There’s a Trashcan Sinatras video clip from many years ago that at least one member of the group would like to make disappear, so in the interests of maintaining a healthy friendship I’ll refrain from uploading it here. Google and YouTube is your friend though. The video is filmed at Japan’s 2009 Fuji Rock festival and features Paul and John from the band being asked their ideal festival line-up. The pair of them have evidently been enjoying the relaxing qualities of every musicians’ favourite – the jazz cigarette – and, grinning pleasantly and enunciating in a subtitle-necessary Ayrshire brogue, they reel off a list of cool and not so cool bands that would make for the ideal festival. “We would have King Crimson. Super Furry Animals. Supertramp! Sex Pistols…Radiohead…The Fall. The Band! We would huv The Band! Bob Dylan! And us!” It’s a very funny minute or so and you should definitely go and seek it out. Your week will be better because of it.
Of all those bands listed, it was Supertramp who popped up in my social feed this week, bizarrely enough.
We’ve recently put on a gig with Nerina Pallot. You might remember Everybody’s Gone To War, her one bona fide Top 20 smash hit from 2006? Nerina regularly fills places like the London Palladium and certainly doesn’t need to be putting a band together to play one-off gigs for 100 people in Irvine, but there she was. Needless to say, she was devastatingly brilliant, switching from electric guitar to acoustic to keys and back again, the stories between the songs just as entertaining as the music she played. I watched one man in the audience sit gape-mouthed for the entirety of her show, pinching himself that he was 10 feet from his favourite-ever artist…in our living room-sized venue…in his home town. Quite a thrill for all of us.
But back to Supertramp.
Over the Easter weekend there, Nerina shared one of those multi-cam videos of her playing all the parts to Supertramp’s Take The Long Way Home. From first clanging gothic piano chord and tension-building strings via the sweeping, sighing melody and none-more-seventies FM rock guitar solo on the vintage SG to the whispered ending, it’s a terrific version of a song I’ve (shhhh!) long held affection for.
In a world of Smiths and Bunnymen (and even Hipsway and Love and Money), you just couldn’t admit to liking Supertramp. That Breakfast In America album, ubiquitous and airbrushed and gazillion-selling as it was was just far too polished for a quiff-topped bedroom guitar player who was far more concerned with the angle of the jangle than, y’know, the art of crafting a song. The singer’s helium-coated voice was plain weird and didn’t do much to convince anyone I knew to listen closely, and the proggy/AOR stylings of the group were the very antithesis if what it meant to be a teenager in the mid ’80s…yet there they were, hanging around the album charts, selling gazillions of records and getting globally successful. Though no one would admit to liking them.
You could take a chance on Supertramp via Irvine Library, and take a chance I did. I probably asked my mum to bring Breakfast In America home after work one night (she worked there) lest I be seen with something as unhip and middle of the road on the long walk home (long way home?) through Irvine Mall. Take The Long Way Home was the one that got me. Not The Logical Song. Not the title track. And not Dreamer or the irritating It’s Raining Again (not on the same album, I know, I know…) Take The Long Way Home just stuck. Swathed in melody and tuneage, it sounded like a heady marriage of solo Lennon and solo McCartney, getting together for one last hurrah, the song’s descending/ascending tour de force of melody and melancholy the equal of Abba at their peak. The verses are hopeful, the choruses resigned, the production supreme. To these ears, it is, like Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street and Right Down The Line, a humbly accepted stone cold AOR/FM classic. (See also Rooms On Fire and Edge Of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks…Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes…Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain...AOR clearly has its moments.) The singer from Supertramp though. That voice just won’t do…
…which is why Nerina’s version is so goddam essential. She breathes new life into a song that’s lived inside of her since the days of mix tapes and spongey orange headphones attached to the Walkman and replicates the entire thing with the sort of elan that only she can muster; majestic piano, head-swirling Wurlitzer, mellifluous bass, gorgeous multi-stacked vocals…and a twin axe attack of sorts. I do believe you’ll like it.
Watch out too for Supertramp headlining when the Trashcans get to curate Meltdown.
Meltdown indeed.
Plain Or Pan 