Born: July 22nd, 1944
Died: September 5th, 2025
Rick Davies, the founder of the British rock band Supertramp, who helped transform it from a faltering English progressive rock act into a prog-pop juggernaut whose 1979 album Breakfast in America sold more than 18 million copies, died last week at his home in East Hampton, New York. He was 81.
The cause was complications of multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, which he learned he had more than a decade ago, according to his wife and manager, Sue Davies, who is his only immediate survivor.
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Like The Beatles and a thousand other bands, Supertramp was fuelled by the creative tension between two strong and highly distinct personalities: Davies and the band’s other creative force, vocalist and songwriter Roger Hodgson.
Davies grew up working class in Swindon, about 80 miles west of London, and tended towards an acerbic, world-weary tone, reminiscent of John Lennon, in both interviews and lyrics.
He and Hodgson shared songwriting credits, but it was Davies who wrote and sang the group’s first hit, Bloody Well Right, a sharp-tongued rebuke of Britain’s privileged class. It rose to No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1975.
Then came the FM radio staple Goodbye Stranger, which climbed to number 15 in 1979. Davies’ intricate stylings on the Wurlitzer electric piano were a bedrock of the Supertramp sound.
Hodgson, a product of British boarding schools, was known for his celestial tenor and his Paul McCartney-esque ear for melody. He composed and gave voice to hits like Give a Little Bit, which climbed to number 15 in the United States in 1977, as well as The Logical Song (number six) and Take the Long Way Home (number 10), both from Breakfast in America.
A 1978 profile of the band in British music magazine Melody Maker referred to the introverted, taciturn Davies as “the realist” and the more expansive Hodgson as “the philosopher”.
“We’re both oddballs, and we’ve never been able to communicate too much on a verbal level,” Hodgson said.
“When there’s just the two of us playing together, there’s an incredible empathy,” he added. “His down-to-earth way of writing, which is very rock’n’roll, balances out my lighter, melodic style.”
Davies was more blunt about their tension: “It gets to be a very personal thing,” he said. “I don’t think that half of the frustration that I feel sometimes has ever come out as much as it can.”
He cited a lyric from his song Casual Conversations, which carried overtones of their relationship: “It doesn’t matter what I say/You never listen anyway/Just don’t know what you’re looking for.” (Another cut from Breakfast in America, the song had Davies as lead vocalist.)
But when the relationship worked, it worked in a big way. Rolling Stone magazine called Breakfast in America, which spent six weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 album chart, “a textbook-perfect album of post-Beatles, keyboard-centred English art rock that strikes the shrewdest possible balance between quasi-symphonic classicism and rock’n’roll.”
Richard Davies, an only child, was born July 22nd, 1944, in Swindon. His father, also named Richard, was a bomb disposal expert during the second World War and a merchant seaman; his mother, Elizabeth (White) Davies, was a hairdresser.
Rick Davies’ love of music started in childhood when he found an old Gene Krupa album. Drawn towards jazz and blues, and pianist Ray Charles, he started playing drums and then taught himself piano.
“Suddenly people were responding to me,” Davies told the website Pop Culture Classics in an interview in 1997. “That instrument just seemed right for me.”
As a student at the Sanford Street School in Swindon, he joined a rock’n’roll band called Vince and the Vigilantes; later, while studying art at Swindon College, he started a blues band called Rick’s Blues.
By the mid-1960s, Davies was playing organ for a band called the Joint, which was backed by a Dutch millionaire Stanley August Miesegaes, who came to recognise Davies’ talents and encouraged him to start his own band. In 1969, at 25, Davies placed an ad in Melody Maker promising “genuine opportunity for good musicians.”
Hodgson, 19, responded, and they formed the nucleus of Supertramp, calling themselves Daddy and practising in a farmhouse in Kent. The band had significant roster turnover in its early years; its best known line-up included Dougie Thomson (bass), Bob Seidenberg (drums and percussion) and John Anthony Helliwell (saxophone and other instruments).
One early member, guitarist Richard Palmer, who had studied English literature, suggested the name Supertramp, taking it from a 1908 book by Welsh poet and writer WH Davies, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp.
The band’s 1970 debut album, Supertramp, as well as its follow-up the next year, Indelibly Stamped, were prog-rock affairs that failed to make a splash, and Miesegaes withdrew his support. But instead of disbanding, the group shifted towards pop and finally broke through with the 1974 album Crime of the Century.
It included the hit Bloody Well Right and Dreamer, which made it to number 15 in the US, kicking off the band’s glorious run through the 1970s.
The divide between the group’s two creative forces eventually grew too wide, as shown by its ominously titled 1982 album, Famous Last Words, the last before Hodgson left the band to pursue a solo career.
Supertramp did not die. Davies reconstituted the group and in 1985 released Brother Where You Bound, which featured contributions from Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. It peaked at number 21 and contained the bubbly dance track Cannonball, which rose to number 28 on the Billboard Hot 100.
After the group’s synthesizer-heavy follow-up, Free as a Bird (1987), failed to crack the Top 100, Davies pulled the plug. He went on to form new incarnations of Supertramp, to tour and record, starting in the mid-1990s, concluding with group’s final studio release, Slow Motion, in 2002.
Supertramp performed for the last time in Carcassonne, France, in 2011, and cancelled a sold-out European tour in 2015 because of Davies’ cancer treatment.
He never did reunite with Hodgson. “It’s like two people who are painting a picture on the same canvas,” Davies once said of their friction in a video interview, “and someone wants to put a red there, and somebody wants to put a blue, and you have problems, because the picture doesn’t get finished.”
