By Michael Baginski/ Rick Davies, the lead singer and co-founder of British band Supertramp, has died after a long battle with cancer. Davies, who co-wrote the band’s music with Roger Hodgson, was the voice and pianist behind some of Supertramp’s most iconic songs, including “Bloody Well Right,” “Crime of the Century,” and “Goodbye Stranger.”
He died Saturday at age 81 after battling multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, for more than a decade, the band said.
Davies and Hodgson formed Supertramp in 1969 and scored hits in the ‘70s from the now classic albums “Crime of the Century” and “Even in the Quietest Moments” before achieving superstardom in 1979 with “Breakfast in America,” which topped charts in the U.S. and Canada, won two Grammys and sold over 18 million copies.
The band was especially popular in Canada throughout its career, and notably an excerpt from its epic “Fool’s Overture” served for a time as the introductory jingle for the long-running CTV news magazine show W5.
Not unlike Lennon and McCartney (and later, Cuddy and Keelor), Davies and Hodgson were opposites that paired together in perfect measure, trading songs on albums – Hodgson’s typically lighter and more commercial, Davies’ distinctly more soulful with “an unmistakable touch on the Wurlitzer (that) became the heartbeat of the bands’ sound.”
But like the Beatles’ duo, Davies and Hodgson also fell out, with the latter leaving the band in 1983 for a successful solo career.
Supertramp disbanded in 1988, though Davies revived it in 1996. The group performed for the last time in Madrid in 2012 and Davies last performed as Ricky and the Rockets in June of 2022 at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett, NY, near his home in Long Island.
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