Supertramp was an extremely popular British prog rock/ pop rock band, selling over 60 millions records worldwide. The band formed in 1969, but it took a few years, and some personnel changes, before finding mainstream success. I've found enough material for four BBC albums. This first one deals with the years before they really hit it big.
The first song is not actually a BBC recording, but it's remarkable in a number of ways, so I've included it. The band formed in 1969 with Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies, who would be the main singers and songwriters for the band through the 1970s. Everyone else in the band at the time would leave by 1973. The band had their first concert in Munich, Germany in 1969, while still known as "Daddy." By chance, a German filmmaker filmed one song at that concert, a ten-minute long cover of the Bob Dylan classic "All Along the Watchtower." Thanks to that film footage, the audio to that has survived with pretty good sound quality.
That performance is still officially unreleased. Everything else here comes from unreleased BBC studio sessions. I found double the amount of material I'm presenting here, but the sound quality ranged from just okay to pretty bad, so I left all that out. Most of it were different versions of the same songs here anyway, so you're not missing that much. What remains doesn't always sound great, but at least it's good and listenable.
Supertramp put out albums in 1970 ("Supertramp") and 1971 ("Indelibly Stamped"), neither of which had much of an impact. Then they changed the sound and had significant personnel changes. It took three years until their next album, which was an eternity in those days. But the wait paid off, because their 1974 album "Crime of the Century" had two hit singles, "Dreamer" and "Bloody Well Right," and sold millions around the world.
Somewhat surprisingly, Supertramp had occasional BBC sessions all through this time period. There are songs here from 1972, 1973, and early 1974, months before "Crime of the Century" was released. The song from 1973, "Chicken Man," is an early version of "Another Man's Woman," which would appear on their 1975 album "Crisis? What Crisis?"
This album is 46 minutes long.
01 All Along the Watchtower (Supertramp)
02 It's a Long Road [Edit] (Supertramp)
03 Try Again (Supertramp)
04 Birds of Prey (Supertramp)
05 Pony Express (Supertramp)
06 Chicken Man [Early version of Another Man's Woman] (Supertramp)
07 Bloody Well Right (Supertramp)
09 If Everyone Was Listening (Supertramp)
The cover photo is a screenshot taken from the 1969 film footage mentioned above. It's pretty low-res, but it's historic. Plus, there's a real lack of any good color photos of the band from their early years. The text of the band's name is a version of the font used on their 1979 album "Breakfast in America."
The link doesn't work!
ReplyDeletelink working fine for me
ReplyDeleteMega works great. I like it much more than Zippyshare. Thanks, and enjoy your vacation.
ReplyDeleteMega works great. I like it much more than Zippyshare. Zippyshare does not work here in England. 🎵 Thanks for the music. Enjoy your holiday, well deserved ⛱
ReplyDeleteHi Paul, first off, as a UK resident, I am much happier with Mega as Zippyshare isn't accessible here (as others have said), requiring all kinds of technical malarkey to access the ZS files. Secondly, thanks so much for this early Supertramp material which I never knew existed, I saw them several times in the 1970-1971 era, playing small venues and struggling to make an impact. They were really good in those early days, too and I was very happy for them when they finally found success in the mid-70's. However, I have to say that, nowadays, I find their albums from 'Crime of the Century' going forward to be a bit formulaic and over-polished, albeit with the odd really good track. Generally, I find myself going back to the first 2 albums which have a kind of wistful innocence about them that I still enjoy. So, thanks for this latest instalment from your BBC archive. Hope your journey through Europe/North Africa is still going well or maybe you are home now?
ReplyDeleteMega for me. Thanks for all your shares. Much appreciated.
ReplyDeleteHi Paul
ReplyDeleteMuch as I like Zippyshare (and I live in the UK too - I just never thought of VPN's, which are pretty straighforward for me, as complicated). Mega is just as good though, no enforced 30 day limit and in my experience far fewer cases of files being deleted by the powers that be and given you can just put any download into your mega cloud storage until later its more convenient for downloaders in some ways. Not only that but with Mega batch downloads from the cloud, if you do not configure bandwidth limits, mega will utilise every bit of bandwidth they can find. I've had a free account (more than one in fact) with them for years.
PS And Mega sees different VPN connections as different users (no doubt based on IP Address) which is rather handy when it comes to avoiding the periodic volume limits imposed.
Now I think I'll try to put my hands in my head OH NO! Toodles......
Oh and I forgot to mention if you use the megasync facility you just dump the file you want to share in the sync directory on your machine and later go into your cloud storage account to get the link for publishing. I've never had an upload or download fail
ReplyDeleteYou haven't yet posted any BBC recordings by Roy Harper. He has several CDs of BBC material available which can be ordered from his website, but I'd be very interested to hear if there's anything else out there,
ReplyDelete