The Crime of the Century recording sessions were, by any measure, a high-wire act, a band working out what it wanted to be, in a Dorset farmhouse running on goodwill and borrowed time. Fifty years on, two of the survivors, John Helliwell and Bob Siebenberg, are talking candidly about how that album got made, and about the rifts that ultimately pulled the classic line-up apart.
The occasion is the Blu-ray release of Crime Of The Century: In Concert At Hammersmith Odeon 1975, directed by Derek Burbidge. It is, as both men are keen to note, a document of a band firing on every cylinder simultaneously, something that would not, as it turned out, last.
Demo-itis, a Dorset Farmhouse and the Making of Crime of the Century
The problems started early. Tracking future single Dreamer at Ramport Studios in Battersea, Roger Hodgson was convinced the recording was losing whatever had made his original demo special. He had put that demo together at his mother’s house in Portsmouth, adding cardboard-box percussion to a Wurlitzer piano part. Now the thing felt wrong to him. ‘Roger had a bad case of demo-itis,’ Siebenberg recalls. ‘We were like, “Yes, the demo’s charming, but you can’t put it out. The sound quality isn’t good enough.”‘ The solution, he says, was to play to the demo and gradually replace its parts while preserving the feel. Dreamer reached No.13 in the UK in March 1975.
Before any of that happened, Supertramp needed to actually become Supertramp. Helliwell had drifted in after a session with the band in July 1973, never formally asked to join. ‘They never officially asked me,’ he says. ‘I just kept going back.’ He and bassist Dougie Thomson had history together in The Alan Bown Set; Thomson had persuaded Hodgson and Rick Davies to try one more album after their first two had gone nowhere. The band’s method for changing personnel, Helliwell explains, was characteristically avoidant: ‘They’d just break up and reform.’
Siebenberg’s arrival was similarly informal. He had moved to London in April 1971 and joined pub-rock outfit Bees Make Honey. Davies, a fan, spotted him playing at The Kensington pub in west London and recruited him on the spot. The proposed audition was a ‘blow’ in the basement of The Furniture Cave, an antique shop on the Kings Road. ‘I was told later they couldn’t bear to go through more formal auditions,’ Siebenberg says. ‘They showed me Bloody Well Right and Crime Of The Century and I was in.’
There was, briefly, another possibility for the lineup. Siebenberg had a friend he thought could be the band’s guitarist: his future brother-in-law Scott Gorham. ‘We’d been best friends in Glendale growing up,’ he says. ‘I played him some early Supertramp demos and he really liked them.’ But by the time Gorham arrived in 1974, Helliwell was already in place, and Gorham joined Thin Lizzy that June instead.
The Crime of the Century recording sessions proper were preceded by a spell of rural communal living that both men remember with real warmth. Manager Dave Margereson rented Southcombe, a two-storey farmhouse near Thorncombe in Dorset, for £20 a week, putting the band 140 miles from any record company interference. Cables ran through a room full of farm implements to where sound engineer Russel Pope sat with a two-track and a small mixing console. ‘All the wives got on; initially there was no tension from any quarter,’ Siebenberg says. Helliwell remembers the listening sessions: The Dark Side Of The Moon, Procol Harum, Spooky Tooth, Loggins And Messina. He also remembers quietly refilling an empty pasteurised milk bottle with straight-from-the-cow milk to fool the squeamish Siebenberg. ‘He was none the wiser,’ Helliwell says.
Then Hodgson announced he wanted to pack it all in and go to India. ‘It was like a hand grenade going off,’ Siebenberg says. He didn’t go, but the mood shifted. ‘It was a really weird vibe for a few days, rehearsing and knowing what he’d been thinking.’
Rick Davies, Roger Hodgson and the Fault Lines That Ran Through Crime of the Century
Producer Ken Scott came aboard after catching a live A&M Records showcase; he had initially been put off by some disjointed demos, but the live set convinced him. His recent credits had included David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. The Crime of the Century recording was done at Trident Studios and Ramport Studios, and the result caught the full complexity of a band held together by creative tension as much as anything else.
Siebenberg describes the Davies-Hodgson dynamic as ‘healthy competition rather than rivalry’. Their differences were real and deep. Hodgson had a public school background; Davies, per Rolling Stone, had grown up a working-class kid who first gravitated toward drums after finding an old Gene Krupa album, before switching to piano. The two men brought genuinely different sensibilities to the band. ‘Roger would talk about crop circles and UFOs he’d seen and Rick would say, “Yeah, right; pull the other one,”‘ Siebenberg says. ‘They kind of filled in holes in each other’s personalities.’ By the time of Breakfast In America in 1979, though, Hodgson’s drift toward spiritualism and Eastern philosophy had stopped being something the others could absorb. ‘It just wasn’t funny any more,’ Siebenberg says.
Hodgson eventually quit when the tour for …Famous Last Words… wrapped in September 1983. He released his first solo album, In The Eye Of The Storm, twelve months later. Speculation about a full classic line-up reunion would persist, on and off, for decades, until Davies died last year at the age of 81. ‘A world without Rick in it makes me want to fall down,’ Siebenberg says. ‘He used to call me “The king of the hi-hat.”‘ Helliwell adds, simply: ‘Sadly there was no funeral.’
Relations with Hodgson remain complicated. He is, Helliwell says, ‘part of a religious organisation in Florida and doesn’t communicate.’ There was one recent face-to-face encounter, though: a court case. Helliwell, Thomson and Siebenberg took Hodgson to court over publishing royalties, which he and Davies had agreed to share with the other members but which had stopped after a period of decades. ‘We lost the case and it was ridiculously expensive,’ Helliwell says. ‘Then we appealed and won, but we’re still waiting. These things move slowly.’ He allows himself a small smile: ‘It was actually quite nice to see him.’
Both men are still playing. Siebenberg gigs around Ventura and Santa Barbara with Sleeping Chief; Helliwell steps out with his Super Big Tramp Band and his Dutch jazz quartet Don’t Ever Leave Me. Supertramp‘s Crime Of The Century Blu-ray is on sale now, and if Roger Hodgson happens to be reading this, his old bandmates (officially) would love to hear from him. Unofficially, there is still money outstanding. The A&M Records showcase that once persuaded Ken Scott to take a chance on them feels like a long time ago.
