Re: Chrissie Hynde concert review 26 Dec 21

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Chrissie Hynde’s Live Homage to Bob Dylan – London, 26 December 2021
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On the evening of Boxing Day 2021, Chrissie Hynde, best known as the
vocalist of the classic group the Pretenders, offered the world a
concert streamed from the Royal Opera House in London. It featured 17
songs, nine of them by Bob Dylan. The US-born, UK-resident singer
performed the same nine Dylan compositions as on her album Standing in
the Doorway released earlier this year, in the same order but with the
added spontaneity and immediacy that comes from live performance,
certainly when the artist gives it their all as Chrissie Hynde did that
night:
https://chrissiehynde.veeps.com (at time of writing, stream available
till 2 January 2022)
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The artist’s song selection for CD and concert reveals an in-depth
knowledge of Dylan’s work and an emphasis away from his better-known
earlier work. The songs were, in order: ‘In the Summertime’, ‘You’re A
Big Girl Now’, ‘Standing in the Doorway’, ‘Sweetheart Like You’, ‘Blind
Willie McTell’, ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’, ‘Don’t Fall Apart on Me
Tonight’, ‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’ and ‘Every Grain of Sand’ – thus,
two from the 60s, one from Blood on the Tracks (1975), all of five from
the Shot of Love/Infidels period (1981/83) and one from Time Out of Mind
(1997).
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The songs were performed in line with the original lyrics, with no
stanzas left out and, interestingly, with two divergences from Dylan’s
own main album versions removed as compared with Hynde’s own CD. In
‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight’, ‘Saint James Street’ is restored from
from Infidels, whereas the CD had ‘Napoleon Street’, as in Dylan’s
drafts of the song recently released on The Bootleg Series vol. 16; and
in ‘Sweetheart Like You’ the first half of the second stanza, on the CD
altered to restore lines (‘You know, conmen don’t need strangers …’)
that Dylan sings on the draft released on that same volume 16, is
changed back to what appeared on Infidels (‘you know I once knew a woman
who looked like you …’). For ‘Every Grain of Sand’, choosing from
Dylan’s alternate lines at the end she prefers ‘reality of man’, as on
Shot of Love, to ‘perfect finished plan’. Chrissie Hynde has thus done
her homework: she has made her choices and shown herself to be
conversant with the history of the songs.
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It is difficult to point up standout performances with a set of so
uniformly high a standard and a vocalist so very much inside the songs,
articulating Dylan’s words with such care. However, an elegiac ‘Tomorrow
is a Long Time’, a contemplative ‘Every Grain of Sand’ and a doom-laden
‘Blind Willie McTell’ were particularly impressive. Hynde’s choice of
‘Every Grain of Sand’ to end her Dylan selection gels nicely with
Dylan’s own recourse to the same song as encore in his most recent tour
setlist.
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The remainder of the concert offered diverse material including
Pretenders numbers, notably two Ray Davies songs famously covered by the
group, ‘Stop Your Sobbing’ and ‘I Go To Sleep’, and, as encore and in
French, Charles Trenet’s ‘Que reste-t-il de nos amours?’. All were well
performed, but it is a fair guess that most spectators will remember
this concert for the Dylan material. As Chrissie Hynde said from the
stage at one point, ‘it’s all in the writing’ …
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°°
Also on my blog at:
https://rollason.wordpress.com/2021/12/27/chrissie-hyndes-live-homage-to-bob-dylan-london-26-december-2021/