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In 1979, Paul McCartney began paying closer attention to the pop charts.
The former Beatle was keenly embracing the trends around him. Wings had reached its end with the new wave coated Back to the Egg, despite its shoddy results, and a little disco was bottled for their stand-alone ‘Goodnight Tonight’. Such an embrace of the era’s pop flourish would reap greater rewards in the following year’s McCartney II, but the final close of the 1970s saw McCartney begin to consider his next creative step for the new decade, just as he had ten years earlier.
For the most part, it was the UK’s music scene that caught McCartney’s attention. Talking to Rolling Stone days after ‘Goodnight Tonight’ was dropped to the charts, McCartney reeled through the likes of Squeeze, The Jam, and Elvis Costello, as well as plucking a surprise punk pic from Peter and the Test Tube Babies with their ‘Lord Lucan Is Missing’. But before them all came one of 1979’s mammoth hitters on both sides of the Atlantic, a titan of the era’s soft rock’s defining anthem.
It’s no surprise that, while appreciating select cuts of the new wave, McCartney would be hopelessly lost in Supertramp’s gleaming popcraft. He loved an old-fashioned song standard too much, and 1979’s ‘The Logical Song’ hit all those Macca bullseyes.
Originally hailing from the more progressive end of 1970s rock, a tighter pop refinement saw them half orbit the breezy ripples of Eagles and The Doobie Brothers over their former Yes and Genesis, Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson riding the creative flux with their stolid co-frontman duties and shared lyrical pen in the Lennon-McCartney tradition.
It was Hodgson who wrote their biggest hit, however. One of two massive numbers that year excoriating the British school system – the other being Pink Floyd’s dark, disco-flecked ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2’ – Hodgson reflected on his days at boarding school, turmoiled by the divorce of his parents and amid the cold, institutional efforts to scrub one’s shyness and sensitivity out of the young boys to deliver the world the next generation of callous young men groomed for power.
“They sent me away to teach me how to be sensible, logical, responsible, practical / And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable, clinical, intellectual, cynical…”
It was pointed stuff for all its electric piano bounce and immaculately shining production. Elevated with John Helliwell’s roaring saxophone solo, Davies sought to imbue his own creative stamp on ‘The Logical Song’ by writing the second chorus’s vocal harmonies and inserting the electronic goal sound from a Mattel handheld football game as Hodgson sings the line “digital”. It’s an off-kilter quirk that counterbalances the song’s lyrical wander of lost childhood, arguably spiked with an even deeper disquiet with its kids’ toy audio swirling amongst Supertramp’s enduring pop rumination.
Striking a Top Ten in both the UK and US charts, ‘The Logical Song’ helped thrust its Breakfast in America to the very top of the Billboard 200, but for Hodgson, the greatest accolade may well have been the kudos bestowed from his old rock and pop hero, “Having been brought up on The Beatles,” he once stated, “It was wonderful to hear Paul McCartney loved my song.”
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