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.

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. 

Rockitmen rock Crowhurst

The Rockitmen hit Crowhurst last Friday night with a storming set that had half the village dancing. These guys could play anything, at least if it loosely fitted within the pop canon. Urban, RnB (in all senses), rock, soul. You name it, these (not so young) boys could do it. They make no bones about what they do either. It’s emblazoned on the banner behind them. “Professional functions party band” goes the no-nonsense description. They are cabaret and proud. Their website says they’ve backed The Real Thing, Cutting Crew and Andy Bell of Erasure. So no slouches then.

Sam Smith’s ‘Stay With Me’, the multi-million-selling piece of pseudo gospel that normally induces nausea in me, was sung with real feeling by the front man. Perhaps it helps being 40+ (to this particular 50+ person) if you’re trying to do plaintive, earnest and, yes, soulful. 

The band can play too. The keyboardist has feel, the guitarist rocks; they give it their all. At one moment it was as if the marquee was fuelled by something other than the Pimms or Harvey’s on offer at the bar. The rush as they piled through a medley of ‘Disco Inferno’, ‘Papa was a Rollin’ Stone’ and ‘I Feel Love’ was something to behold. ‘Are you ready?’ the singer teased as the band were about to hit a particular high point of the Donner Summer/Giorgio Moroder classic and the floor erupted once again.

Something that got this obsessive’s goat however was when the front man introduced songs by UB40 or Madness as these bands’ material. It helps for punter accessibility I guess. However people should be reminded that the incomparable Labi Siffre wrote and first performed ‘It Must Be Love’, and that ‘Red, Red Wine’ became a reggae number before UB40 covered it and after Neil Diamond wrote it!  

I sadly had to leave before the show ended way after midnight (!), although not before enjoying an inspired merging of ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘La Bamba’.

If you’re getting married, divorced or planning a bar mitzvah, these are the boys for you. 

Mike Hatchard's Crowhurst Breakfast Jazz - overeasy and sunny-side up

Mike Hatchard, jazz musician and singer, played a nearly two hour set this afternoon in the tiny East Sussex village of Crowhurst. Mike is a jazz and popular music veteran. As a young man he was Matt Munro’s musical director, he played with Barbara Thompson's Paraphernalia, and in recent years he has been playing up and down the English south coast with Herbie Flowers, former bassist with Sky and session man on many a classic 1970s rock album.

Those who came to Mike’s Jazz Breakfast at 1030 am on a Sunday morning in Crowhurst Village Hall were served bacon butties and coffee before he took to the electric keyboard, opened up with Sinatra's 'Come Fly With Me', and then provided the audience with a musical guide to some of the leading pioneers of 1920s jazz piano.

Mike plays with feeling and can sing often highly challenging and diverse material. A ragtime number associated with James P. Johnson and a boogie woogie tune popularised by Charles ‘Pinetop’ Smith were played with dexterity and gusto. Performing ‘Spain (I Can Recall)’) a Corea/ Rodrigo/Maren/Jarreau tune that Al Jarreau normally sings is not easy, but Mike carried it off. George and Ira Gershwin’s ‘Someone to Watch over Me’ was sung and played with great tenderness. 

More striking still was his take on  ‘The Dutchman’. The subject matter of this Liam Clancy folk number is a lifelong love ravaged, but not ended, by senility. Mike clearly loves this song deeply. It should have brought the house down. The audience were, I think, still taking it in long after he had moved on to the next number. 

Mike has great rapport with the audience, regaling them with tales from the road, which in his younger years was often traversed by bicycle. Such was the sympathy that Mike created, he even got away with an embarrassing ‘comedy’ number from a very different era: ‘Have Some Madeira, M’Dear’, a tale of an old man seducing an underage girl with the aid of fortified wine. 

At one point Mike brought on Crowhurst’s newest resident to play the trumpet. Paul Eshelby is a professor at the Royal College of Music. More importantly he is a sensitive as well as a virtuoso musician. I am sitting in a village hall with 50 people on a Sunday morning watching Paul play ‘My Funny Valentine’ to Mike’s skillful piano accompaniment and thinking that in many other Sussex villages this space would be reserved for amateur dramatics and the bingo. In fact the children’s club was scheduled to follow.

Toward the end of his set Mike picked up the fiddle and performed a couple of numbers in a swing style accompanied by Paul and Steve Savage, an accordionist.  The three musicians’ feigned exit through the audience brought very loud applause and many, well-deserved, shouts for more, to which Mike responded by switching to an acoustic guitar to perform a French gypsy jazz number with Steve.

A great show. Look out for Mike performing with Herbie Flowers at the St Mary's in the Castle in Hastings, and elsewhere on the Sussex coast.

Joan Armatrading live at Bexhill's De La Warr Pavilion, England

Rock’s Charlie Pride is a born-again black artist.

I lost touch with Joan Armatrading nearly three decades ago. In 1985 she seemed firmly planted in the white musical bombast of the time. Me Myself I, the last number by her that I paid any attention to, was a brilliant piece of overproduced pop-rock stomp. Last night at Bexhill's dlwp her devotees and enthusiasts were treated to a one woman seminar on Joan as major league black performer with a rightful, but not sufficiently acknowledged, place in the international music hall of fame.

She gave us the photos to prove it.

She did raw and accomplished blues, and subtler jazz, guitar. She sat at the piano and emoted like a latter day Nina Simone.

Joan's voice is as powerful as when she started but is now possessed of a richer, maturer tone. 

