The last Supertramp album ends where the first one began. Tucked among nine new Rick Davies songs is Goldrush, written with Richard Palmer-James around 1970, played as the opening number at every Supertramp show before Crime of the Century, attempted in the studio more than once across thirty years and never once captured to the band’s satisfaction. In 2002 they finally got it. Nobody heard it: in North America the album was sold by mail order from the band’s own website, because no label wanted it. Slow Motion is a quiet, jazzy, unbothered record made by men with nothing left to prove, and it is the full stop on a thirty-two-year discography.

The short version

Slow Motion is Supertramp’s eleventh and final studio album, released on 23 April 2002 through EMI in Europe and, in North America, only through the band’s own label and their website. Rick Davies wrote everything and sang every lead. The band is the one fans knew from 1997’s Some Things Never Change: Davies on keyboards, vocals and harmonica, John Helliwell on saxophone and clarinet, Bob Siebenberg on drums, Mark Hart on vocals, guitars and keyboards, Cliff Hugo on bass, Carl Verheyen on guitars and Lee Thornburg on trumpet, with the addition of Jesse Siebenberg — Bob’s son — on percussion. It was cut mainly at Sonora Recorders in Los Angeles with overdubs at The Backyard Studios in Hampton Bays, New York, and produced by Davies with Mark Hart and engineer Jay Messina. Ten tracks.

The last one

Davies had spent nearly twenty years answering the same question, and by 2002 he had stopped bothering. On Free as a Bird and Some Things Never Change he had given Mark Hart room to write and to sing lead; here he takes it all back. Every song is his, every vocal is his, and the only outside credit belongs to a man who left the band in 1970. Davies also moved from Los Angeles, where he had lived since the mid-Seventies, to New York during the making of it, which is why the overdubs happened three thousand miles from the basic tracks. The album was supported by the One More for the Road tour, roughly eighty-seven shows across Europe and North America between April and September 2002, and then Supertramp went quiet. They came back for the 70-10 anniversary tour in 2010 and worked on and off until 2015, but no more studio albums followed. Davies, who died in 2025, never made another record.

The sound

Smooth, warm and deliberately unhurried — the title is not accidental. This is Davies’s own music at last: rhythm and blues, jazz, horns, Hammond, harmonica, played by a band who had been on the road together for years and sound like it. Helliwell has never played better on a Supertramp record, and the conversations between his saxophone and Thornburg’s trumpet are the reason to own the thing. Verheyen is a serious guitarist and gets space to prove it. What is missing is obvious and unfixable: there is no second voice, no tension, nobody to argue with, and so the record settles into one register and stays there for fifty minutes. Even the sympathetic reviews concede that the mix does the songs no favours. Davies produced it himself, and a producer with more distance might have cut two songs and three minutes from each of the long ones.

The songs

The title track opens the album at a walking pace and is the closest thing here to a single, all groove and Hammond and a lyric about not keeping up. Broken Hearted is the ballad the album needed. Tenth Avenue Breakdown is one of the two long ones and the one where the band actually stretches: a proper jam, Davies’s keyboards at the front, the horns answering him, and it goes on about three minutes past the point it should. A Sting in the Tail swings, and it is the track that most obviously connects to the Davies who wrote Bloody Well Right thirty years earlier. Goldrush is the ghost: a song from the band’s first line-up, written with Richard Palmer-James before he left to become King Crimson’s lyricist, opening act of every early Supertramp concert, never successfully recorded until now. It is not the highlight, but it is the most moving thing on the record simply because of what it is. And Dead Man’s Blues closes the album at length, with the solos and the slow build of the old side-two epics, and it is the best piece here by some distance — the one moment where the last Supertramp album sounds like the first great one.

Reception and legacy

It was reviewed sparsely and rated harshly: the 2004 edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide gave it one star out of five. AllMusic was kinder about the songs than about the record, praising the writing and blaming the production, which is the consensus among the people who actually like it. On Prog Archives it sits at a respectable three out of five across well over a hundred and fifty ratings, with the same refrain each time — fine playing, no Hodgson, no spark. The commercial story is the starkest part: a band that had sold tens of millions of albums could not get this one distributed in America, and shifted it by mail order while seeing out the last of an EMI contract in Europe. Twenty-four years on it remains the hardest Supertramp album to find on a shelf and the easiest to overlook.

The verdict

Not an album to start with and not one to argue about. If you want the band, go to Crime of the Century; if you want Davies at full stretch, go to Brother Where You Bound. Come here last, when you already like the man’s voice and his taste in horns, and take it for what it plainly is: eight musicians in a room, playing jazz-inflected blues with no ambition to sell anything to anyone. Play Dead Man’s Blues first. Then play Goldrush, and remember that it took thirty-two years and eleven albums for a song from the band’s very first set list to finally make it onto a record — the last one.

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