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From: will.dockery@gmail.com (W.Dockery)
Newsgroups: rec.music.dylan
Subject: Re: Chrissie Hynde concert review 26 Dec 21
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2025 06:40:08 +0000
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Christopher Rollason wrote:
>
> Chrissie Hynde’s Live Homage to Bob Dylan – London, 26 December 2021
>
> 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)
>
> 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).
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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’ …
>
> °°
> Also on my blog at:
> https://rollason.wordpress.com/2021/12/27/chrissie-hyndes-live-homage-to-bob-dylan-london-26-december-2021/

Interesting.