UFO & Supertramp – Hastings Pier 7th July 1972

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cutting supplied by Sarah Harvey

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Supertramp in 1971. Photo source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:21stCenturyGreenstuff  Supertramp Mark II. L-R: Roger Hodgson, Frank Farrell, Rick Davies, Kevin Currie, and Dave Winthrop.

Sarah Harvey…. what a line-up!

Andy Qunta…..Just what I was thinking, Sarah! Wow!

Alan Esdaile…..Surprised to see Supertramp were supporting UFO. A few months later and it was probably the other way round.

Mick O’Dowd….Who’d have thought Supertramp as being a support band. Listen had a better write up in the ad and were 3rd on the bill!

Pete Fisher…..remember being mesmerised by Michael Schenker!

Chris Sambrook… I remember UFO playing on Hastings Pier organised by Hastings College 1969 [i believe]. This was the time they were still with the original Guitarist, Mick Bolton on Beacon Records and who were doing  very well in Japan. The Following gig on the Pier was in in the early  70’s. If memory serves me well the following  line up with Michael Schenker and Bernie Marsden. Then the 3rd time  without  Bernie Marsden. Correct me if i’m wrong on each count.

Iain Cobby… Can I say that opening act Xerox was myself, Tony (Vic) Bridger and Steve Demetri. God knows how we got the gig, but I know we played several Rory Gallagher tracks and Steve put a pile of talcum powder on his floor tom so that it shot into the air and choked me when he first hit it (where did he get the idea?) Other memories of the night were walking past UFO’s open dressing room to see them cozzing up in glitter and spandex and some great platforms. I watched Supertramp from the side fill. Cant remember anything of Listen or UFO, but a great night to remember.

Mick O’Dowd… Wasn’t Robert Plant a one-time member of Listen?

The waitress who appeared on the cover of Supertramp Breakfast In America

photo source: https://www.facebook.com/ClassicAlbumArt

Chris Jolly… FAB cover and FAB album!

Heather Sidery… Awesome!!!!!!

Mike Guy… That’s strange, 2 days late this pops up in my news & I’m just on my keyboard playing If Everyone Was Listening, from the wonderful Crime of the Century. First saw Supertramp on a very wet Saturday in August 1975 at Reading Festival [Yes headlined later that evening], also saw them a few times in Belgium, & a couple of weeks ago there was a Supertramp tribute band at the Eastbourne Bandstand – fab show.

Bookham Ally… That reminds me of the Woodstock couple. Still together after all these years. The couple on the album cover were photographed by Burk Uzzle for the Magnum agency. He took at least two pictures of the couple, one of which shows the woman’s face and the other which appears on the cover; however, he never got the couple’s names. In 1989, Life Magazine identified them as a then 20-year-old couple named Bobbi Kelly and Nick Ercoline, who married two years later and raised a family in Pine Bush, New York, just 40 miles (64 km) from the festival site. That claim has since been disputed by a woman named Jessie Kerr from Vancouver Island, and her friend John.

David Bartlett… Classic cover for a classic album.I learnt to play Bass via Crime of the Century. Love you Supertramp XX PS you don’t look a day over 50. Hubba Hubba

 

Supertramp – Breakfast In America review by Neil Partrick

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

I wrote a review of the LP ‘Breakfast in America’ 40 years on.

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.

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.