Paris

About

After years as cult heroes, U.K. art rockers Supertramp sanded off their artier edges and amped up their pop tendencies for their 1979 breakthrough, <i>Breakfast in America</i>. The next year, the band released <i>Paris</i>, which documents a stop in the City of Lights on their <i>Breakfast</i> tour. But while the set list here includes the recent singles that were monopolizing the radio at the time ("The Logical Song," "Take the Long Way Home," "Breakfast in America"), this luminous live recording is dominated by older material, which much of Supertramp's newly expanded audience was probably experiencing for the first time. What the newbies hearing the shows and subsequent album learned was that even though some of Supertramp's earlier tunes were extended affairs full of prog-rock twists and turns ("Fool's Overture," "Crime of the Century"), all of them were laced with the same sort of pop charms the aforementioned hits possessed. Case in point: the frothy "Dreamer"—the studio cut had stiffed as a single in the U.S. several years earlier, but the vivid live version became a major hit in 1980.

via Apple Music

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