Supetramp: Retrospectacle - The Supertramp Anthology

That Supertramp became superstars of their time is a medium miracle. Bands like King Crimson or Jethro Tull had sublimated blues-drenched rock music into art rock and educated a listenership that had spent itself dancing at Woodstock and now wanted to attentively (and quite calmly) pursue elaborate solos and virtuoso arrangements. Supertramp did what they could. "It was definitely hairy," keyboardist Rick Davies recalls in the liner notes. "I had just started playing Hammond and wasn't quite familiar with the instrument yet." His playing on the first, self-produced album, "Supertramp," he says, could have been optimized. Indeed, the early work offers some unexpected insights. The marriage of art-rock with pop required some flirtations with the rhythm&blues tradition and a cautious approach to more complex song and arrangement structures. "Surely," taken from the first album and heard in an alternate version on "Retrospectacle - The Supertramp Anthology," is still clearly in the Mersey beat tradition. For "Land Ho", one of Supertramp's rare songs, the same applies - but here you get to deal with a brisk shuffle, a rhythmic system that had been subjected to a first test only immediately before by Led Zeppelin. Retrospectacle - The Supertramp Anthology is the first ever double CD retrospective of Supertramp, one of the most important bands of the past decades & covers a period of over 30 years of their career. All songs are "digitally remastered", with every Supertramp album (1970-2002) included.