The Pretenders, with
Paul Kelly and the Boon Companions,
The Church, Josh Pyke.

A Day on the Green
Annie’s Lane Winery, Watervale.
January 20.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

While it was a welcome break to the South Australian drought and a boon to the state’s near North where it fell most heavily, the enormous hogshead of rain that unloaded on well-named Watervale, seemed sure to mean that A Day on the Green would be a night in the mire.

It had rained the night before, flooding shops in the main street of Clare, and this continued well into the next afternoon as undaunted fans arrived with hampers, folding chairs and a ready thirst for Annie’s Lane own drop. But, providentially, sometime through The Church’s set (probably around the time of their memorable rendering of Under the Milky Way) the clouds not only parted, but blue sky came out to play.

If ever there was a portent this was it. And the show that followed, performed (if I may mangle my metaphor) in the teeth of imminent deluge, seemed especially nimble and sweet. Fellow headliner, Paul Kelly, performed with three Boon Companions, including a slightly uneven Ash Naylor guesting on lead guitar and the ever constant Pete Luscombe on drums. Opening with a solo crooning of They Thought I was Asleep, Kelly’s set ranges from crowd favorites such as To Her Door and Before Too Long to less performed material such as Blush and Won’t You Come Around. As always he judges the occasion well, throwing in some new songs and gliding through When I First Met your Ma and Gravy. The crowd is yelling for more but the set closes on a prompt, but fortunately unprophetic note, with Deeper Water.

It is clear that it is The Pretenders’ night and so when Chrissie Hynde slips on stage unannounced and fifteen minutes before schedule, it is as if she is some kind of magical apparition. In her white leather regency jacket, and skin tight pants, trademark hair with a curtain of fringe down to her panda mascara eyes, she represents timeless and ageless rebel girl pop. Slim as a whip, relaxed and interacting closely with the adoring (and wine-cranked) groundlings, Hynde goes shoulder to shoulder with fellow guitar-slinger Adam Seymour for a note perfect dash through Night in My Veins. It sets the pace and the standard as she moves into that distinctive aching vocal for Don’t Get me Wrong and Dylan’s Forever Young.

The fast punk early standards are on display. Talk of the Town, The City was Gone and middle period rockers like Back on the Chain Gang and Middle of the Road – Chrissie on wailing harmonica and Seymour, one the best in the business, scintillating and succinct on lead. Kid – “You’ve turned your head/ you’ve dropped your hand” – is dedicated to Pete Farndon and James Honeyman-Scott, both dead from overdoses in the early eighties (who can forget the band’s doom-laden Festival Theatre gig in Adelaide only months before their demise, Hynde ragged with anxiety and half the band on the nod.)

This is what makes this gig such a marvel of rock and roll survival. Hynde’s marvelous songs sound the more exultant, classics of the crash and burn of youth and romantic hazard. Original drummer Martin Chambers, enigmatically behind a perspex screen, is there too – the other witness from the lower depths. The Pretenders’ name is even more ironic these days, There are no more legitimate monarchs of eighties rock than them – witty, fast on their feet, a mystery achievement of their own. The set closes at seventy five minutes with the immortal Brass in Pocket. It is all too soon, but in itself apt – a fabulous stolen moment before the heavens close and the rains return.

The Adelaide Review, No 309, February 2, 2007, p.14.