Former Supertramp bandmates square off over royalties from hit albums

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Four former bandmates of the British rock band Supertramp faced off in court on Tuesday in a trial over royalties from their six 1970s and 80s hit albums, including their most successful record,"Breakfast in America."

Three of them — bass player Dougie Thomson, saxophonist John Helliwell and drummer Bob Siebenberg — accuse the band's main songwriter, singer and guitarist Roger Hodgson of reneging on a 1977 agreement that entitled them to a cut of his songwriting royalties in recognition of their contributions on the recordings.

Supertramp's other songwriter and fifth member, keyboardist and singer Rick Davies, who had formed the band with Hodgson in 1969, was also a defendant in the lawsuit, but the plaintiffs settled with him in 2023.

According to the three former band members, Hodgson stopped paying them their share of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual revenue starting in 2018 without explanation. They now accuse him of breach of contract and are asking a federal jury in downtown Los Angeles to award them the royalties they say Hodgson has been withholding.

"My clients made a massive contribution to the band's success," David Given, an attorney representing Thomson, Helliwell and Siebenberg, told the jurors in his opening statement. "After my clients joined, the right pieces fell into place."

According to Given, the first lineups of Supertramp released two albums in the early 1970s that failed to make an impact. Only after the other three joined Hodgson and Davies, in what became the classic version of the band, did they start to achieve commercial success.

The 1974 album "Crime of the Century," which moved away from the band's original prog-rock sound to more of a pop-focused sound and which included the hit single "Dreamer," sold 12 million copies worldwide.

The lawsuit pertains to songwriting royalties from the six albums that the band released between 1973 and 1983, Given said. After Hodgson left the band in 1983 to pursue a solo career, an exit agreement between the band members preserved the terms of the 1977 deal that gave Hodgson and Davies a 27% cut each of the songwriting royalties from the six albums and 11.5% to each of the other three members.

This 1984 agreeement, Given said, stated that this division of royalties was meant to be "in perpetuity." However, in recent years Hodgson has characterized the royalty sharing deal as "a gift" to the band's "sidemen," according to the lawyer.

The songwriting royalties in question are collected by Delicate Music, a partnership between the two songwriters Davies and Hodgson, who distributed a share of their royalties to the three other musicians.

Alan Gutman, an attorney for Hodgson and Delicate Music, disputed that the 1984 agreement entitled the three former band members to a share of the royalties forever because the language of the contract only entitles Hodgson to his 27% share in perpetuity.

The 1977 agreement to split songwriting royalties with the three band members' who didn't write any of the songs, was made only because the three were broke at the time, according to Gutman. The 1975 album "Crisis? What Crisis?" hadn't included a hit single and it sales fell short of the successful "Crime of the Century," which meant the band had no money coming in from record sales.

This meant, Gutman said in his opening statement," that whereas Davies and Hodgson were getting paid from their songwriting royalties, the other three were left plotting to get a little piece of that revenue until money from other sources was coming in.

That doesn't mean, Gutman told the jury, that they are entitled to receive a share of Hodgson's royalties forever.

"Mr. Hodgson wrote the songs that made Supertramp," Gutman said. "It's Roger Hodgson who gave birth and life to the songs. They are about him growing up in the English countryside and attending boarding school."

Follow @edpettersson

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