My review of the Pretenders/ Bryan Ferry concert in Bangkok, published in The Nation on February 26, 2004. The photo of Chrissie Hynde at left is actually from the last time I saw the band, in Toronto years ago.

So special

The turnout for Monday’s Bryan Ferry-Pretenders concert at BEC-Tero Hall seemed to prove just how starved for live top-quality music Bangkok’s expats are – every one of them showed up. It was like the USO visiting the troops in a foreign land.
Well, the place was packed, anyway, and not with the kind of folks you’re apt to see at a Korn or Mariah Carey show. Their collective age could be tallied in millennia, a fact not lost on the performers, who proudly sport a few wrinkles of their own. “You don’t have to dance!” the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde mocked a still largely lounging crowd as the band kicked into their best-known hit “Don’t Get Me Wrong” at the midway point. “I understand. You can stay sitting if you want to. No really, it’s all right.”
With that, the song abruptly decelerated into a slow jazz version, and the audience, stung but laughing, was on its feet.
“So that’s what it takes!” Hynde chortled.
With Hynde by turns hilarious and caustic, dancing and furiously slashing, the Pretenders opened the show with a spirited 90-minute set of leaping dynamics, including a three-song encore, that Ferry was hard-pressed to match.
The lathering of (self-)deprecating humour early in the set served to blow away some of the cobwebs ready for the heaving rock whirlwind of “Time the Avenger”, “Back on the Chain Gang”, “Middle of the Road” and “Precious”.
Amid the fury, Hynde charmed and enticed. Ferry was right when he told The Nation beforehand that she’s “singing better than ever”. Her sustained vibrato was spellbinding against a garden of keyboards on “Hymn to Her”. She was majestic and castigating at the same time on “Stand By You”, her paean to penned animals “sitting in cages tonight so you dumb f**ks can eat them at the end of the month”.
And she was one truly seductive siren on the closing “Brass in Pocket”, which sounded as good as it did 26 years ago.
It was a bittersweet appearance for the Pretenders. Hynde informed those in the crowd who didn’t know that Bangkok had witnessed the last show by “the original Pretenders”. That was in 1982. Within months, guitarist James Honeyman-Scott was dead of a drug overdose, half a year later bassist Pete Farndon too.
“Without them we wouldn’t be here tonight,” Hynde said, somewhat cryptically, by way of dedicating “Kid”.
But she’s never had a problem staffing the band with great players. Adam Seymour spent memorable solos on Monday strangling his guitar neck like Neil Young. Original drummer Martin Chambers is old too, so he came preserved in a special glass box – no, actually, it was a plastic acoustic buffer, behind which he had plenty of tricks with which to enthral and amuse.
During the 30-minute break between acts, fans were speculating whether the billing should have been reversed, but delighted at the knowledge they’d already got their money’s worth.

Ferry’s first array of songs were compelling, if baffling, an utter contrast to what had preceded. He sang “Only Face” at the piano to violin accompaniment, then played harmonica and sang Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice (It’s All Right)”, then was joined by Chris Spedding on acoustic guitar for a countrified Irish traditional “Carrickfergus”.
The full nine-piece band – with a pair of wailing backup singers in red dresses – finally got stomping with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (Dylan again, harp again), and then swerved into the old weeper “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”, with a gripping arrangement.
Then there was an instrumental (“My One and Only Love”), and the hundred-odd fans jammed against the stage, though enthusiastic throughout, must have been wondering what was up.
But Ferry had brought his old drummer with him too: Roxy Music’s mighty Paul Thompson got young bassist Mark Smith buzzing for “Cruel”, and these guys could cook. In fact, it took Roxy’s old tunes – “Casanova” (“flirting with heroin”!), “Virginia Plain” and “Do the Strand” – to stop the old fans from dreaming they were in Chrissie’s band instead of Bryan’s.
Apart from that, it was a lot of, erm… disco. Even the gorgeous “Avalon” is a samba, and then there were “”Don’t Stop the Dance” and “Love is the Drug”. Disco was a big thing in the ’80s, of course, but history hasn’t turned out to be the boogie party its fans wanted.
Such whinging was easily muscled aside by a full-blast “Let’s Stick Together”, not to mention the soaring backing vocals (Michelle Dawn in particular came close to hitting the Pink Floyd power zone with Spedding on “My Only Love”) and some astonishing fiddling by Louise Peacock, whom Roxy fans might well dub “Phyllis Manzanera”.
The penultimate tune, that soul standby “Shame Shame Shame”, had the audience firmly in the groove and preparing its final adulations, but the closer, “Woolly Bully”, was more frat-house tribute than the perfect ending to a classy night.
With just one show (Hong Kong) left on a long world tour before a few months’ break back in England, Ferry at times seemed tired, almost distracted. He got his biggest spontaneous screams of the evening whistling during his wonderful rendition of Lennon’s “Jealous Guy”, but there were a couple of moments when his voice hit some Rod Stewart gravel and skidded.
A tad too dishevelled to do the Strand, he just couldn’t connect like Chrissie.