Most people who own this album own it by accident, and most people who know the cover could not name a track on it. That is roughly fair. Indelibly Stamped is Supertramp’s second album, made by a band that had lost three quarters of itself, hired replacements weeks before the sessions, and gone into Olympic Studios with no plan beyond staying alive. Roger Hodgson called it the survival album. There is no Wurlitzer manifesto here, no concept, no Ken Scott: just five men playing blues, soul and rock and roll in the hope that somebody would notice. Nobody did, the band fell apart, and three years later they made Crime of the Century.

The short version

Indelibly Stamped is Supertramp’s second album, released on 25 June 1971 by A&M and the first of their records to be issued in the United States. Only Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson survive from the debut: Davies on keyboards, harmonica and vocals, Hodgson now on guitar rather than bass and singing lead for the first time on record. The new men are Frank Farrell on bass, piano and accordion, Kevin Currie on drums and Dave Winthrop on flute and saxophone, all three recruited shortly before recording began. It was cut at Olympic Studios in London across March and April 1971, produced by the band themselves, engineered by Bob Hall with Rufus Cartwright on tape. Ten tracks. It sold nothing, took the band’s benefactor with it, and years later quietly went gold in France and Canada.

A new band, in a hurry

The debut had not sold and the line-up had disintegrated. Richard Palmer, the guitarist and lyricist — later Richard Palmer-James, who would write words for King Crimson — was gone, and so was drummer Robert Millar. Hodgson moved from bass to guitar to cover the gap, three strangers were brought in, and the sessions began almost immediately. Hodgson has been candid about what that produced: no theme, no direction, a band floundering and trying to get back into its manager’s good books. The band’s own sleeve notes conceded that only Travelled bore any resemblance to the first album. What they did not know was that this was the end of the line. Stanley August Miesegaes, the Dutch millionaire who had funded Supertramp since 1969, withdrew his support after this record, and the group effectively ceased to exist. Farrell left first, replaced in 1972 by Dougie Thomson; by 1973 Currie had given way to Bob Siebenberg and Winthrop to John Helliwell, and Supertramp were a different band with the same two songwriters.

The sound

Loud, loose and American. This is Davies getting his own way for the only time in the Hodgson era: rhythm and blues, boogie, soul horns and harmonica, with Winthrop’s saxophone arriving as a lead instrument for the first time in the band’s history. The Wurlitzer is present but doing bar-room work rather than defining anything. Curiously, the album points forward to the wrong decade — the brass-and-blues attack of Remember is much closer to Brother Where You Bound and Free as a Bird, fourteen and sixteen years later, than to anything in between. The two Hodgson pieces pull the other way, acoustic and pastoral and gentle, and the gap between his songs and Davies’s is already the width of the Atlantic. On the later albums that gap is the whole point. Here it just sounds like two men making different records in the same room.

The songs

Your Poppa Don’t Mind opens the album as a bright blues-pop shuffle with a hook and no ambition beyond it. Travelled is Hodgson’s first lead vocal on a Supertramp record, an acoustic piece that builds to a saxophone coda, and the only track the band admitted sounded like their debut. Rosie Had Everything Planned is the one to hear: a waltz somewhere between a chanson and an English folk song, with Farrell’s accordion and a small dark story at its centre, and it is the only original in the entire Supertramp catalogue on which Rick Davies has no writing credit at all. Remember is the monster — multi-tracked saxophones, Davies roaring, harmonica and piano solos, and a sax riff that anyone who knows Bloody Well Right will recognise as a first draft. Forever is softer blues, Potter and Coming Home to See You are the throwaways, and Times Have Changed began life as Times of Rain, written with Palmer before he left, with new words by Davies and Hodgson. A Friend in Need passes. Aries closes the record with flute and a long jazzy jam that sounds like Traffic and is the second-best thing here.

Reception and legacy

It got very little attention and less praise, and the retrospective view has settled on transitional, which is generous. The cover, though, has outlived the music by some distance: a photograph by Keith Morris of the tattooed torso and arms of a topless woman, sleeve design by Bob Hook. For decades the model was assumed to be Rusty Skuse, on the evidence of the names inked on one arm. She was not. Paul Sayce, writing in Tattoo News, identified her as Marion Hollier, tattooed at the Les Skuse studio in Bristol during the 1960s, and a newspaper piece published just after the album came out named her too and reported her fee: forty-five pounds. She said afterwards, plainly enough, that she had not been keen on posing topless and that the money settled it. A&M covered the nipples with two gold stars for the American edition; some later pressings ran the photograph in black and white, and the original British gatefold is the one collectors want.

The verdict

Last on the list, and only for people who want the whole story. There is no version of a Supertramp introduction that starts here: Crime of the Century is three years and one complete rebuild away, and nothing on this record predicts it. What it does give you is Rick Davies unfiltered, before anyone told him what a Supertramp song sounded like, and if you like the blues end of the band you will find more of it here than anywhere else in the catalogue. Play Rosie Had Everything Planned, play Remember, then put it back on the shelf and go and play Crime again. The cover, meanwhile, has been famous for fifty-five years, and the woman on it was paid forty-five pounds.

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