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.

England doesn't deserve to win

For those who insist that sportspeople just want to practise a profession that has nothing to do with politics, and that politics should be kept entirely separate from sport, consider this. As “England”, the football team, exited the World Cup last night, one of the many overpaid football gobshites who substitute verbal diarrhoea for clarity of speech, told 37 million ITV viewers that, despite losing, they had done “the nation” proud and that “the nation” will honour their achievement etc etc. Be in no doubt that the main match commentator, Clive Tyldesley, was being archly political in his propagandist nonsense, whether he quite realised it or not.

There is no nation called England. The nation that he was mixing it up with was one that rejoices under the internationally recognised, legal, title of the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”. That’s the UK, for short, not Britain and most certainly not England. Only the spatch-cock nation that is the UK could concoct a situation where it doesn’t have a national football team. Instead three constituent countries and one “province” (Northern Ireland) compete against each other on the international football stage as if they are nations.

Of course nations are subjective things, some exist only in the fact that some people feel an affinity to them, whether a “nation” has national independence, statehood, or not e.g. Palestine, Kurdistan etc. In the same sense Scotland is arguably a nation: there are enough Scots who profess to be Scottish (whether they actually want their country to leave the UK or not). The Welsh ditto, most of whom most definitely do not want to leave the bosom of the UK family. Northern Ireland is most definitely not a nation, nor can you give the term 'country' to an artificially concocted place that nearly a century ago was carved out of Ireland to appease a then overwhelming majority who wanted to continue to politically identify with the British state against the wishes of a minority who identified with a nation called Ireland.

That leaves us with the “nation” that the ITV football commentator may have thought he was referring to:  England. England has no political or governmental status, within the UK or internationally. Unlike Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, it has no government, no formal national apparatus. There are laws that apply only to the territory of England, and there is definitely a legal corpus known as English law. But that’s it.

At the start of the match you could hear the Russian stadium commentator, whose serial verbosity periodically interrupted every live World Cup game, say “and now the English national anthem”. The England football team almost sung along as they once again appropriated the UK’s turgid national paen to political quiescence and anti-democratic sentiment. There is no English national anthem. How could there be? ‘English nation’ is an oxymoron. Despite the proliferating born-again Cross of St George enthusiasts, whose empty-headed embrace of the ultimate imagined nation has boomed since England’s second greatest World Cup performance (1990), and a little thing called Brexit (2019?), there aren’t many English men and women who have a clear idea of what their nation actually is. There was no national ambiguity in Zagreb last night though among the fans going ape-shit in a nation of 4m born out of sectarian horror just two and a half decades ago.

If you cannot unavowedly name your nation, then it doesn’t exist (yes, it’s true, a tree falling in a forest doesn’t make a sound if nobody is there to hear it). If, like Tyldesley, your nation is a confusion of England, Britain and, I suspect, some half-cocked rewriting of wartime history, and the role of a few German royals and a half-American half English toff called Churchill in it, then maybe this doesn’t matter. But the reason why people get killed in your name without anybody you elect having any constitutional authority over it, and why the tiresome parade of unelected aristocrats propping up the head of state and her church, continues is because the “English” can’t tell their national arse from Rice Krispies. God Save Us indeed.

Al Riach live and dangerous in Crowhurst

from October 2016 edition of "Crowhurst News", published in East Sussex, England

Click on image above to read a larger and, hopefully, more legible version of this reprint from what is a hard-copy only monthly publication produced in the village of Crowhurst, located near Battle, East Sussex, UK.

Buckets of love from buckets of blood

Doug MacLeod is a preacher, a self-help therapist. He treats depression with CBT. Specifically his chosen behavioural remedy is the Blues. Not wallowing in it, but singing about it and hopefully therefore finding a way through it. Doug was abused as a young man. The Blues was his redemption it seems. He isn’t saying it’s easy, but when he sings he finds a way to lift himself beyond his problems and, between songs, advises his listeners as to how they might do the same, other than by the therapy of listening to him that is. 

A mature white American originally from St Louis, Doug has been living in Baton Rouge for many years. He has had at least a couple of his songs covered by some bigger names in the blues field and been regularly honoured himself, yet he remains fairly obscure beyond his musical fraternity. Accompanying himself on a Resonator acoustic guitar, he sings with conviction. 

