New Wave/Post-Punk legends The Pretenders have spent much of the past year performing show-stealing (we’re assuming…), hits-filled festival gigs and support sets for Axl, Slash, and Duff’s Guns N’ Roses and Foo Fighters. However, this past Sunday, July 14th, they brought An Evening with The Pretenders to the 2,500-capacity Fillmore as part of their 15-date headlining tour, their first time headlining the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection proper since 2009… Their last area headlining show in 2018 was technically in Upper Darby.
The capacity audience boasted a notably eclectic mix of music T-shirts, including Iggy Pop, The Grateful Dead, The Damned, and Marvin Gaye… However, in addition to their longtime admiration of one of the greatest acts of the 20th and 21st Century, they did share at least one thing in common: No one in attendance needed to be I.D.’d upon entry (Founding Pretender and sole constant member Chrissie Hynde is gearing up to turn 73, and the majority of fans weren’t far behind… At 39, I was certainly one of the “babies.”)
However, unlike fans (mostly adorned in shorts on the sweltering night), Ms. Hynde donned skintight jeans, [likely vegan] leather thigh-high boots, and a distressed tee for the duration of the show, resembling all of the rock star she did during the band’s earliest days as part of London’s punk scene in the late ‘70s. Her swagger and sass have also aged very little, which was exceptionally evident during early staples like “Precious” and “The Wait.”
While the setlist did include many of The Pretenders’ biggest hits (such as “Kid” and “Back on the Chain Gang,” but without the likes of “Brass in Pocket,” “Message of Love,” and “Don’t Get Me Wrong”), the performance was far from the type of greatest hits sets that legacy acts are often notorious for. Hynde and crew churned out more than half of 2023’s Relentless, including “Losing My Sense of Taste,” a track which bears more than a passing resemblance to the work of Chrissie’s good buddy Morrissey and opened the set, and instant elder anthem, “Let the Sun Come It,” which closed out the planned portion of the evening.
The performance also boasted a surprising handful of tracks from 2020’s Hate for Sale (including “The Buzz,” which Hynde dedicated to Johnny Thunders, who was apparently quite a good baseball player prior to a seminal rock n’ roll guitarist), which fit charmingly amidst “the classics.” However, the evening’s highlights may have been early non-singles “The Phone Call” and “Pack It Up,” which haven’t frequently made live shows, but had the band at their most punk rock toward the end of the night.
The 110-minute set (which ran 20 minutes longer than the officially scheduled performance) concluded with an unplanned second encore (according to setlist.fm, the first of the year) of “Mystery Achievement,” which closes out The Pretenders’ 1980 debut and displays the chops of the band as legitimate connoisseurs of rock of a plethora of subgenres as well as anything from their extensive catalogue. The evening came to a close at 10:20, a little early by rock n’ roll standards, but likely to the delight of nearly all in attendance, who, nevertheless got to see the city’s best mega rock show of the summer.