A few hours before the doors opened for the Pretenders’ Edinburgh concert, Chrissie Hynde posted a message on her social media channels. The gist being that, while she appreciated the support of the band’s most devoted fans – the ones who travel from city to city and country to country to attend multiple concerts – she was, to be frank, getting sick of seeing the usual suspects plonked six feet in front of her at every damn gig. She was therefore formally asking her hardy but apparently increasingly tiresome acolytes to cede the front row to ‘local faces’. This would, she said, help keep ‘it new’ for the band each night.
Hynde has always been pretty punchy, but this seemed a bit much, even by her standards; not so much biting the hand that feeds as gnawing it clean off. I duly went along to the Usher Hall expecting fireworks.
Hynde belted out the songs like a careworn cabaret singer, microphone in one hand, heart in the other
Would I arrive to find Hynde personally dragging repeat offenders from the stalls? Would fans be gluing themselves to the apron, like some greying pop culture scion of Extinction Rebellion? No such luck. In the event, the singer seemed happy enough with her paying audience, the crowd appeared unwavering in its adoration, and it was hard to argue with the effectiveness of the outcome. Perhaps more artists should treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen.
In a changing world, Hynde is a fixed point of absolutes. She’s no chameleon; at 73 she looks exactly the same as she ever did, a rock and roll Dorianne Gray in black T-shirt, thigh-high boots, skintight jeans and crow’s nest hair. Perhaps more remarkable is the fact that she sounds the same, too. Her voice, which has always been a miraculous thing, remains outstanding. The trademark vibrato was on point; she can still snarl, snap, mutter and coo to order, and she can do even more with it these days.
On soulful ballads ‘The Losing’ and ‘You Can’t Hurt a Fool’ Hynde laid aside her guitar and belted out the songs like a careworn cabaret singer, microphone in one hand, heart in the other.
Musically, her dedication to the art of two guitars, bass and drums would seem rather quaint – sentimental, even – if she didn’t deliver so thoroughly with it. Although she remains the only original Pretender, Hynde has somehow managed to preserve the essential spirit of the enterprise. There were no samplers, no computers, nothing ‘on track’. Not even a keyboard. ‘Hate For Sale’ was pure punk, a lively bookend to the Pretenders debut single ‘Precious’. Born 40 years apart, they were performed here more or less as twins.
Hynde doesn’t do or say much on stage – ‘Here’s another one’ was a typical song introduction – but guitarist and current co-writer James Walbourne added some theatre to the proceedings. When he reeled and duck-walked around the stage while unleashing yet another solo – impressive though they were, perhaps there were a couple too many of them – Hynde beamed like a proud mother hen.
The extended minimalist dub-rock of ‘Private Life’ stretched the template of what the band do, but mostly this was retro rock and roll served straight. Picking judiciously from the first three Pretenders albums and the two most recent, Hate For Sale and Relentless, the set focused on the most rewarding eras of a band enjoying a late period purple patch.
New songs such as ‘The Buzz’ and ‘I Think About You Daily’ held their own alongside hits ‘Kid’, ‘Talk of the Town’ and ‘Back on the Chain Gang’. ‘Don’t Get Me Wrong’ shone, but so did ‘Let The Sun Come In’.
Hynde closed with ‘I’ll Stand by You’, as though acknowledging that this slightly schlocky mid-1990s hit sits awkwardly with the rest of the catalogue. Still, she wrung every last drop of emotion from it. They didn’t perform ‘Brass in Pocket’, ‘Stop Your Sobbing’ or ‘Middle of the Road’. Great songs all, but they weren’t missed.
Newly reformed, and with a second album recently released 36 years after the first, Fairground Attraction have essentially picked up where they left off in 1990, making skiffleish folk-pop heavily imbued with the flavours of jazz, country, chanson and Cajun. In Edinburgh, accordion, glockenspiel, concertina and ukulele vied with more conventional instruments.
The six-piece group gathered around the core duo of guitar player Mark Nevin and singer Eddi Reader. Although the songs are middleweights at best – nothing here was ever going to outpunch a cover of Patsy Cline’s ‘Walking After Midnight’ – and occasionally somewhat irritating, they were performed with heart, humour and nimble expertise. Reader provided the essential spark – another outstanding and idiosyncratic vocal stylist grown ever more so with age.
Comments