'Precious' is Chrissie Hynde at her punk-tastic, unapologetic, ballsy best, with that half-singing, half-talking Dylan-inspired drawl.There's a bit of a dip in the middle, as we enter mid-tempo country for a while, however 'I Go To Sleep' is shimmers with the open honesty and rawness of the lyrics about an absent lover.The penultimate track on The Best Of is '2000 Miles', and despite being as far away from Christmas as it's possible to be, the lilting waltz rhythm seems to suit summery and wintery days alike.
Tattooed love boys the pretenders lyrics skin#
At 22, I've got a relatively short innings in The Pretender's history, but tracks like 'I'll Stand By You', 'Back On The Chain Gang', 'Brass In Pocket', in fact anything in the first ten tracks, are those timeless, ubiquitous tracks that creep under the skin and stay there forever. The Best OfWith 22 iconic tracks, there's no doubt that at least one song on this album will have sound tracked your life at some point. (It’s recommended that you listen to this on Spotify as their embed only has 200 songs.This double album is a glorious ride on the nostalgia train of The Pretenders 30 year history, before dropping off at slap bang in the middle of up-to-date, with their latest release, Break Up The Concrete. Oh boy you’ve been forgotten!!!!!!!!!!!!!Īnd with that, James Honeyman-Scott just totally and completely takes off: cramming about 5000 guitar solos into one, all skyrockets and pinwheels and air raid sirens and the end of the fucking world rolled into several bars of glorious noisy chaos that seems like it would be impossible to stop until it smashes headlong into THE RIFF and dissipates like a massive wave into a giant wall as Chrissie Hynde exclaims yet another dick-hardening “huuuuuuuuuhhhh!” before one last verse and chorus.Īll in all, “The Wait” is an utterly tremendous and incredibly exciting piece of music, and the fact that it came after five other stunners, each one completely different from the others and yet all infused with everything I loved about rock and roll back then - and everything I still love about it - meant that it didn’t even matter that the rest of the album wasn’t quite as ovaries-to-the-wall powerful for it to totally and completely wipe me out.Ī filterable, searchable & sortable somewhat up to date database with links to every “Certain Song” post I’ve ever written.
Kick the wall turn the street and back againĬhild, child staring into the streetlight I said child, child staring into the streetlight The wait child neon light late night lights hurtĪnd then, with Farndon picking up his bass and running away from the rest of the band as fast has he can, there’s a quick chorus while they all catch up to him and drag him back to THE RIFF.Īfter the second chorus, the guitars drop out and over a still on-fire Farndon and ever-sturdy Martin Chambers, Hynde sings actual words on the bridge. The wait child pacing child forth back now hurts The wait child pinball child pool hall child hurts Said the wait child magic child work it on out now work it Weirdly enough, unlike most of the other songs on Pretenders (“The Phone Call” excepted, of course), the lyrics and singing on “The Wait” are more impressionistic and mixed lower, Hynde’s vocals becoming part of the song instead of dominating, everything being subsumed to the amazing riff (heretofore referred to as THE RIFF because I’ve been air-guitaring to it for nearly 40 years) at the heart of the song, spitting out the words to map the build up to THE RIFF’s explosion.
Jury’s still out.) Coming after an initial outburst of guitars and drums that still hadn’t quite found a direction, it’s like Hynde is telling the song “follow me.” And boy does it ever. I’ve often joked that Pretenders turned me from a boy into a man, and the moment Chrissie Hynde exclaimed “huuuuuuuhhhhh!” and the chittering, stuttering riff that dominates “The Wait” explodes out of the speakers is when I pretty sure it happened. After the complicated stomp of “Tattooed Love Boys,” side one of Pretenders went in a different direction, a slow instrumental with double entendre title of “Space Invader,” ostensibly named after a very popular arcade game of the time, highlighted by a big, rumbly Pete Farndon bass and out-of-nowhere guitar outbursts from James Honeyman-Scott that I absolutely loved.Īt the fade, they brought in some of the actual noises from the Space Invaders arcade game, which segued instantly to what might be my favorite song on Pretenders, the utterly incandescent “The Wait,” one of most exciting rock ‘n’ roll songs that anybody has ever performed.
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