One award winning number, the “Entitled Ones”, told the story of those who feel deserving of a better life than the rest of us, a song spawned by his own disillusion with an able-bodied friend who bought himself a blue disabled badge because he was too lazy to find a less convenient parking spot.

A less “correct” message was “Home Cooking” whose essential idea is that a man well-fed at home doesn’t go sniffing around for dinner elsewhere. Doug introduced it by admitting that this attitude doesn’t necessarily make for a good relationship but it sure as hell works as a blues song. He’s right. 

My particular favourite on the night was “Long Black Train”. He introduced it with a carefully worded homily about our relatively brief duration on this earth. When the ticket collector tells you this is your stop, he warned, it’s no good saying, “Well, I’d like to ride on a little longer.” So before you get to the end of the line, make sure your journey was worthwhile. The song itself was big on atmosphere, subtly working its charm on you. Like many songs he performed on the night I am sure his material repays more listening, which I intend to do via his latest CD, “Live in Europe”.

“The Devil’s Road” was one of several that gave a hint of the trouble he’s known. It told the story of a woman seeking redemption whose search for guidance from a priest takes on a dark turn. It was unclear in his musical telling of this story which of the two people the devil was supposed to be influencing, or whether desperation and unpredictability can take any of us into unwanted places. God and the Devil are always pretty close at hand in the blues world, a close cousin of Gospel in any case. 

Doug MacLeod live at Mrs Yarrington's Music Club - with thanks to the latter's Facebook page

It would be something to see him play this song in some of the “Buckets of Blood” that, as he explained, the hard-core, down-home blues joints are known as in the US. Mrs Yarrington’s Music Club, held monthly at the back of the Senlac Inn in Battle, is no bucket of blood, but, appropriately perhaps, the pub room has doubled as a temporary Methodist Meeting House, and the evening we were there was almost as hot and humid as a Mississippi summer night.

Toward the end of the gig, Doug told us that we may have a hole in our bucket that our experiences growing up have given us, but despite this those who care about us do their best to keep our buckets filled with love. Remember this, he said. Amen to that. 

The Destruction of the UK State: Betrayed by Ignorance and Miscalculation

The seeds were sown in 1978 when the SNP and Welsh Nats blackmailed Jim Callaghan and his minority Labour government to hold a referendum on devolution. Those in favour couldn't muster 40% of registered voters in Scotland, so it fell by the wayside. Devolution was clearly rejected in Wales. The SNP's representation collapsed in the May 1979 UK General Election, but the idea of home rule for Scotland was there.

If the Labour Gov't ('74-'79) had given two fingers to the petit tribalists of the British Isles (including trying to please both Ulster Unionist and SDLP MPs at the same time) and gone to the country in 1978, they would have won with a workable majority. We all know what happened next. Perhaps the decline of the post war UK political, economic and social order, and specifically of subsidised Scottish steel mills and coal mines, was inevitable, and would have fed deep frustrations north of the border. However the personality and ideology of Margaret Thatcher, and limited Scottish support for the Conservatives under her, helped bolster the SNP. Then comes wise Mr Blair and devolution for Scotland and Wales, arrogantly thinking that a semi- federal arrangement eternally steered by Labour politicians on the ground, buoyed by grateful celtic clients, would keep the UK settlement intact.

In 24 hours a bunch of kids and some older political illiterates will probably break up the UK state. A tribal war has been successfully waged, as if Westminster was the headquarters of the English Colonial Administration. Westminster is so loathed - by all quarters of the UK - that the fact that its MPs were elected by us, including Scottish residents, seems somehow to not be understood. A "democratic deficit" is one of Salmond's rallying cries, yet every UK subject determines who forms the UK Government. Unless they can't be arsed. 

The trouble is that if there is a narrow "No" vote tomorrow then a belated attempt to fire up enthusiasm for the political process in all parts of the UK will see devolution across its countries and regions. Scotland's nationalists may not be satisfied. The English rejected regional governments in the late 1990s (except in London). If they're offered their own national parliament then they will probably secede from the Union themselves, after the UK (possibly minus Scottish votes) comes out of the EU in 2017. We're doomed...