Supertramp’s Roger Hodgson takes Thebarton Theatre audience back for Breakfast in America

Supertramp’s former frontman Roger Hodgson brought all the band’s hits back to life for the 40th anniversary of its Breakfast in America album at Thebarton Theatre.

Roger Hodgson of Supertramp performs at Thebarton Theatre. Picture: Supplied

OVER a rumbling electric piano groove, the unmistakeable, yearning opening harmonica notes of Take The Long Way Home bring a cheer of recognition from an Adelaide crowd that is instantly transported back to 1979 and the pinnacle of Supertramp’s career – its Breakfast in America album.

Behind that Roland RD-2000 keyboard, resplendent in a pristine white suit which might have come straight from the same period, sits that British group’s former singer and principal songwriter Roger Hodgson, whose high-pitch nasal vocals and pounding pianism remain the hallmarks of its sound.

Instantly, an aura of carefree delight swells in the crowd. This is exactly what they have come to hear, played exactly as it should sound.

The mix might be as mellow as the mood – a perfect balance of instruments at a moderate volume, rather than the usual rock concert dynamics of excessive bass and drums and screaming solo instruments – but again, that was precisely the appeal of the group in its heyday.

Roger Hodgson of Supertramp performs at Thebarton Theatre. Picture: Supplied

There was a time when wild horses couldn’t have dragged me to a Supertramp show but here, in the deft hands of Hodgson and his superbly skilled current musicians, memories of an era when the band dominated FM radio came flooding back in an unexpected sea of sentimentality.

Chief among Hodgson’s accomplices is multi-instrumentalist Michael Ghegan, whose harmonica and saxophone solos recreate those on Supertramp’s best-known hits with note-for-note precision, while imbuing them with a soul and sense of spontaneity which feels as if they are being improvised in the moment.

On a stage lit with pink and purple spotlights against a backdrop of potted palms, the concert might not have been at the originally planned parklands venue but the intimacy of Thebarton Theatre proved a much more rewarding experience for audience and artist alike.

“We made it,’’ Hodgson declared on the final night of his New Zealand and Australian tour. “Music can hold our memories like nothing else, so I hope this brings back a few good ones tonight.’’

It does, and then some, with hit after hit after hit: Harmonica once again acting as a Klaxon call for the Pink Floyd-like overtures and long instrumental passages of School, the jaunty rhythm of instant singalong Breakfast in America, then the chiming grand piano of Lovers in the Wind.

Roger Hodgson of Supertramp performs at Thebarton Theatre. Picture: Supplied

The audience whistles the introduction to Easy Does It with Hodgson on acoustic guitar, building into a bigger strum with Ghegan accompanying on a mouth-blown melodica and keyboardist extraordinaire Ray Coburn swapping to a pedal steel guitar sound for Sister Moonshine.

There may be some heavier themes on Hide in Your Shell but it still erupts in one of Hodgson’s trademark uplifting choruses and an audience clap-along.

Lord is it Mine leads into another highlight, The Logical Song, complete with all its endless rhymes and more superb saxophone lines.

From Hodgson’s lesser-known and most recent album, 2000’s Open the Door, Death and a Zoo is a rumbling epic, replete with roaring animals and jungle noises, piccolo pipes and thundering synths, all building in a majestic yet tragic crescendo, that finally subsides behind bars of white light.

Things go back to a more gentle acoustic approach for Even in the Quietest Moments but it’s not long before sampled city noises usher in Hodgson’s 1984 solo hit Had a Dream and the pace picks up with his rocking electric guitar solo and its “bop-shoo-wah-nah” backing vocals.

Roger Hodgson of Supertramp performs at Thebarton Theatre. Picture: Supplied

As a special thanks to tour promoter Phil Rankine, Hodgson played a new, as yet unrecorded song about forgiveness, titled The Awakening, which had an almost Celtic folk feel.

More sharp, staccato keyboard stabs led into Child of Vision, after which Hodgson introduced his remaining band members, David J. Carpenter on bass and Bryan Head on drums and percussion.

“All dreamers to the front of the stage,’’ the singer said, bringing the crowd to its feet for Dreamer, with its almost impossibly high vocal bridge.

Three instrumental passages fit together to form Hodgson’s closing opus Fool’s Overture, incorporating everything from crowd chants to Churchill speeches.

In keeping with his honest, open approach, Hodgson forwent the usual pretence of leaving the stage and – amid rapturous applause – launched straight into two singalong encores: Give a Little Bit and It’s Raining Again, a song so catchy you can almost forgive him for rhyming “fighter” with “uptighter”.

It’s difficult to imagine an audience – or an artist – going home with a bigger collective smile on their faces.

Roger Hodgson

Thebarton Theatre

February 6, 2019