Most title tracks are a formality — a song that happens to share the album’s name. “Crime of the Century” is the opposite. When Supertramp finished their third album in the summer of 1974, they named the whole record after its closing track because, as the band later explained, they felt it was the strongest song they had. It is easy to hear why. In five minutes and thirty-six seconds, the song moves from a whispered accusation over a lone piano to a full-throated guitar climax and then dissolves into one of the most famous instrumental codas of the progressive rock era — a slow, stately procession of piano chords and strings that simply refuses to end, as if the verdict it delivers were too heavy to lift. It was the sound of a band that had failed twice, been written off by nearly everyone, and decided to make its last stand count.
A Band at the Last Chance Saloon
To understand the weight the title track carries, you have to understand how close Supertramp came to not existing at all. The band had been formed in 1969 around keyboard player Rick Davies, bankrolled by the Dutch millionaire Stanley August Miesegaes — “Sam” — whose money paid for the first two albums, Supertramp (1970) and Indelibly Stamped (1971). Neither sold. When the funding ended, every member drifted away except Davies and the young singer-guitarist Roger Hodgson, the band’s two songwriters. A third album on A&M Records was effectively their final chance.
The rebuild was methodical. Davies and Hodgson recruited drummer Bob Siebenberg — credited on the album, for contractual reasons, under the name Bob C. Benberg — along with saxophone and clarinet player John Helliwell and bassist Dougie Thomson. A&M’s A&R man Dave Margereson, who would manage the band for the next decade, sent the new line-up to a seventeenth-century farm at Southcombe in west Dorset to live together and rehearse. It was there, eating, sleeping and breathing the material, that the album — and its title track in particular — took shape. Hodgson later recalled that the song “just bounced between Rick and I for so many weeks before it finally took form,” and that more people told him it touched them deeply than any other song he was involved in.
Forty-Two Demos, Eight Songs
Recording took place between February and June 1974 at three London studios — Trident, Ramport (owned by the Who) and Scorpio Sound — with Ken Scott co-producing alongside the band. Scott, who had engineered for the Beatles and worked with David Bowie, gave the record its remarkable clarity and dynamic range. The sessions were famously selective: Davies and Hodgson arrived with roughly forty-two demo songs, from which just eight were chosen. Because of a contractual arrangement, every song was credited jointly to Davies and Hodgson, but the reality varied track by track — “Bloody Well Right,” “Asylum” and “Rudy” were essentially Davies compositions, “Hide in Your Shell” and “If Everyone Was Listening” were Hodgson’s, while “School,” “Dreamer” and “Crime of the Century” were genuine collaborations. Producer Scott observed that the two men “were very, very different personalities,” and that those differences made the music sound the way it did.
That friction is the engine of the title track. It is sung by Davies, whose earthier, blues-rooted voice delivers the lyric like a charge sheet: an unnamed “they” is accused of committing the crime of the century, and the singer demands to know who is responsible and who will pay. The phrase itself was a piece of tabloid hyperbole, applied over the decades to one notorious crime after another — which is precisely why it suited an album loosely preoccupied with loneliness, conformity and mental stability, themes that run from the boarding-school alienation of the opening track “School” through to the closing title song.
Five Minutes, Three Movements
Structurally, “Crime of the Century” behaves less like a pop song than like a small symphony in three movements. It opens in near-silence: Davies’s vocal over sparse piano, the accusation repeated until it feels like a chant. Then Hodgson’s guitar enters — notably, it is the only lead guitar feature on the album’s second side — and the song swells into a dramatic instrumental climax, with Richard Hewson’s string arrangement broadening the sound and producer Ken Scott himself contributing a water gong to the track’s texture. Finally, instead of resolving, the music sheds its words altogether and settles into the long, hymn-like piano coda, the chords tolling over and over while the strings hold the harmony aloft. It is a bold way to end an album: no chorus to take home, no single-friendly hook — just a slow fade into the dark.
The personnel behind that sound became Supertramp’s definitive line-up: Rick Davies on vocals, keyboards and harmonica; Roger Hodgson on vocals, guitar and pianos; John Helliwell on saxophones, clarinet and backing vocals; Dougie Thomson on bass; and Bob Siebenberg on drums and percussion. The record is dedicated, simply, “To Sam” — a quiet acknowledgement of the benefactor whose money had kept the band alive long enough to make it.
Part of the title track’s power comes from where it sits. The album’s second side is sequenced like a descent: it opens with “Dreamer,” the shortest and most playful thing on the record, then darkens through the seven-minute “Rudy” and the hushed plea of “If Everyone Was Listening” before arriving at the title track, the only possible finale. Across the whole album there are just eight songs in forty-four minutes, and the production treats them as movements of one work rather than as singles-in-waiting — which makes it all the more striking that FM and album-oriented rock radio adopted the record so thoroughly, with “School” in particular becoming a format staple. The title track was never a single; it did not need to be. It was the destination the rest of the album was travelling toward, and listeners who bought the record for “Dreamer” found themselves staying for the slow, tolling coda that closed side two.
The record’s sound, meanwhile, acquired a reputation of its own. In 1977 Crime of the Century became the first pop LP ever reissued by the audiophile label Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab — a remarkable honour for a three-year-old album, and a direct consequence of Ken Scott’s engineering, with its wide dynamics and immaculate separation between piano, woodwinds and strings. The album has been remastered and reissued repeatedly ever since, including an early CD appearance in A&M’s “Audio Master Plus” series in 1984.
The Verdict of the Charts
Crime of the Century was released on 25 October 1974, and it transformed the band’s fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK it peaked at No. 4 on the Official Albums Chart in March 1975, while the single “Dreamer” reached No. 13. In the United States it became the band’s first charting album, reaching No. 38 on the Billboard 200, with American listeners flipping the “Dreamer” single over and making its B-side, “Bloody Well Right,” a No. 35 hit on the Hot 100. In Canada the album was a phenomenon, peaking at No. 4, remaining on the chart for over two years and eventually earning a Diamond certification for sales of more than a million copies. In the US it was certified Gold in 1977, after the success of the follow-up era had sent listeners back to it.
A Staple That Never Left the Stage
The title track’s afterlife has matched its ambitions. Along with “School,” “Bloody Well Right” and “Rudy,” it remained a staple of Supertramp’s concerts well into the twenty-first century; much of the album was performed on the band’s celebrated 1980 live album Paris, where the orchestrations of “Asylum,” “Rudy” and “Crime of the Century” were recreated on string synthesisers and Oberheim instruments, played mainly by Helliwell. Critics, too, kept returning to the record: AllMusic awarded it four stars, Record Collector gave the deluxe edition five, and in 2015 Rolling Stone placed the album at No. 27 on its list of the 50 greatest progressive rock albums of all time. A fortieth-anniversary deluxe reissue in December 2014 added a complete 1975 Hammersmith Odeon concert, on which the title track stretches past six minutes.
There is a pleasing symmetry in the album’s famous cover, too. Photographer Paul Wakefield, making his first album sleeve, read the lyrics and built his image of a prison window floating in space — hands gripping polished aluminium bars beneath a field of stars — partly from a line in “Asylum,” about being haunted and taunted in a cage. The title track asks who committed the crime of the century and never answers. Half a century on, the question still hangs in the air over those final, tolling piano chords — and the band that asked it, against every expectation, got away with making one of the defining albums of its era.