Roger Hodgson

There is a voice you recognise in a second: high, clean, able to climb with no apparent effort. It belongs to Roger Hodgson, and it is also the pen behind "Dreamer", "Give a Little Bit", "The Logical Song", "Breakfast in America", "Take the Long Way Home" and "It's Raining Again". It is worth saying so up front because almost every summary gets it wrong: all six are his, even though "Dreamer" and "Breakfast in America" are frequently attributed to Rick Davies. In Supertramp everything was credited to both names by contract, and that erased for decades who wrote what. His story is always told as that of a man who chose his family over fame, and that is half true. What is missing is a verbal pact that somebody broke and a fall from a loft.

Two songwriters under the same roof

Hodgson was born on 21 March 1950 in Portsmouth and co-founded Supertramp in 1969. The band worked like two separate workshops sharing a room: him, with the high voice and the melodic songs, bright and frequently spiritual; Rick Davies, with the low voice, the Wurlitzer and a bluesy pulse, earthbound and sarcastic. The comparison with Lennon and McCartney gets used a lot and for once it fits: the contrast was the material.

The contractual mechanism explains the later confusion. Every track was credited "Davies/Hodgson", as with the Beatles, but the publishing contracts recorded the real authorship separately and gave each of them approval rights over his own songs. On Hodgson's side are, in addition to the ones already named, "Don't Leave Me Now", "C'est le Bon", "Know Who You Are" and "Crazy" —the Supertramp one, not Patsy Cline's—. On Davies's side, "Bloody Well Right", "Goodbye Stranger", "Crime of the Century", "Rudy", "Cannonball" and "My Kind of Lady".

Hence the sentence that gets repeated and that needs qualifying: most of the radio anthems came out of Hodgson, but the Supertramp catalogue makes no sense without Davies. They are two different things.

The two most frequently mistaken attributions are precisely the biggest ones. "Dreamer" is usually given to Davies because the riff sounds on a Wurlitzer, Davies's instrument; Hodgson wrote it at nineteen on his mother's piano and he sings it. "Breakfast in America" is also from those teenage years. And "The Logical Song", which came out of his boarding school experience and won him an Ivor Novello award in 1980, carries a vocal harmony contributed by Davies: the division was clean, but it was not airtight.

September 1983

His own account of why he left has two halves and neither is a scandal. In 1981 he had moved to northern California, far from a band based in Los Angeles, and he wanted to raise his children. At the same time he felt increasingly limited inside the group and fed up with the commercial side of the job. He left at the end of the …Famous Last Words… tour, in September 1983, when Supertramp was one of the biggest bands on the planet. Getting off there is the same kind of decision as that of Cat Stevens or that of Peter Gabriel, though for different reasons.

The exit came with an agreement. In 1983 there was a verbal pact between the two of them: Davies kept the Supertramp name, Hodgson kept his songs for his solo career. None of it was put in writing.

Five years later, Davies began playing Hodgson's songs live. Hodgson has told it without hedging: "The hard part came when he broke that agreement and started playing my songs five years later. It hurt me enormously. I felt betrayed". And also, less diplomatically: "He's playing songs he didn't even like at the time!". It was not a dispute over percentages. It was that the only division that ordered forty years of shared credits had been made with a handshake.

The two wrists

After Supertramp he released four records of his own, not a couple: In the Eye of the Storm (1984), which passed two million copies, Hai Hai (1987), the live album Rites of Passage (1997) and Open the Door (2000). Seen that way, the silence of the nineties looks like a life choice. It was not entirely.

In 1987, just before releasing Hai Hai, Hodgson fell from a loft in his house and broke both wrists. He was told he would never play again and it took him around eighteen months to recover. A guitarist and keyboard player with both hands out of action is not choosing anything: he is waiting. Adding that fall to the retirement for family reasons takes nothing away from the merit of the 1983 decision; it restores the real weight of the years that came afterwards.

Nor is it true that they never crossed paths again. On 14 April 1993, at a Beverly Hills Hilton dinner in honour of Jerry Moss, co-founder of A&M, Hodgson, Davies and the saxophonist John Helliwell played "The Logical Song" and "Goodbye Stranger" together, and afterwards recorded demos of two new songs. Management disagreements separated them again. In 2010 Hodgson offered to join some dates of Supertramp's European tour and Davies's circle turned him down.

Davies died on 6 September 2025, at the age of 81, in East Hampton, New York, from complications of a multiple myeloma diagnosed around 2015 that had forced him to cancel that year's European tour. The reunion half the world was waiting for came down to two songs played in a hotel ballroom and some demos that nobody released.

What to remember

Roger Hodgson's story is almost always told as a noble gesture, and it was one: he got off the train at the summit to raise his children. But the full profile is harder and more interesting. A contract that split the credits down the middle and left the real authorship in the files; a verbal pact that ordered the division and that was broken with no paper to appeal to; a domestic fall that nearly cost him his trade and that explains the silence better than any philosophy.

What is not in dispute is the songbook. One man wrote "Dreamer" and "Breakfast in America" before he turned twenty, on his mother's piano, and spent the rest of his life explaining that they were his. When that very high voice sounds, the argument about who signed what becomes rather small.

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Sources

Roger Hodgson was born on 21 March 1950 in Portsmouth, England, and co-founded Supertramp in 1969 as singer, guitarist, keyboard player and songwriter. He is the author and performer of "Dreamer", "Give a Little Bit", "The Logical Song", "Breakfast in America", "Take the Long Way Home", "It's Raining Again", "Don't Leave Me Now", "C'est le Bon", "Know Who You Are" and "Crazy" (the Supertramp track). Rick Davies is the author of "Bloody Well Right", "Goodbye Stranger", "Crime of the Century", "Rudy", "Cannonball", "My Kind of Lady" and "I'm Beggin' You". All Supertramp tracks were credited "Davies/Hodgson" by contract, but the publishing contracts recorded the real authorship and granted each author approval rights over his own songs. "Dreamer" and "Breakfast in America" were written by Hodgson at nineteen; "The Logical Song" originated in his boarding school experience, with a vocal harmony contributed by Davies, and received an Ivor Novello award in 1980. Hodgson moved to northern California in 1981 and left Supertramp at the end of the "…Famous Last Words…" tour, in September 1983, citing family reasons and the wish to get out of the group's limits. In 1983 there was a verbal agreement under which Davies kept the band's name and Hodgson his songs for his solo career; according to Hodgson, Davies began performing his songs five years later. He released four records of his own: "In the Eye of the Storm" (1984), which passed two million copies, "Hai Hai" (1987), the live album "Rites of Passage" (1997) and "Open the Door" (2000). In 1987, before the release of "Hai Hai", he fell from a loft in his house and fractured both wrists; he was told he would never play again and his recovery took around eighteen months. On 14 April 1993, Hodgson, Rick Davies and John Helliwell performed "The Logical Song" and "Goodbye Stranger" at a Beverly Hills Hilton dinner in honour of Jerry Moss, co-founder of A&M Records, and then recorded demos of two new songs; management disagreements prevented the reunion from continuing. In 2010, Hodgson offered to take part in dates of Supertramp's European tour and his proposal was rejected. Rick Davies died on 6 September 2025, at the age of 81, in East Hampton, New York, from complications of a multiple myeloma diagnosed around 2015 that forced the cancellation of that year's European tour. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, published interviews with Roger Hodgson and other press coverage.