Rick Davies, the singer and keyboardist who as a founding member of prog-rock and pop group Supertramp penned some of the band’s most popular and enduring songs, died on Saturday at his home in Long Island. He was 81.
“The Supertramp Partnership is very sad to announce the death of Supertramp founder Rick Davies after a long illness,” the band wrote in a statement. “We had the privilege of knowing him, and playing with him for over 50 years. We offer our sincere condolences to Sue Davies.” A cause of death was not immediately available, but Davies had been battling multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, for over a decade.
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Taking the name from the 1908 book The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by Welsh author William Henry Davies, Davies founded the group in 1969 with guitarist Richard Palmer, drummer Robert Millar, and vocalist-bassist Roger Hodgson. They released their prog-heavy eponymous debut album and second album Indelibly Stamped in 1969 and 1970, respectively, to little fanfare.
But after retooling the group, Davies and Hodgson found their commercial breakthrough with 1974’s Crime of the Century featuring Davies-penned hits “Bloody Well Good” and “Crime of the Century,” among others. (The Hodgson-penned “Dreamer” would also become one of the band’s biggest hits to date.)
Davies would go on to write some of the band’s most enduring tracks, including “Goodbye Stranger,” “Cannonball,” and “My Kind of Lady.” Breakfast in America, the band’s sixth album, went quadruple platinum and won two Grammy Awards alongside an Album of the Year nomination.
Born in Swindon, Wiltshire west of London, Davies originally gravitated towards the drums after finding an old Gene Krupa album. “That one hit me like a rocket. It was like water in the desert,” Davies told Pop Culture Classics in 1997. “On the radio in England in that era, all you heard was Vera Lynn and corny sort of stuff.” After switching to piano, “suddenly people were responding to me. That instrument just seemed right for me.”
He formed a band, Rick’s Blues, with future pop singer Gilbert O’Sullivan and later, the Lonely Ones, a band formed by future Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist Noel Redding.
This story is developing
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