Here’s where I break my own rules. Supertramp’s Crime of the Century (1974) is hardly a hidden gem – it’s a much-loved classic that can be found in millions of collections – and it’s not even one of the 100 albums I gave to Dave. It is, however, one of my favourite albums, and after the sad news of Rick Davies’ death this week, it seems an appropriate addition to this series. My house, my rules.

As a band Supertramp get a couple of brief mentions in Dead Man Singing but their music doesn’t have a significant role to play in the story. The role their music played in my life is a different matter though. Supertramp were my favourite group as a teenager. There was a significant period of time when it’s no exaggeration to say that I listened to them every single day. While Breakfast In America (1979) is the album that saw them scale the commercial heights, it was their 1974 breakthrough that I probably played more than all the others, and I’ve always regarded it as their masterpiece.

First track School sums up a lot of what makes Supertramp such a distinctive band. There’s the wailing, mournful harmonica opening, giving way to Roger Hodgson’s plaintive vocal and the delicate interplay of guitar and clarinet before the rest of the band kicks in. From there the intensity of the song ebbs and flows, building to peaks and falling away before eventually hitting one of the great piano-led instrumental sections in rock. The lyrics speak of angst and a search for individuality which very much set Supertramp at the heart of a 70s hippy mindset, while there’s even room for Hodgson to cut loose on electric guitar towards the end – something that you could take for granted with most bands at the time, but which wasn’t always deemed necessary in Supertramp.

It's one of those albums that doesn’t have a weak track. The adolescent angst of School is followed by Rick Davies’ belligerent Bloody Well Right, and the band’s two songwriters trade lead vocals for the rest of the album. A personal favourite of mine was Hide In Your Shell – probably my favourite song before Richard Thompson’s Wall of Death entered my life – which is another slice of prime Hodgson existential searching. Dreamer was the breakthrough hit single, and the title track, the Davis-led Crime of the Century is held back to the end for good show-stopping reasons, but you could drop the needle at any point on either side of the vinyl and hit gold. Great lyrics, great singing, idiosyncratic music which didn’t really sound like anyone else at the time, and absolute mastery of a fluid approach to tone and tempo which still sets it apart from the modern preference for click tracks and uniformity.

So why didn’t the album make the cut for Dave’s post-death selections? For one thing, when I think of Dave I think guitars, while when I think of Supertramp I think of keyboards. For another, the twin songwriters in the band expose a major difference between Dave and myself. I always found Roger Hodgson’s searching, spiritually focused lyrics the more compelling, while Rick Davies’ more down-to-earth approach would have been more appealing to Dave. The things that I most liked about Supertramp wouldn’t necessarily have floated Dave’s boat, and I felt that including anything of theirs would risk tethering his taste in music too closely to my own – I wanted him to be his own man, not just a cypher for me. Not that he would dislike Supertramp by any means, but it didn’t feel like something he would consider essential for his new life. My life, now that’s a different matter.