The Pretenders
3Olympia, Dublin
★★★★☆
It’s not considered polite to discuss a woman’s age, but as Chrissie Hynde struts the 3Olympia stage in leather boots, defiantly wielding her Fender Telecaster, it’s clear the Pretenders leader is not fixing to get into any discussion about age. “We don’t have to get fat, we don’t have to get old,” she rebel-yells during the band’s latest single, Let the Sun Come In, from their forthcoming album, Relentless. It’s the first of a three-song encore that ends in a total country-rock wigout of their 1985 song Thumbelina. Before that, Hynde and co deliver a quickfire set that runs through some of the band’s beloved hits, along with plenty of other rockers and rollers from all points in the band’s 45-year career.
She might have passed the 70 milestone, but Hynde is still a rock chick through and through: still cool, still edgy and still in fine, beguiling voice. Her band of younger men are worked like a rock‘n’roll chain gang – but this is clearly a labour of love, as the band deliver the familiar guitar lines from past hits such as Kid, Don’t Get Me Wrong, Message of Love and Back on the Chain Gang. Guitarist James Walbourne, with whom Hynde has written most of the new album, never lets up on the riffology, as the band swings from punk to blues to country-rock and back to punk again.
For long-standing fans, the ghosts of original guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon will always hover in the gods, and there’ll be a few who’ll miss the band’s other surviving original member, drummer Martin Chambers, who’s not part of the current line-up. But, as Hynde herself admits, she’s always felt like she’s in a tribute band to her fallen bandmates. Just last week the band lost another former member, the former Smiths bassist Andy Rourke, who played on the band’s 1994 album, Last of the Independents.
Sunday night’s gig is part of a tour that was postponed by Covid in 2020, and the set features several tracks from the 2020 album Hate for Sale, including the amped-up title track and the rather excellent The Buzz (which cheekily steals the a few chord progressions from Kid), as well as the deliciously self-aware ballad You Can’t Hurt a Fool (”Look at her now, she’s centre stage/ Too old to know better, too young for her age”). We also get a sneak peek at the tracks from the new album, including I’m Losing my Sense of Taste, but the big moments to savour are when the band pull out nuggets such as The Adulteress, Time the Avenger, and – still my favourite Pretenders track – Talk of the Town.
