murraybramwell.com

June 01, 1987

Getting Close to Royalty

Filed under: Archive,Music

The Pretenders
Thebarton Theatre

In many ways Chrissie Hynde is soul companion to songwriters Ellie Greenwich and Carole King, who between them produced most of the definitive popular music released in the early sixties by Liberty Records and Phil Spector’s own Philles label. Like Leslie Gore, Sandie Shaw and Dionne Warwick, Chrissie Hynde’s music is Aching Pop – soulful, histrionic and bitterly aware of the chains of love.

The last time the Pretenders toured in early 1982 they gave one of the worst concerts ever seen in Adelaide. The band was ragged and sullen and Hynde shrieked and pouted at everyone in sight. The grim news that guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon both died of overdoses within ten months of the gig gave some explanation but Hynde herself seemed unable to marshal her volatile talents either as writer or performer.

The Pretenders’ first album was one of the marvels of 1980. In its fusion of punk, pop and hardline rock, it showed popular music’s remarkable capacity to adapt, mutate and conquer. Their second album was a more mixed effort but then, by that time, so was the band. The third album brought in Robbie Mcintosh on guitar and Malcolm Foster on bass and was aptly named Learning to Crawl. The current album, Get Close, sees Hynde at her most confident and commercially resilient. Martin Chambers, who played drums and if their last concert was anything to go by, also refereed the. band through its indulgences and tragedies, was unceremoniously fired (a fact daintily omitted from the programme notes) and now Hynde is the only true Pretender.

But, in a sense, she always was. The band always reflected her sensibilities, the pungent lyrics, her experiences, and back in Adelaide in 1987, Chrissie Hynde showed that given half an hour to find her feet she can deliver great rock and roll. As the band straggled through “Message of Love”, “The Adultress” and, after a nervy dedication to Honeyman-Scott, “The Kid”, the crowd was feeling fidgetty. You didn’t need to own a CD of Get Close to feel that the sound mix was like kapok and Hynde nervously off-key. Malcolm Foster on bass plunked every which way and continued to ramble all night while Robbie Mackintosh kept cranking out· riffs like malfunctioning incendiary devices. The lighting was great from the word go, with mauves, scarlets, blues and banks of criss-crossing colour which, with carefully differentiated sound, should have been galvanizing.

A few phrases from John Lennon’s “Don’t Let Me Down” led into ‘Light of the Moon’ from Get Close and Chrissie Hynde finally started moving her stetson in time with her considerable talents. Perhaps the initial rattliness was a calculated effect because there’s nothing like a shoddy start to make you grateful when a band hits its straps. In “Private Life “ Hynde’s plangent lyric found its correlative in Rupert Black’s mesmeric keyboards and Blair Cunningham’s clipped, even drumming. At least, having given Chambers the heave-ho, Hynde found a drummer with power and intelligent detail in Cunningham. “Hymn to Her”, the band’s single, followed, with Hynde’s vocals gathering expressive energy as the band led straight into “Chill Factor”.

A nostalgic return to halcyon Pretenders material with “Stop Your Sobbing” contrasted with Hynde’s apocalyptic blues polemic about her native Cleveland, “My City was Gone”. From Learning to Crawl,-the song showed the band, particularly Robbie Mackintosh, really learning to swagger, with RnB worthy of The .Stones, which of course means boogie ripped off from only the very best of black Chicago. “Mystery Achievement”, another ineffable triumph from the first album, got a disappointingly gabbled treatment, but “Middle of the Road”, with its delectable guitar chords and witty lyrics made amends. With “Precious”, the band reassured us that it really can cope with playing the greats from Chrissie Hynde’s past life.

The sound hadn’t really got itself together by the encore, but The Pretenders had. ‘Don’t Give Me Love’! again reminded that Chrissie Hynde could make a living any day as a. Top 40 songwriter. Then she crossed our palms with the obligatory “Brass in Pocket”, which, like the best live performances came through not only with sweet familiarity but also with the shock of revelation. The audience, fitful and undemonstrative most of the night, bayed for more, and Chrissie Hynde climbed her stage staircase once more and sang “The Wait” with the rightful air of a Pretender who need wait no longer.

“Getting Close to Royalty” The Adelaide Review, June 1987, pp.12-13.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment