Pretenders: Relentless in Boston

Forty-three years ago, I was sitting in a Minneapolis hotel room with Ray Davies and he told me the Kinks were the only band where you could see a concert, be over the moon with enjoyment and still walk away disappointed.

I took that to mean the breadth of material was so was deep, no matter what you heard — and loved — there were going to be omissions and you’d exit the venue thinking, “Damn, they didn’t play …”

Upon seeing the Pretenders, the band fronted by Ray’s long-ago ex Chrissie Hynde, at the sold out MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston July 19, those thoughts banged around my brain. Happy as I was, walking out with the throng on Lansdowne Street – joining a Noah Kahan crowd of hippies emptying the adjacent Fenway Park – with the final two encore songs in my head, “Back on the Chain Gang” and “Middle of the Road,” I drifted back to those that were MIA: “Mystery Achievement,” “Tattooed Love Boys,” “Up the Neck” and “Brass in Pocket.”

Not that we weren’t warned: In a 2022 Facebook post, Hynde wrote: “I’m completely dumping any sort of Greatest Hits set for now on. I never wanted to go there in the first place but was trying to keep myself alive and pay the bills. And yes, I know that’s no reason to be in a rock band. (I was just too scared to go back to waitressing.) But those greatest hits/ballads days are now behind me. If anyone wants to come and see me in the future it’s going to be punk rock/no hits.”

VIDEO: Pretenders “Kid” 

Well, that wasn’t actually the case. Aside from the aforementioned encore-land, hits and ballads did have a certain prominence during the two-hour show – “Precious,” “The Wait,” “Talk of the Town,” “Stop Your Sobbing,” “Kid,” “Private Life” and “My City Was Gone,” among them. But they started with two from the latest album, 2023’s Relentless – “Losing My Sense of Taste” and “A Love” and then two from 2020’s Hate for Sale, “Turf Accountant Daddy” and the title cut. They ended up playing five more from Relentless – more than half the album – thereby thwarting the veteran-band-in-modern-days dictate: Play a best-of set and, if you dare, sneak a new song or two and hope the audience doesn’t take it as a cue for a bathroom break. 

As it turned out, I was leaving the men’s room at one juncture and overheard two happy bros having a chinwag. One said, “When she sings, she sounds great!” and “Too many new songs!” His first statement was certainly on target – she did sound great. She’s my favorite female rock singer, still, with that floating, ever-expressive contralto. The way she glides and soars around a vocal line – that wavering tremolo – is sublime.  For more detail, I’ll go with what Mara Marietta says on her Culture blog: “Her voice, her signature, marks her identity as surely as a fingerprint, one that signifies, among other things, a virile tenderness, a bravado wrapped in vulnerability (or is it the other way round?). It’s a voice of unmistakable timbre, and however acrobatic, its mission is always emotion.” 

As to the “too many new songs” charge? Sure, most of us would have swapped a few new songs out for the classics of yore, but here’s the deal: The new songs are pretty strong, too. They’re not as familiar, of course, and they didn’t hit us as those first album songs did in 1980 (our youth!) partially because we don’t pay the rabid attention we once did – when Pretenders were this fresh new American/Anglo band – and we don’t have as much invested in every move Pretenders make. Life moves on, expands. But that first album was such a jolt: 12 great songs! Arguably, the finest rock debut LP ever.

As everyone knows, Pretenders lost half their band (guitarist James Honeyman Scott and bassist Pete Farndon, to whom Hynde dedicated “Kid”) to drugs decades ago. (On that first US tour in 1980, which I saw at the Paradise club in Boston, Hynde sported a “Have a Nice Death” t-shirt – irony foretold, sadly enough.) Hynde also dedicated “The Buzz” to Johnny Thunders, another drug victim who Hynde said was “a baseball player before he became a guitar player.” This, I did not know. 

Co-founding drummer for decades Martin Chambers has been a mainstay with Hynde (although fired in 1985, rejoining in 1994), but now he, too, is not in the live mix, nor was he on Relentless. On the road, Kris Sonne, who is on Relentless, handles the power-drive spot very capably. Kris Page is on bass and James Walbourne, a Pretender since 2008 and Hynde’s songwriting partner (He’s also co-leader of the Rails.) He was a standout – a modest guitar hero even, a master of the wah-wah pedal – taking some leads and bridges into the stratosphere. especially on the still spooky “Private Life.” “Bet you didn’t know how we were gonna get out of that, did ya?” quipped Hynde after the blitz. They did. And that refrain: “Private life, Trauma, Baby leave me out. Stop,” all four parts sung with a different tone and slant just slays me, especially that almost whispered “stop.” I’ve also always liked that Hynde is most always strapped, playing rhythm guitar, which makes Pretenders seem more of a band and not just a singer with backup musicians. 

VIDEO: Pretenders “My City Was Gone”

“My City Was Gone” came early in the Pretenders’ world (1982) and it’s been a cornerstone ever since. It’s a look back at Hynde’s hometown of Akron, Ohio, and probably has always struck a chord for anyone who’s moved away from their hometown only to revisit and experience that same sense of nostalgia and loss. Did so at MGM Music Hall. It is the perfect companion to Joe South’s “Don’t It Make You Want to Go Home,” released in 1969.

Hynde has had the same hair style forever, (first brunette, sometimes blond, brunette now) with those bangs covering her forehead. She has same sexy, slim look. I don’t think she’s an ounce over her playing weight in 1980 and while you can say keeping your looks and physique shouldn’t matter, let’s face it, it can and does. It helps you get into older music without thinking about its age, or the performers’, or, gulp, our own. And still, of course, you have to take note in “Middle of the Road,” that when Hynde sings about middle age – “I got a kid, I’m 33” – you do the math know she is now 72.

In a press release accompanying Relentless, Hynde explained what it meant.  “I enjoy seeing the various meanings and origins of a word,” Hynde said.  “And I liked the definition: ‘showing no abatement of intensity.’ So when it came to an album title, it seemed fitting. You know… to keep doing it. I think anyone in a band is constantly questioning if they should keep going. It starts as a youthful pursuit and eventually, it makes you wonder, why am I doing this? It’s the life of the artist. You never retire. You become relentless.”

“Precious” probably is my favorite Pretenders song and often a rousing concert-closer. Here, the multi-climactic rocker, came in about a quarter of the way through the set. Hynde presents herself as both vulnerable and tough, and after going on about unfortunates trapped in a world they never made, she rears back for “But not me baby, I’m too precious – fuck off!”

Is there a more defiant “fuck off” in rock than that? A more profound statement of taking stock in yourself, going your own way, rules and mores be damned? I don’t think so.

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Jim Sullivan

Jim Sullivan is the author of Backstage & Beyond: 45 Years of Classic Rock Chats and Rants, which came out in July, and the upcoming Backstage & Beyond: 45 Years of Modern Rock Chats and Rants, which will be published October 19 by Trouser Press Books. Based in Boston, he's written for the Boston Globe, Herald and Phoenix, and currently for WBUR's arts site, the ARTery. Past magazine credits include The Record, Trouser Press, Creem, Music-Sound Output. He's at jimullivanink on Facebook and the rarely used @jimsullivanink on X.

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