Background and Recording
After the failure of their first two albums and an unsuccessful tour, the band broke up, and Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson recruited new members, drummer Bob C. Benberg, woodwinds player John Helliwell, and bassist Dougie Thomson. This new line-up were sent by their record label, A&M, to a seventeenth-century farm in Somerset in order to rehearse together and prepare the album.
The album was recorded at a number of studios including Ramport Studios (owned by The Who) and Trident Studios with co-producer Ken Scott. While recording the album, Davies and Hodgson recorded approximately 42 demo songs, from which only 8 were chosen to appear on the album. Several other tracks appeared on later albums (Crisis? What Crisis?, ...Famous Last Words...). Due to a contractual agreement, all the songs are credited jointly to the two writers, but their partnership as songwriters was dissolving and some of the songs were in fact written by one or the other individually. "Asylum" was written by Davies, "Hide in Your Shell" by Hodgson, and both "School" and "Crime of the Century" are actual Davies/Hodgson collaborations. Little is known about which of the two wrote the remaining songs; Hodgson recounted that "Dreamer" began as a home tape he recorded, but is vague as to whether or not Davies had a hand in the finalized composition.
The album was named after the final song, "Crime of the Century", which the band members felt was the strongest song on the album. Shortly after his departure from Supertramp, Hodgson commented, "I've had more people come up to me and say that that song touched them more deeply than any other. That song really came together when we were living together at Southcombe and just eating, sleeping, and breathing the ideas for the album. The song just bounced between Rick and I for so many weeks before it finally took form." For unknown reasons, in several interviews both before and since, Hodgson has attributed the song as being written solely by Davies. He describes "School" as "my song basically" but admits that Davies wrote both the piano solo and a good deal of the lyrics.
Hodgson and Davies both stated that communication within the group was at a peak during the recording of this album, while drummer Siebenberg stated that he thought it was this album on which the band hit its "artistic peak".
Crime of the Century deals loosely with themes of loneliness and mental stability, but is not a concept album. Davies consciously linked the opening track "School" to "Bloody Well Right" with the line "So you think your schooling is phoney", and according to Hodgson, any unifying thread beyond that was left to the listener's imagination.
The sound of the train in "Rudy" was recorded at Paddington station, while the crowd noises in the song were taken from Leicester Square.
Read more about this topic: Crime Of The Century (album)
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