There were some occasional lyrical lapses. However Joan gave a flawless performance of numbers that ranged from the very good to the quite exquisite.

If there is one complaint, it is that Joan’s self-styled “last major world tour”, and first solo one, is evidently a low-budget affair. If she had been genuinely unplugged, the rawness that worked so well on her blues and balladeer numbers would only have enhanced her performance of the now classic Love and Affection.

It was still a barnstormer, but the pre-recorded synth strings and cheesy sax could have ruined it were it not for the sheer emotional heft and powerful hook lines that inevitably made it a winner. More or less devoid of “enhancements”, Down to Zero and The Weakness in Me, two comparably powerful torch ballads, were better performances on the night.  

Joan does great dead-pan too. She joked, self-effacingly, about pics of herself with better known performers, and introduced her encore so that she could get off the stage according to her schedule.

Joan closed the concert with an early favourite, Willow, and, oddly, gave the audience the last word as she played along to the few who felt confident enough to sing it back to her.

This gig though was an object lesson by Joan in “why I matter”.

She is of course preaching to the converted. 

Let’s hope she once again gets the attention she deserves from national and international media.    

Yellowmen raise the roof in Crowhurst

‘Raising the Roof’ was a late October musical celebration in a Sussex village in aid of the Yellowmen of Kadongdong. Loosely a folk night, it was a joyous and mostly very entertaining evening. 

The standard of performance was initially quite varied, but the second half was almost faultless, and this in a village hall in the south of England. A world away from the UKIP froth at nearby coastal towns, the cause was to aid local men bringing relief to a part of Kenya where death from diarrhoea is not uncommon. The performers were a mix of folk-based musicians, solo singers, performance poets, an Andrew Sisters-style act, and a relatively youthful rock cabaret act with attitude. Two threads ran through the evening: retired teacher Chris Fisher and members of the family Moses: Brian and his daughter Karen.

Chris, MC and the evening’s co-organiser with Brian, is possessed of an impressive traditional singing voice; Carthy-esque but not derivative. Brian opened proceedings with a spoken tale of winter gloom before Chris joined in, walking from the back of the hall while singing an acapella version of the traditional ‘January Man’.

The next act, Robson, a self-styled exile from Northumbria, sported a white jacket and shades and looked like a cross between Roy Orbison and Los Lobos, but was sadly possessed of the vocal charms of neither. He also fell guilty to the mistake of many an intimate, unplugged type event, whether in village or city centre: too much between song schpiel. When he lifted his singing focus beyond the childlike to a reworking of ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsy’, things improved no end.

Next up was a bit of a surprise. ‘JC and the All-Stars’ were fronted by a young man with real rock star swagger, a Liam Gallagher stance, and Ryan Gosling looks. Unfortunately it soon became rock star stagger as his back pocket quart of Scotch dominated more than his stage act, and a voice relatively well attuned to doing an Oasis cover struggled with (the perhaps inevitable) ‘Whisky in The Jar’. The band, led by Mark Cole, played well enough, with some nice lead guitar touches by ‘JC’ (Joshua Cole). Follow that.

Well, Roger Stevens, doing a comedy set, certainly did. I don’t know if he writes his own jokes, but every one was a winner, and I’d had less than a pint of a very local brew at this point. Most are unrepeatable here, but suffice it to say that gags about onanism are still funny.

Dave Roberts was billed as an ‘Old Hippy Sings Old Hippy Songs’. He did what it said on the tin, and he did it very well. ‘All Along the Watchtower’ was not just a straight cover, and its climax, segueing into the last line of ‘Stairway to Heaven’, was a hilarious exercise in self-deprecation. He was followed by a tasteful and highly accomplished instrumental acoustic guitar set performed by Fionn Johnson, not bad for a 13 year old.

Among the stand-out performances of the second half were Steve Royston, whose ‘Play for England’  juxtaposed British men serving in Afghanistan with millionaire footballers whose patriotic duty and failings usually preoccupies the nation more. Chris Fisher’s take on a Ralph McTell song was performed with a large remembrance candle and poppy as a prop. His performance likewise successfully trod a careful line between necessary scepticism and undue cynicism.  

The Victory Sisters were performing their wartime favourites routine for the first time ever. They have fine voices and definitely looked the part. Their set finished with ‘White Cliffs of Dover’; some of its more idealistic lyrics somehow sounding more ironic than ever amidst the political notes others were striking.

Brian Moses has the style and air of one of the Liverpool Poets. His almost aggressive telling of the kind of name he wished his street was called– Paradise Lane not Meadow Road - was powerful and funny. Roger Stevens then returned with Victory Sister Karen Moses to help him out on vocals. The Crowhurst News gave me the impression that he might be singing with the pulp fiction writer and husband of a Blair babe, Ken Follett, and the black Tory activist and ‘Play Away’ presenter, Floella Benjamin. Now they would make for an interesting duo.

The Collins boys, father and son, did one of the greatest versions of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ I have ever heard – a very smart accompaniment to the passing round of Al Collins’ Bob Dylan hat to raise extra funds for the Yellowmen. Son Rory was less inspiring on his own as he, by his own admission, went for the lowest common denominator and regaled us, albeit in fine voice, with some sing-along Beatles’ and Kinks’ tunes.

Many of the performers were then brought out for one last time as Chris Fisher led them in finale that featured a funny take on the ol’ Macca standard, ‘Mull of Kintyre’; and, more stirringly, the Shire Horses’ ‘Sit You Down’. A very moving end to an excellent evening.