Supertramp Breakfast in America: Why local papers including Rick Davies' Swindon Advertiser and the Manchester Evening News appear on the cover
When you work as a local journalist, you end up knowing a lot of arcane facts about a town or city - even more so than the area you grew up in.
So, for example, Portsmouth is the only island city in the country.
Swindon Town is - or was several years ago (I can’t be bothered to go through the current league to check this) - the only league team not to contain any letters of the word “mackerel” in its name.
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And there’s another little fact about Swindon that has always remained dear to my heart (I worked at the Swindon Advertiser from 2003 to 2007 and was the news editor before I left).
On the back cover of Supertramp’s Breakfast in America album, you can see the band in an American café, all reading papers. Singer Rick Davies, who has just died aged 81, was reading the Swindon Advertiser, as it was the publication from his Wiltshire hometown. His bandmates were pictured reading the Manchester Evening News, the Glasgow Herald, the Oxford Mail, plus a Los Angeles paper.
[Side note: One of the weirder 9/11 conspiracy theories emerged from the front cover of that record - the U and the P of Supertramp are behind the Twin Towers. As they are obscured by the buildings they could be said to resemble a backwards 9 (the P) and 11 (the U, as you cannot see the curve at the bottom), leading to some excitable people to claim that Supertramp predicted the future.]
It’s perhaps not important, and Davies’ passing has rightly seen tributes online from the Advertiser of today, but being of the generation whose dad had Breakfast in America in his record collection, it always gave me a little frisson of pleasure to know of my paper’s minor and obscure place in the history of an album which sold 20m copies worldwide.