‘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.”
Johnny Marr was in the Pretenders, for about a nanosecond, just after the Smiths broke up. Look, I’m guessing, but from the look of him on stage – affectionate, relaxed, bringing his A game – it was a bit of a spiritual cleanse for him, the Pretender months. They smashed out the crowdpleasers – Back on the Chain Gang, Don’t Get Me Wrong – to a crowd for which “pleased” was too simple a word. The vibe was more a la recherche du temps perdu; we were smashed round the head by late 80s could’ve-beens, too lost in a collective reverie to even murmur along the lyrics. Imagine if the Smiths hadn’t split up, and the two bands had just merged. The end of that would have been a cracker of a court case. Imagine if Marr had stayed in the Pretenders for longer than a year.
“There’s a drunk hanging around backstage,” Hynde said, “he’s a big guy and he insists on playing. I don’t want any trouble.” So deadpan, so convincing. The guy next to me squared his shoulders, like he was ready to jump up there and help out. “Come on out, Dave Grohl!”, was her big reveal. He leapt behind the drums with the wild enthusiasm of a puppy, first he was going to play with the sticks, then he was going to eat the sticks. Back against the wall, I’d say she brought her guns out in the wrong order. People were more excited to see Johnny Marr, it felt like a moment; Grohl was more of a cameo. The rumour earlier in the day had been that the surprise was Paul McCartney, and sure enough, he did put his face in, but only to do a thumbs up and then skedaddle. It would be churlish to ask what he added, exactly. What occasion isn’t buoyed by a reminder that Macca exists and is cheerful?
Maybe hoping to get Grohl to calm down, Hynde launched into I’ll Stand By You, and this time, maybe mindful that this was likely the final banger, the crowd got its karaoke hat on, singing along quietly enough as to not annoy each other, loud enough to get its message across: you, lady, have one lovely voice. It’s great to meet your guitar heroes, whatever they get up to, but you just have this lovely voice, strong and low, opulent and convincing. No abatement of intensity.
