Rare is the box set that starts strong and stays strong. Usually the first disk or two contains everything you really need, and the last disks are full of late-career tracks that are highlights only compared to the songs that were omitted. Whether through the Pretenders' talent or by the compilers' design, Pirate Radio-- which is the band's first multidisk retrospective and a long time coming-- showcases a band that held onto its gritty gift for crafting complex songs with sharp melodic lines and smart(ass) lyrics. There are some duds here, but the high ratio of rockers to clunkers remains remarkably consistent across all four disk, which is no mean feat considering the Pretenders have been in an almost constant state of turnover since their very first album.
Seemingly an ideal band for a box set like this, the Pretenders made at least one great album (their self-titled debut), a few good albums, and a couple of releases that are generously described as "for-fans-only". However, they were best song by song-- not just singles like "Don't Get Me Wrong" or "Night in My Veins", but album tracks like "Thumbelina" and "Bad Boys Get Spanked" as well. Collected together, these 81 songs-- presented in rough chronological order across four disks and complemented with a DVD of mostly lip-synced live appearances-- rarely ever sound dated. Furthermore, listening to them doesn't require any sort of trendy nostalgia for the late 70s or early 80s. Pirate Radio, in other words, proves more than simply artifactual: While even its weakest tracks contribute to its historical/biographical scope, the set proves an imminently listenable, often kick-ass collection.
The Pretenders were post-punk chronologically, if not aesthetically. An ex-pat from Akron, singer Chrissie Hynde hung out with the Sex Pistols, scribed for NME, and clerked at Malcolm McLaren's notorious Sex shop. She was also desperate to be "in a band," a need so strong the liner notes suggest it's pathological. So she hooked up with four guys from Hereford and formed the Pretenders just as punk was fizzling out. They fed off punk's visceral energy, but Hynde was too much of a fervent believer in capital-R Rock to buy into its nihilism. Also, while most other post-punk bands were experimenters and tinkerers, she was (and remains) a traditionalist, refining instead of redefining rock. Their modest goal, which they handily achieved, was to be a really good rock band: tight, inventive, aggressive, goofy, gutsy, and-- perhaps most important-- with a particular sound that could be readily identified as the Pretenders. They laid it all out on their self-titled 1979 debut, which includes some of their best songs: the country-inflected "Kid", the motorbike beat of "Tattooed Love Boys", the inimitable vocals and slangy lyrics on "Brass in Pocket", the show-closing "Mystery Achievement". People don't buy and comb through every lyric and riff of this album the same way they do Power, Corruption, and Lies or Entertainment!, but it's aged just as gracefully, retaining its original power.
Nevertheless, a surprising eclecticism is encoded into the Pretenders' DNA, the byproduct of their transatlantic line-up and Hynde's coming-of-age to American radio. Pirate Radio includes convincing country songs like "Tequila", Bo Diddley rumbles like "Cuban Slide", shameless balladry like "I'll Stand By You", American soul numbers like their cover of "Thin Line Between Love and Hate", and blue-eyed soul songs like "977" (which borrows its melody from "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?"). They could easily be gaudy and goofy ("The Adultress") and maudlin ("Birds of Paradise" or "I'll Stand By You", take your pick), but they treat all these styles as if they're all logical bedfellows under the Rock umbrella.
Connecting all these disparate stylistic elements is Hynde's singular bravado, a vocal delivery both masculine and feminine, aggressive yet controlled, brash yet vulnerable-- contradictions that serve the song first and her persona second. Her voice has a crystalline quality that arcs tenderly on "Kid" and "2000 Miles", but she frequently launches into a kind of jive singspeak, rushing through her syllables without losing the meter. She can sell a line as mushy as "I'm thinking of the fireworks that go off when you smile" as persuasively as a raunchy line like "You've got your chest on my back across a new Cadillac-oh yeah." From the very first track on Pirate Radio through the very last, she maintains a complex and often contradictory front. In this regard, the television and concert clips on the DVD could potentially complement the music and portray another side of Hynde, but most of the material consists of awkward performances in which she either lip-syncs poorly or tries way too hard. Only the mid-80s concert footage of "Middle of the Road" hints at her considerable stage presence.
Sadly, Hynde is the only constant throughout Pirate Radio's four disks, just as she was the only constant in the Pretenders. Original members Pete Farndon and James Honeyman Scott both OD'd (Farndon after being booted from the band, Scott after a night of pub hopping), and drummer Martin Chambers was fired, then rehired a few years later. Hynde carried on for years under the Pretenders moniker, never going solo; that's less a heroic act that a manifestation of her need to belong to a band, even if it allegedly inspired the hit "Back on the Chain Gang", which is reportedly about keeping the band together after Scott died. We should all be so lucky to have a memorial as lovely as Hynde's "oh-oh-woa-whoa-whoa" that punctuates each line of the verse. So Pirate Radio naturally rises and falls with her whims, and while it may have been tighter with three instead of four disks, the set shows an artist who helped to create and sustained a sound that has made the Pretenders stand out among nearly thirty years' worth of bands. The audience may have shrunk, but the songs remain the same.
