Review:  The Pretenders storm Tanglewood with a take-no-prisoners rock show

It was a sweltering, stormy, night in the Berkshires when the Pretenders blew into Lenox, Massachusetts, for the band’s debut performance at Tanglewood on July 16, near the start of the US tour supporting their latest album, Relentless. Picnickers on the lawn had already been evacuated a few times due to lightning, and their blankets, baskets, and charcuterie boards looked more than a bit soggy given the on-again-off-again downpours.

We took our seats under the shelter of the Koussevitzky Shed, and the band emerged onstage without fanfare — and without an opening act — band founder and leader Chrissie Hynde looking every bit the rock legend she is, in a red leather jacket and black leather boots over black T-shirt and skinny jeans, sporting her trademark shag, tearing right into a new song, Losing My Sense of Taste. Which straight away brings up the elephant in the room.

Hynde is 72 years old, but she’s every bit the punk she was when she started the band decades ago, in 1978. Backing Hynde were Dave Page on bass, James Walbourne on guitar, and Kris Sonne on drums. Flanked by the two young guitar heros, Hynde was vibrant and vital, bristling with attitude. She sang in fine voice, hitting all her soulful, melodious tones and vibrato moments, and not holding back on the occasional shouts, with no ill effects of time evident in her vocals. But the lyrics… she directly takes on the subject of aging in her songs, without fear or deflection. 

Take, for example, the opening lines of her opening song:

I must be going through a metamorphosis

The senile dementia or some kind of psychosis

I don’t even care about rock and roll

All my favourites seem tired and old

And the closing lines:

The beginning, the middle, the end must be nearing

Or maybe I’m losing my sense of hearing

These are not typical rock ‘n’ roll sentiments; we’re more used to the famous line from the Who’s My Generation — “I hope I die before I get old.” Losing My Sense of Taste was no anomaly. Toward the end of the set, the chorus of the doleful new song Merry Widow stood out on repeat: “I’m a divorcee, but I feel like a widow,” not sounding very merry at all. More lively was another new song, the anthemic Let the Sun Come In, with this lyric in the chorus: “We don’t have to get fat, we don’t have to get old.”

While Hynde seems to confront the fact that she’s aging in her new work, she absolutely confronted the audience at Tanglewood, where the demographics skew older. (Realistically, if you’ve been a fan of the Pretenders from the band’s early days, you’re old, as their heyday was in the early 1980s. Do the math, no matter how painful; that’s more than 40 years ago.) Throughout the evening, she exhorted the crowd to get up and dance, even tangling with the security guys who were trying to keep people in their seats. At one point she declared with resignation, “You can sit down or get up, I don’t care. Grandma likes to sit down herself.”

She also repeatedly admonished her fans to put down their cell phones, at one point yelling, “This is a rock concert. If you want to make a phone call, go outside.” She even halted her ballad You Can’t Hurt a Fool (from her 2020 album Hate for Sale) to shout at someone taking phone photos near the stage: “Fuck that. Turn it off!”

Hynde and the band gave the audience a plethora of music to keep them off their phones and on their feet, with plenty of new songs peppered with older favorites. They didn’t offer up a hit until the fifth song of the set, the lilting tune Kid, from the band’s debut album Pretenders, released in 1979, which they followed up with a searing rendition of Precious, from the same album, bringing the audience into a frenzy. 

After dedicating The Buzz — a moving ballad about obsessive love from the 2020 album Hate for Sale — to the late punk-era guitarist Johnny Thunders, Hynde gave a quick shout out to her hometown Akron, Ohio, before launching into another crowd favorite, My City Was Gone. The audience was up and dancing by the song’s first heavy beats and jangly guitar riff.

Throughout the evening, James Walbourne took off with searing guitar solos and rock-star antics, teasing all kinds of noise out of his instrument and vamping at the edge of the stage. Drummer Sonne and bassist Page kept up the beat, and tireless Hynde sang nonstop, with occasional backup vocals from Ellis and Page, engaging with front-row fans beyond merely scolding them. The message was clear — she wasn’t going to take any BS —and the band was playing with take-no-prisoners energy.

Hynde kept the crowd waiting until the encore for faves Bad Boys Get Spanked and Middle of the Road, then delivered her hits Mystery Achievement, Back on the Chain Gang, and the upbeat love song Don’t Get Me Wrong in the second encore. The show ended with the power ballad I’ll Stand By You, from the 1994 album Last of the Independents, finishing off a more than two-hour high-energy set on a slow note, and leaving the crowd wanting more — namely the song that first comes to mind with mention of the Pretenders: Brass in Pocket. Why was that song left off the roster when Hynde certainly knows that everyone wanted to hear it? Chalk it up to grandma’s enduring and endearing cantankerous punk attitude. As one of my Pretenders-loving friends remarked, “She’s badass.” And we love her for it.

Information about the Pretenders Tour