Hide in Your Shell is an epic plea by the Roger Hodgson for the one he loves to open and trust and risk the worst of life and begin living it. It has the same plinking electric piano as the more famous song from this album (we'll get there) but its gentle lead verse vocals and pitch perfect stacked harmonies in the chorus lift it high. Asylum is more on the Randy Newman road as Rick Davies takes his American approach to music and delivers a shuffling power ballad about mental fragility. It opens to a huge showband finish and a tinkling piano playing off into the dark. And that is the old familiar end of side one after four songs.
The peppermint icecream bright Dreamer begins side two with Hodgson's headvoice vocals seemingly taunting someone for their absent-headed ways. A Townshendish bubbling middle section turns this around until the momentum builds to a gloriously shambling reiteration of the opening. I came home from piano lessons one day and saw this on Countdown and marvelled that this deliriously sweet music was possible. It would be years before I heard anything by The Beach Boys so this was a first. Love it to this day.
Davies is back for Rudy and what seems like a continuation of Asylum. The title character feels unseen and disconnected. A galloping orchestral middle section lets the music say more than the lyrics as both Davies and Hodgson trade lines about needing to toughen up. It's Davies epic to match Hodgson's Hide in Your Shell and works fine.
If Everyone was Listening takes the figure about the world as a stage from Shakespeare. It begins as a torchy plaintive ballad but goes all stagey, heavy with blows against the empire of modern life. I don't know how much meaning that sentence has but it does fit in with this song. The song works but it's one that happens when you leave it on rather than one that you head for when playing the record.
The title track is also stagey but there's more of an epic rock opera feel to it. Davies sings out in the dark to his own piano before big bass choirs join him. Big instrumental sections bolster what is a much shorter lyric than I remember. The second section is an elongated fade over a persistent piano figure which goes from a minor chord to its sixth below as orchestral instruments, guitar, sax and synthesis snake around it. It's perfectly well handled and doesn't outstay a second of its welcome.
Supertramp are only remembered by hits and memories radio stations, when someone picks up a 12 string acoustic and starts playing Give a Little Bit, and for providing the songs for ads. That sounds like a slight but it isn't. It means, apart from anything, that they made music with an instant appeal that leaves out any considerations of its original context. Songs like Dreamer could be from next week. That doesn't mean it was forward looking but that artists that consider themselves baroque pop or Wilsonian always end up sounding like Supertramp.
And not just Supertramp. They are in a margin that has not existed for decades and is a little hard to imagine now. They're not alone. These not quite pop or rock or prog outfits like 10CC, Roxy Music, Ace, ELO or Queen adopt anything that helps finish their song arrangements and sounds enough like the other tracks on an album to give them the appearance of being bands rather than songwriters with regular session musicians. Let Genesis, Pink Floyd, Emerson Lake and Palmer noodle and concept away on album charts and in stadiums, the Supertramp stratum could deliver hit singles and LPs with Hipgnosis cover art and a decent place in the AOR charts. No one was surprised if they made concept albums or gathered songs and you could leave their records on without getting up to skip tracks.
It wasn't just absorption. These acts took heart from the dawn of the age of the rock album in the late '60s when royalty bombed the culture with psychedelic opera, scrapbooks of their daily lives or the heavy ambition of a Tommy or S.F. Sorrow. Fans expected things of albums at this time. Whether it was the next two sides of Status Quo headbanging or Bowie's new sophisticated phase, they waited for statements with mindbending cover art and lyric sheets.
This was the band's breakthrough, fuelled by hits in the singles charts the world over and whoever did buy the first two albums had waited not just for this new statement but the success that followed it. This was a reward and more, being coherent and tastefully neat in the distribution of its ideas. At school, it was one of the records that engendered a lot of home taping and, along with Bowie and Led Zeppelin, joined the currency of the cassette swap market. I never owned this one on vinyl but when it recently came up on one of my usual HD online stores I shelled out for it and revisit it now and then with pleasure.
While I sounded like I was dismissing this band and their ilk up there, really, the point I was trying to get to was how when we lost this group of album orientated rock practitioners, we lost a lot of what an album could be. From punk onwards, rock albums began to sound samey all the way through and a value arose that a band should sound present a uniform sound from song to song and that exploration beyond that was all sorts of anathema. That's a pity as it makes a band's identity more pronounced than the music it presents and the music becomes a kind of brand power offering. The chopping and changing according to what a song needs that records in the tradition of this one sound like the songs are compositions, expressions of joys and shocks of living. So, I can snicker at this platter for its flared bombast here and there, but really, it still sounds like the kind of thing I would have waited for rather than just accepted when it arrived.
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