‘We don’t have to get fat / We don’t have to get old / We don’t have to fade to black,” Chrissie Hynde told the crowd in her idiosyncratic smooth roar. It’s off the new album, Relentless. “I like the definition,” she told NME last month, “showing no abatement of intensity. It’s the life of the artist. You never retire. You become relentless.” While this is very much the spirit of the 2023 line-up – never retire, never surrender – Hynde is peculiarly unchanged in her every particular, from the sinewy rock sprite look to the enveloping voice. It’d be fun to get told off by Chrissie Hynde. However mean she was, I bet it’d be really resonant and calming, like a didgeridoo.
“James Walbourne on the guitar, nice one”, she said at the end of Thumbelina, less to the audience and more to the guitarist himself, “cheers dude, good of you to show,” which sounded a little opaque – he’s been in the band since 2008 – until you realised what she had up her sleeve. The special guests were about to arrive: after that, you understood it as a little word hug, “just because Johnny Marr’s coming out, you’re still my favourite.”
