Dreamer
I
don’t think there can be many pop singles that are genuine
one-offs: songs that sound like nothing else, ever. But one such must
surely be Supertramp’s 1975 single, Dreamer.
The song, lifted from the preceding year’s Crime of the
Century album, entered the UK
charts on February 15th,
1975, reaching its highest position of nunber 13 on 8th
March... the day after my birthday. But I did not receive this single
as a present, nor its parent album. I wasn’t even sure if I
actually liked it. Not yet, anyway...
For
many years, Dreamer
has had a potent nostalgic quality for me. It’s a song I don’t
mind hearing time and time over, and there aren’t many records I
can say that about. For a long time, the sound of it conjured up two
images: one was seeing the band miming it on Top
of the Pops, a performance where every member seemed to be equipped with a keyboard.
This struck me as a novelty at the time, as did the sight of John
Helliwell playing a wine glass, an item inaudible on the record (to
my ears, at any rate). The other image Dreamer
has always conjured up for me is of a blue, summer sky, with small
fluffy clouds scudding along on the breeze. A ‘dreamlike’ image?
Maybe, but I think there’s another reason for it, and I’ve had to
go back to weather records to confirm it.
The
first three months of 1975 were notable for their lack of sunshine.
Here in the midlands, we received less than half the average in
January and February, and a below average amount in March. My
recollections of the time are of a generally dull and overcast
outlook, enduring since the new year and lasting pretty well until
the beginning of spring. That’s not to say that the sun never
shone, but when it did, the effect was somewhat more noticeable.
I
was at school during these months, arriving in semi-darkness and
going home in the lengthening twilight. We didn’t take much notice
of the weather indoors. Then, one morning, I found myself sent on an
errand to fetch some books from a store room. It was always an
interesting experience to walk the corridors between lessons, where a
strange silence held sway. The store room was somewhere I’d never
been before, and its single window looked out across a lawn belonging
to the old art college next door. In the course of collecting the
required texts, I paused for a moment at the window to take in the
view. On that particular morning, the relentless grey conditions had
abated temporarily, and a dusty blue sky could be seen, with small
rags of white cloud driven across it by a light breeze.
I
think Dreamer must
have come into my head at that moment, because the glimpse of spring,
the blue sky and the clouds became fixed to the song in my
subconscious. For that moment, I became the subject of the lyric:
‘Can you put your hands in your head?’ I felt I was looking out
of time through that window, felt as if all past and future days were
gathered out there in that one moment of surprising light. My own
future was an unguessable void. I could have been something out of
this world... but of course, I was dreaming a lie.
Dreamer
was in the charts at the time: I’d probably heard it within days
via the Sunday teatime chart rundown, or the band’s TOTP
appearance. But I didn’t rush out and get it. In fact, it was the
song that got me,
working its way down to some deep, inaccessible place over the coming
years. Nostalgia is never an instant fix; you need four or five years
to feel it properly. And so it was that, sometime in the summer of
1979, in recognition of the song’s evocative power, I finally caved
in and bought Crime of the Century.
 |
| Supertramp mime Dreamer on Top of the Pops, with a set suggesting the Crisis, What Crisis album sleeve. Note the wine glass on the corner of John Helliwell's keyboard. |
There
were lots of things about Dreamer
that I shouldn’t have liked: the falsetto vocals, the reliance on
keyboards (especially electric piano, a sound I took a long while to
appreciate), and the complete absence of guitars (other than the
bass). In retrospect, these are some of the aspects that make the
song unique. For it is. Unique not only amongst Supertramp’s
recorded history, but in the entire history of pop music. There is no
other recording that sounds remotely like it. Most records follow a
production or writing formula that lends them a kind of house style –
the jingle-jangle of the Byrds, for instance, derives from the
Beatles, whose own sound derived from the likes of Chuck Berry... and
so on. Supertramp’s other singles are all much more obvious
products of the pop/rock genre, with prominent acoustic guitars
featuring on several, alongside sax, bass, drums, the uniquitous
keyboards. Dreamer
sounds like none of them. It isn’t even structured like a
conventional pop song. I’m going to take a minute here to unpick
the song... to get my hands in its head, oh no…
It
opens in the bright, optimistic key of D Major, with the rhythmical
electric piano vamp that provides a musical backbone to the
composition. Rodger Hodgson had, in fact, written the song on a
Wurlitzer electric piano (widely revered by musicians for its sharp, signature tone), and his original home demo, featuring cardboard box
percussion, was re-created by the band for their studio recording. He
was nineteen at the time of writing, and this naivety perhaps
accounts for the song’s experimental, unorthodox structure.
A
verse/chorus establishes the subject and the narrator’s point of
view: he’s addressing someone who hasn’t really got their head
together. Next comes a surprising chord change, rising from G to A
flat and B flat, on the way to the new key of C Major (‘what a day,
a year, a life it is’). This section, feeling more like a bridge
than a chorus, is repeated before a return to the original D Major.
The narrator is losing patience with his subject: ‘you stupid
little dreamer/ now you put your head in your hands, oh no.’
Now
the band breaks out, with an instrumental section featuring a
dinstinctive bass figure and dry, minimal drums (imitating Hodgson’s
home-made percussion). Reaching the bridge again, the journey to C
major now settles into a new key centre for the song. Percussion
drops back, and keyboard again comes to the fore in a small
instrumental passage that leads into the heart of the song. Now, for
the first time, the ‘dreamer’ tries to explain himself to the
narrator with a second vocal (‘If I could be someone’) setting
up a ‘call and response’ with Hodgson and the rest of the band.
The ‘dreamer’ wants to take us all with him (‘come on and
dream, dream along’), wants us to wallow in the safety of C Major,
and so it seems, until a crescendo (na-na-na-na) that bursts back
into the cold light of D Major and Hodgson, the narrator, comes back
to the fore. The repeated verse/chorus from the song’s opening
builds, with layered backing vocals, until the end comes, sudden and
surprising, leaving us with nothing but a dreamlike, tinkling
celeste, as we wonder if, in fact, the dreamer has won the day.
What’s
it all about, anyway? Is Hodgson challenging the lure of the drugs
that had become so much a part of rock culture? Or is he adopting a
more pragmatic persona, delivering a rebuke to a friend who just
can’t get a grip on reality? Perhaps he’s doing both. I didn’t
ask these questions at the time. All I knew was that the song had
attached itself to me like a musical limpet mine. Every so often, in
the years since then, it’s gone off in an explosion of blue sky and
wide lawns and unexpected March sunshine.
I couldn’t see it at the
time, aged just fourteen, but the song was my destiny. It was
speaking to me. And my subconscious was listening…
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