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Saturday, January 5, 2019

Supertramp's 'Breakfast in America' reconsidered

Perhaps it’s a matter of age, temperament, and the amount of your adolescence that you spent hiding from your parents. Confident ‘rock’ albums of the 1970s, whether by pre-punk behemoths Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin or punk posers like The Clash, are these days widely accepted in polite, white, male, middle-class circles. However Supertramp’s ‘Breakfast in America’ (released March 1979) had what for some was a more appropriate soundtrack to ‘suburban’ bedroom angst than the shed-load of pop platitudes that still pervaded about rebellion, ‘frontlines’ and class conflict (including from Pink Floyd). Such bourgeois issues usually didn’t penetrate the minds of those living in net-curtained semis, where entertainment was of the family variety and politics was what two parties usually only did every four or five years.

Album cover of 'Breakfast in America' (released on A&M Records; artwork by Gothic Press, London)

To be fair, Supertramp had, since ‘Crime of the Century’ in 1974, been chronicling, among other things, late teenage fears and, sometimes, coping mechanisms. On ‘Breakfast in America’ however we get the band’s principal singers and songwriters, Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies, in two set-piece lyrical and vocal contests over meaning and materialism in the west. On ‘Goodbye Stranger’, Rick Davies semi-ironically trumpets every young man’s apparent desire for personal freedom of a decidedly non-political kind, while Roger Hodgson’s backing vocal offers some salutary ripostes on the essential emptiness of such a lifestyle. On ‘Child of Vision’ it isn’t so much America that is being taken down by Hodgson with a Christian disdain for hedonism and other sins of Mammon, but the west in general. 

This connected to a me as a schoolboy in Sussex, England who was beginning to question the values he had been brought up on, but who didn’t relate to those for whom calls to ‘destroy’ or ‘revolt’ had provided an effortless, and essentially meaningless, release. Unlike the Sex Pistols’ single, ‘God Save the Queen’, which was banned two years earlier, ‘Logical Song’ was a Top Ten UK hit that actually addressed the stigma that anyone who sought to articulate their social disconnection could be made to feel, rather than moronically equating an economically-struggling social democracy with a ‘fascist regime’. Hodgson expressed what some school kids were feeling, using adjectives shocking to a BBC Radio 1 audience and that admittedly ‘O’ Level English students would be more comfortable with. However he wasn’t being pretentious. When Pink Floyd celebrated illiteracy, and got a surprise Christmas Number One on the backs of working class kids from a north London primary school, they most definitely were.

Above all perhaps, ‘Breakfast in America’ is strong on ‘hooks’, big on ‘catchy’, and shows a band at the peak of its powers. It was to be a pretty abrupt downward trajectory after this album, but then Supertramp’s ability to melodically sing about insanity, adolescence, and loneliness was more at home in the 1970s. At the time that ‘Breakfast in America’ came out, the American rock critic Robert Christgau begrudgingly conceded its musicality but then held it against Supertramp when he claimed that tuneful vocals and beat weren’t the same as feeling and rhythm. Perhaps these things are in the ear of the beholder. However there is emotion aplenty on this album – in voice and subject matter - and ‘Child of Vision’ positively swings. ‘Take the Long Way Home’ chronicles personal alienation; ‘Lord Is It Mine’ has Hodgson laying himself emotionally bare. Alone and in need, he thanks God for giving him hope and teaching him humility, but wrestles aloud with his inability to sustain his faith. Using the ugly language of today: this ‘impacted’ me at the time. The whole of ‘Breakfast in America’ still does, forty years later.

10 comments:

Valerie Grove said...

I had a particularly long bus ride home from my teenage job at the supermarket on a Saturday. I would sit smoking on the always empty top deck singing this entire album to myself. I could probably still do it now. Thank God for the invention of the Walkman! Other lyrics that resonate as much now include:

"And causal conversations, how they bore me. Yeah they go on and on endlessly. There's nothing left to do, ueah you're fading out of view, I might as well talk in my sleep. I could weep."

Neil Partrick said...

Many thanks Valerie. Really good that you got in 'Casual Conversations'. I didn't mention enough Rick Davies songs from this album. This is a particularly good one, and a well-chosen line!

Keith Rodway said...

I agree about Pink Floyd and Roger Waters' philistine attack on child literacy. However, I gave one of a series of talks recently at a renowned university in London. A young woman of formidable intellect who was also on the panel had been home-educated. She said she hadn't realised until she was in her teens that those of her peers who attended state schools had very little grounding in the arts: they had had their innate creativity'educated out of them'. I doubt that Waters had either a similar experience or similar considerations in mind, and teacher friends were appalled by Another Brick in the Wall. But, the song did rail against conformity, and conveyer-belt education, and I sympathize with that.

Great review, well wwritten, considered and insightful. At the time I rejected the record as bourgeois crap, as punk had washed my brain and cleaned out any interest in what I took to be cconventional 'pop'. It makes me want to hear the record again, and reconsider my own prejudices, always the mark of a good review.

Neil Partrick said...

Many thanks for this extensive response Keith. As considered as always. The audience at that renowned university would definitely have benefited from your cultural insights. Point taken about the upside of 'Another Brick in the Wall Part 2'. It's catchy and has a cool guitar solo too.

Keith Rodway said...

It's a good song I think, and the young people singing on it area great, though I find The Wall itself a little hard going on the whole.
Thanks for your kind comment. The talk was at UCL, one of a series of seminars given to international business management students working in construction. They were great.
Looking forward to your next blog. I'm off now to listen to Breakfast in America.

Al said...

As ever, you make me reconsider my upbringing & tastes. But I prefer your sizeable influence on playing John Coltrane to me in your bedsit in Stoke Newington (before it was cool). BBC4 has had a good series the last few Friday nights - a whole hour devoted to the bass - I'm in heaven....

Neil Partrick said...

Thanks a lot Al for your comments, and for your appreciation of the review and of our times together 30 years ago listening to John Coltrane. I have to confess that these days I usually only hear him when a track from 'Live at the Village Vanguard' comes up on random when I am listening to my phone in the gym. How times change. While that album's wonderful, I generally find his earlier stuff, as captured on 'More Lasting than Bronze' for example, more enjoyable than the later stuff. I need to dig out 'A Love Supreme Again' however (and check out BBC4 again too!). Cheers, N.

Bandit said...

Hi Neil

I urge you all to rediscover Alabalma. And also, writing as a bass player of a swing jazz quartet, Favourite Things. Then again, check out Wreckless Eric. Also Van Morrison TB Sheets is ahead of its time. xx

Bandit said...

Apologies for typo.

Also Keith, if you haven't yet, listen to Meddle & Obscured by Clouds. Al

Neil Partrick said...

Hi Al/Bandit. I needs to check out JC's version of Alabama Song... i didn't know your were a bass player in a jazz band. Mind you I haven't seen you live since your Morrisonian white shirt and leather pants phase. What's the band called? I agree that the other Morrison's TB Sheets is very good and, like much of that post Them, pre Astral Weeks period, underrated. I too like mid period Floyd, though Echoes bores me.