson vetoed it — it would have looked absurd next to the lighter material — and the band shelved the song. Even the geography was a standoff: Hodgson would not come down to Los Angeles, Davies would not go up into the mountains where Hodgson lived. Siebenberg’s account is the funniest and the saddest thing in the story — he, Helliwell and Thomson simply did not care, travelled back and forth, and ended up recording most of it at Hodgson’s place to keep the peace. Davies cut his own parts at his home studio in Encino. Siebenberg later said the record had been watered down from what either man intended and ended up belonging to neither camp, and that in hindsight it was plainly where the end began.

The sound

Bright, glossy and expensively made, with a dark album trying to get out from underneath. The Hodgson songs are aimed frankly at radio: airy, melodic, textured, occasionally weightless. The Davies songs go the other way — blues, jazz, doo-wop, an old-fashioned piano heart — and are consistently the more interesting for it. Helliwell’s saxophone and clarinet remain immaculate throughout, Thomson’s bass is quietly excellent, and Davies’s electric piano is worth the admission on its own. What is missing is the thing that made the band: the sense of two writers pushing each other. Here they simply alternate, and the running order slams a mournful minor-key opener straight into a jaunty blues shuffle, which does the record no favours at all. Rearranged, as many listeners have discovered, it plays considerably better. That is not a compliment to the sequencing.

The songs

Crazy opens on a dark, urgent, rattling figure with Helliwell’s saxophone across it. Put On Your Old Brown Shoes is the Davies blues, nostalgic and warm, with a flute and — unexpectedly — Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart on backing vocals. It’s Raining Again is the hit, and a very good one: melancholy underneath, sunny on top, with a spoken French line lifted from an old nursery rhyme, and a video that took the band into the MTV era. Bonnie is Davies again. Know Who You Are closes side one alone with a voice and a picked acoustic guitar, and its bareness says more about the state of the band than any interview did. My Kind of Lady is a 1950s piano ballad and the album’s other hit, and it settles an argument: the falsetto in the chorus is not Hodgson, it is Davies, singing out of his natural baritone with the help of double-tracking and a phaser. C’est le Bon is crisp and airy, with the Wilsons again. And then the two closers, which is where the album finally becomes what it might have been throughout: Waiting So Long is Davies stretching out, and Don’t Leave Me Now is Hodgson’s farewell — grand, spacious, piano-driven and genuinely moving, the one track everybody agrees belongs with their best work.

Reception and legacy

Top ten on both sides of the Atlantic, gold in America, two hit singles — and by Supertramp’s standards a disappointment, because Breakfast in America had set a bar nothing was going to clear. The critical line, then and now, is that the album is over-polished and under-written, that Hodgson’s romantic ballads replaced the lyrical sharpness the band once had, and that the playing, while accomplished, no longer astonishes. The defence is that six of these nine songs are very good indeed, and that the record is the victim of its own sequencing and its own predecessor. What is beyond argument is what it meant. Hodgson spent the tour telling audiences he was leaving; the last show was in California in September 1983, and that was the end of the classic line-up. He went off to make his solo debut. Davies took Brother Where You Bound, the song that had been thrown off this album for being too heavy, expanded it to sixteen minutes, and built the next Supertramp record around it — the record he had wanted to make in the first place.

The verdict

Not the place to start — that is Crime of the Century, then Breakfast in America. Come here fourth or fifth, and come knowing you are listening to a divorce. Don’t Leave Me Now is the essential track and one of Hodgson’s finest. Waiting So Long is the Davies album that never was, in miniature. It’s Raining Again is a lovely single. The rest is a compromise nobody in the band wanted, made with enormous skill by five musicians at the top of their craft and the bottom of their patience. As epitaphs go, the title chose itself.

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