[3] The album's dedication reads "To Sam", which is a nickname for Stanley August Miesegaes, the Dutch millionaire who supported the band financially from 1969 to 1972.

[6] After the commercial failure of their first two albums and an equally unsuccessful tour, it looked like the end of Supertramp, but Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson revitalized the band, recruiting drummer Bob C. Benberg, woodwinds player and backing vocalist John Helliwell, and bassist Dougie Thomson.

[7] Their record label, A&M, in particular A&R man Dave Margereson (who would become their manager for the next ten years), sent this new line-up to a seventeenth-century farm in west Dorset to rehearse their next album together.

Six tracks were first recorded, for the soundtrack of Tony Klinger's 1971 film Extremes "about British youth, lifestyles and drug addiction".

[citation needed] Hodgson describes "School" as "my song basically" but admits that Davies wrote both the piano solo and a good deal of the lyrics.

"[16] Ultimate Classic Rock critic Nick DeRiso rated "School" as Supertramp's 3rd greatest song, calling it a "jazz fusion-informed gem" and praising its "free-form creativity," "plaintive lyric" and "stirring musical specificity.

[citation needed] The sound of the train in "Rudy" was recorded at London Paddington station, while the crowd noises in the song were taken from Leicester Square.

With the album title already chosen, Wakefield started asking himself "what an appropriate sentence could be for 'the crime of the century'" and combined it with a line from the song "Asylum": "when they haunt me and taunt me in my cage."

Through multiple exposure, Wakefield shot 12 pictures on transparency film, which he then combined with a back-lit starscape, that was actually a black card sheet filled with holes in a darkened studio.

[28] Village Voice critic Robert Christgau was ambivalent towards the album's "straight-ahead art-rock", which he called "Queen without preening.

"[20] Adam Thomas's retrospective review in Sputnikmusic described it as one of the better albums of the 1970s for its powerful expression of young adult confusion and alienation, and for its consistent contrast between prog and pop elements.

[5] In the 1987 edition of The World Critic Lists, CBC's Geoff Edwards ranked Crime of the Century the 10th greatest album of all time.

[33] Mobile Fidelity also released its own remastered CD version on a gold disc as part of its "Ultradisc" series, in November 1984.

[citation needed] The 1997 remaster has all tracks peaking at 100 per cent, significantly altering the original dynamic range of the recording and effectively adding new distortion to the sound.

[citation needed] The album was re-issued by German audiophile label Speaker's Corner in 1999, as a 180 gram vinyl LP.

[citation needed] It was announced in October 2014 that the album, remastered by Ray Staff, would be reissued in CD, digital download, and 180g vinyl formats on 9 December 2014.

[37] In addition to the original album, the release would include a complete recording of a 1975 Hammersmith Odeon concert, a 24-page booklet of photographs, and an essay written by Phil Alexander with new interviews with Ken Scott, Dave Margereson, and most of the band members.