She's a 52-year-old woman who could kick the combined butts of Britney, Christina and Beyoncé into kingdom come, as well as giving the likes of Courtney Love and Brody Dalle lessons in how to pout.
She's a woman who elbowed her way into the Big Boys' Rock'n'Roll Club and beat the majority of the whining wretches into submission. Chrissie Hynde treats her audience in equal measure with contempt and consideration. Frankly, we're not worthy. Hynde is a trooper of the old order; an Anglophile from Akron, Ohio, she travelled to London in the mid-1970s just to be near the centre of the rock music universe and ended up making herself part of it.
The Pretenders have had a tough time - they haven't had a Top 30 UK hit since 1994; they have become increasingly irrelevant in modern pop music terms - but still they deliver the goods. Essentially a late-1970s/1980s band in terms of commercial success, they have admiringly taken the decision not to be purely a nostalgia act. Which means we were not treated to a succession of hit singles and obsequious offerings from the mouth of the stage. Instead, Hynde - by far the best rock vocalist of her generation, and probably one of the best per se - chooses to blend fine pop songs (including Back on the Chain Gang, Talk of the Town, Night in my Veins, Brass in Pocket) with some choice album tracks (Precious, Up to the Neck, Money Talk).
A mixture of curtsies, cuteness and cutting remarks (she gamely calls the audience losers and gets away with it without a catcall), Hynde is a throwback to a time when female performers in rock had real things to say and a magnetic presence with which to draw in the fans. Musically, the band blend jangly pop with a granite-hard rock dynamic and are by no means as faceless as we have come to expect. It's Hynde, however, who we continue to look at: still gorgeous, still feral at heart, still in touch with life. - Tony Clayton-Lea
Kings of the Road
The Ambassador
Typical. You wait for what seems like forever to catch the story of just one generation of Northern Ireland bus drivers, and then three generations turn up at once.
But Brian McAvera's comic play, set in pre-Troubles Belfast, provides us with little more than a celebrity vehicle.
Ed Byrne sits by the hospital bed of his comatose father, approaching the terminus of life. Good for nothing, "except telling stories", Bryne's Rinty Sharvin fills his silence with patter, wondering aloud why he defied his father's wishes and followed in his bus route. Then, for some reason, Granddad "Shiny" Sharvin returns from the great beyond to relate more jokes and anecdotes.
Even at this early stage the performances are at cross-purposes. Struggling free of his amiable stand-up persona, Byrne valiantly attempts to play this one straight. Veteran actor James Ellis is having none of it. Face front, arms outstretched, glittering smile for the balcony, Ellis only turns his attention to Byrne when it cannot be avoided.
Staggering from one memory to another, McAvera's meandering script justifies itself with more "once upon a time"s or "remember when"s than an amnesiac's storybook. With all the action happening in the wings or at the depot, director Chris Parr responds with the occasional bustle of illustrative movement or by flashing up video projections almost apologetically: regular service will resume shortly.
So light on substance is this play that the sudden interjection of trenchant trade-unionist politics is simply bewildering. The perfunctory pathos of Shiny's Dunkirk tales or the demise of Michael Smiley's T.J. Sharvin at the original flaring of The Troubles even require a "this-bit-is-serious" synth chord to indicate emotional depth.
Such clumsy signposting suggests a distrust of the audience, while our role is poorly defined. Passengers, is how Granddad describes us. And, in fairness, you do feel you've been taken for a ride. - Peter Crawley
Runs until Oct 24th
Peregrine, Coburn
NCH, Dublin
Beethoven - Variations on a theme from Handel's Judas Maccabeus. Brahms - Sonata in D Op 78. Prokofiev - Sonata in C Op 119. Eibhlis Farrell - Stillsong. Piazzolla - Le grand tango.
For his appearance as the National Concert Hall's 2003 début recitalist, cellist Gerald Peregrine chose a programme which, in its first half, had little to do with obvious display. This was the decision of a player who loves the finer things of music and can deliver most of them.
However, Brahms's Sonata in D Op. 78, an arrangement of the Violin Sonata in G made in the 1890s by Paul Klengel, was perhaps a challenge too far. The lower pitch makes the arrangement even more intimate than the original. Add that to the size of the venue and you need a more subtle rhetoric than was offered on this occasion.
Stronger projection of the cello part would have helped. So would some discriminating piano playing from Lance Coburn. It was not just that the piano often drowned the cello. It was frustrating to hear a pianist of such technical ability appearing to ignore the soloist's dynamic scaling, and grabbing at opportunities to project a top line regardless of context. This reached preposterous levels in the last section of Piazzolla's Le grand tango, where the composer's well-wrought cello accompaniment was obliterated as the right hand knocked out melody and the left hand cockily vamped away.
How things might have been was suggested by an effective account of the Piazzolla's quiet middle section and by Prokofiev's Sonata in C Op. 119, which received the most complete performance of the duo items. There Gerald Peregrine's command of colour, his ability to do beautiful things well, spoke out via a naturally springing rhythm.
Eibhlis Farrell's Stillsong (1994) is a meditative work for solo cello - short, lyrical, free. In this work above all one heard, without hindrance, those qualities which can make Peregrine such a rewarding musician. - Martin Adams
Gerald Peregrine and soprano Rhian Mair Lewis perform at Waterford's Garter Lane Arts Centre tonight
