Pretenders: Beautifully Wrong

There is a point, after you have listened to enough records for a living, when music begins arriving pre-explained.

You hear the first eight bars and know roughly where everybody went to school.

Here comes the punk band. Here comes the post-punk band that would very much prefer you notice they have read a book. Here comes another lot who have discovered reggae bass lines and would like credit for international diplomacy. Here comes a guitarist who has spent six months getting exactly the right sound and somehow misplaced the song.

Then somebody puts on the Pretenders.

And for a few minutes it becomes necessary to stop being clever.

This is inconvenient.

Their singer, Chrissie Hynde, has a voice that should probably not work.

Not in the conventional sense, anyway. It is not grand. It does not arrive wearing evening clothes. There is something hard in it, something slightly damaged, something amused, and then suddenly a tenderness appears that seems to have wandered into the wrong room.

And the timing.

Good Lord, the timing.

She does not so much sing over the band as decline to acknowledge the band's jurisdiction.

The rhythm section comes charging forward and Hynde places a phrase somewhere just behind it, or ahead of it, or possibly in another postal district entirely. Then, somehow, they meet at precisely the place the song needed them to meet.

You keep expecting the whole arrangement to come apart.

It does not.

Instead it develops thrust.

A great deal of that has to do with Pete Farndon and Martin Chambers, who appear to have constructed some sort of illegal propulsion system in the basement.

Farndon is not, so far as I can tell, one of those bass players about whom other bass players will someday gather in specialist shops and speak in lowered voices.

He is better than that.

He plays the note.

Not necessarily the note you expected. Not always the note another bassist would regard as the professionally responsible note. But the note that makes the song suddenly lurch forward, grin unpleasantly, and demand another drink.

There is a particular kind of musician who can play seventeen impressive things in four bars.

Farndon seems more interested in playing one slightly peculiar thing that causes the other three people in the band to become more dangerous.

This is a useful quality.

And Chambers.

Martin Chambers plays drums as though he has discovered that the song is trying to escape and has been assigned to stop it reaching the border.

There is nothing polite about the resulting motion. He and Farndon do not merely establish rhythm. They generate pressure. The songs are pushed from behind with the steady insistence of machinery that has been operated somewhat beyond the manufacturer's recommendations.

Which makes Hynde even stranger.

Normally, if you have a rhythm section doing this much shoving, the singer has two choices: ride it or shout at it.

Hynde does neither.

She floats around it.

She delays syllables. She spits others out too soon. She turns corners at odd angles. She seems perfectly content to leave a space where every other singer would insert a note, then place the note somewhere mildly alarming instead.

It ought to feel mannered.

It doesn't.

It feels inevitable.

This is the part I distrust, because critics are trained by experience to become suspicious whenever something feels inevitable on first hearing. Usually by the sixth listen you discover the trick.

With the Pretenders I am beginning to suspect there may not be one.

Then there is James Honeyman-Scott.

Jimmy, apparently.

Fine.

Jimmy is ridiculous.

While Chambers and Farndon are down below operating the machinery and Hynde is wandering through the song rearranging time, Honeyman-Scott is somewhere above the entire operation dropping guitar parts out of the sky.

Little chords.

Tiny melodic decorations.

Great sheets of sound that appear for three seconds and disappear before anybody can file the paperwork.

He seems entirely uninterested in proving that he is the guitarist, which immediately places him ahead of approximately nine-tenths of the guitarists currently occupying recording studios.

There are moments where his playing barely seems attached to the rest of the track, and yet removing it would be like removing the windows from a house because technically they are not load-bearing.

He gives the songs air.

That may be the peculiar achievement of this band.

Everybody appears to be doing something different, and yet nothing is fighting for space.

Farndon and Chambers are building the road at speed.

Honeyman-Scott is levitating several feet above it.

Hynde is crossing against the light.

And somehow they all arrive together.

I would like to provide a sensible explanation for this.

I am paid, nominally, to have those.

Perhaps it is because the arrangements are clever. Perhaps the musicians understand each other's instincts unusually well. Perhaps Hynde's rhythmic peculiarities create exactly the empty spaces Honeyman-Scott knows how to occupy. Perhaps Chambers is the secret adult in the room, holding the whole thing together while everyone else commits minor offences.

Or perhaps four people simply met who should not fit together and discovered that not fitting together was the entire point.

"Tattooed Love Boys" is where any remaining attempt at professional detachment becomes somewhat embarrassing.

That track is outrageous.

It starts with the sort of guitar figure that makes one suspect the instrument has developed a nervous disorder, and then the whole band comes in with the subtlety of furniture being thrown down a stairwell.

The meter alone ought to get them arrested.

Hynde rides across it with that impossible phrasing, simultaneously inside the rhythm and apparently annoyed by its existence. Chambers hits everything as if percussion has recently insulted his family. Farndon finds those ugly, perfect little notes underneath. Honeyman-Scott turns angular guitar into something almost elegant.

Then they do it again.

It is vicious and graceful at the same time.

This should not be allowed.

There are weaknesses.

There have to be.

Occasionally the band's cleverness gets close enough to the surface that you can see it looking pleased with itself. A few songs threaten to become more interesting as constructions than as songs, which is a danger with musicians this alert. Hynde's detachment, magnificent when the material supports it, could become a mannerism if repeated too often. And one wonders whether Honeyman-Scott's tastefulness might eventually need somebody to drag him into the middle of the room and make him play something genuinely stupid.

Every great guitarist should periodically be forced to play something stupid.

It prevents architectural disease.

There is also the commercial question.

I have no idea what radio is supposed to do with this.

The Pretenders are too tuneful for the punks, too abrasive for the pop people, too muscular for the art crowd and too peculiar for anyone who prefers songs to behave themselves.

One imagines some fellow at a radio station listening to this record, admiring it greatly, and then reaching for something everybody already understands.

It is possible that the Pretenders have produced the ideal record for people who buy records precisely because radio doesn't know what to do with them.

That is not usually considered a business model.

Still.

There are records you admire.

There are records you recommend.

There are records you can already hear becoming dated while they are still spinning.

And then, every so often, there is a record that makes the room feel slightly different.

This is one of those.

I do not know whether these four people can keep this strange machine running. I do not know whether the public will tolerate a band whose singer treats meter as a suggestion, whose bassist keeps choosing the suspiciously correct wrong note, whose drummer appears to be powering a small municipality, and whose guitarist decorates all of it like some celestial vandal.

I don't know if radio will play them.

I don't know if they'll last.

I know only that something unusual has happened here.

And, despite decades of accumulated evidence suggesting that confidence is merely embarrassment placed on a timer, I have the uncomfortable feeling that years from now people will still be talking about this record.

Which is annoying.

Because now I'll have to be right.