Chrissie Hynde review – too few mercurial moments

Chrissie Hynde is a rock survivor and she doesn’t care who knows it. Shaggy of mane and sinewy of bicep in a cutoff top, the 63-year-old gazes around the venue. “I remember this place when it was the Music Machine,” she muses. “I saw Siouxsie and the Banshees here, with Sid Vicious.”

Thirty-five years into her career, Hynde this year released her debut solo album, Stockholm, expressing the hope that it sounded like “power pop you can dance to, like Abba meets John Lennon”. It’s hard to think of two artists that it less resembles. Instead, it sounds exactly like a muted, mellow take on the Pretenders.

That is no hardship, but tonight’s set, which drew heavily on the new record, showed that it has few of the mercurial moments such as when Hynde’s husky, knowing drawl, always on the cusp of desire and regret, tilts into pealing guitars to heartrending effect. New, mid-paced chuggers such as In a Miracle and Like in the Movies plod along, going nowhere fast.

Far better is You or No One, a piquant love song buried in a Phil Spector wall of sound, but Hynde really connects on the crowdpleasing oldies. Kid and Don’t Get Me Wrong are all plangent, chiming chords and insatiable yearning, while Back on the Chain Gang is a reminder that the Pretenders’ punk-pop always had the weight very much on the second syllable.

Hynde encores with the exquisite opiate bliss of the Ray Davies-penned I Go to Sleep and the recently reworked 1983 Christmas hit 2,000 Miles. As Chrissie Hynde takes her leave, grinning beneath her Ronnie Wood thatch, it’s evident this particular rock survivor has plenty of years left in her yet.