Rick Davies, singer and keyboardist for the hugely successful UK band Supertramp, has passed away. On their Facebook page, Supertramp revealed that Davies died on Saturday after a battle with multiple myeloma. Davies was 81. In their announcement, the band says, “Rick’s music and legacy continue to inspire many and bears testament to the fact that great songs never die, they live on.”

Richard Davies was born into a working class family in the English town of Swindon, and he fell in love with music young. After hearing Gene Krupa, he started playing a homemade drum kit as a child, and then he joined a local marching band as a snare drummer. Later on, he taught himself to play keyboards with no formal training. In the early ’60s, Davies studied art at Swindon College, and he played in a couple of local bands, including his own group Rick’s Blues, which once included Gilbert O’Sullivan on drums. For a while, Davies stopped playing music professionally and found work as a welder after his father fell ill. Eventually, though, Davies joined the Lonely Ones, a group that had previously included bassist Noel Redding, who went on to join the Jimi Hendrix Experience. They lived in Munich and scored German films.

When Davies was in the Lonely Ones, a Dutch millionaire offered him funding to return to England and start a new band, and that’s what he did. In 1969, Davies enlisted a few musicians, including singer/bassist Roger Hodgson, through an ad in Melody Maker, and they started a group called Daddy. They changed their band name to Supertramp, taking the moniker from the title of William Henry Davies’ memoir. Supertramp, like the Lonely Ones before them, lived in Munich and scored German films, but they also scored a deal with A&M Records’ UK branch. They released their self-titled debut in 1970. Supertramp’s early prog records didn’t sell terribly well, and the band’s membership kept shifting from the very beginning. Davies and Hodgson were the only members who remained after a few years.

Supertramp’s third album, 1974’s Crime Of The Century, became their breakout when the Davies-written single “Bloody Well Right” reached the top 20 in the UK and the top 40 in the US. In 1977. they cracked the US top twenty with “Give A Little Bit,” a Hodgson-written song that became a rock radio staple. Supertramp relocated to Los Angeles, and they recorded the 1979 pop blockbuster Breakfast In America. It went quadruple platinum and spawned four major hits, including the Davies-written “Goodbye Stranger.” Davies also wrote “My Kind Of Lady,” one of the singles from their 1982 follow-up …Famous Last Words…, but Hodgson wrote most of the band’s hits. He left the group to go solo in 1983. Davies took over as Supertramp’s sole frontman, and his wife Sue became their manager.

Rick Davies was always more interested in jazz than the relatively pop-oriented Roger Hodgson, and Supertramp became less commercial with Davies as sole bandleader. The title track of the band’s next album, 1985’s Brother Where You Bound, was a 16-minute odyssey about the Cold War with a David Gilmour guitar solo. Davies got into synths on 1987’s Free As A Bird, which included the club hit “I’m Begging You.” Supertramp became less commercially successful, and they stopped playing Roger Hodgson-written songs live, until fans demanded the return of those tracks. Davies and Hodgson briefly reunited in the early ’90s and tried to work on music together, but it didn’t last long. Supertramp’s final album Slow Motion came out in 2002, and they continued to tour until 2012. They announced another tour in 2015, but they had to cancel because of Davies’ health issues. Later on, Davies performed several times near his Long Island home under the name Ricky And The Rockets.

Check out some of Rick Davies’ work below.