Chrissie Hynde has been a rock star for more than fifty years. The Pretenders have not been together quite that long, but Hynde was already making her name as a girl about town and rock-star-in-waiting in London. She has lived the life full-time for all of that period. It is a surprise, then, that she does not fully appreciate the credit that has accrued with that history, and how people still want to hear what she has to say.
Supporting their tenth Album in 2023, The Pretenders initially booked themselves into smaller venues, before it became clear that they had underestimated the love that the world had for her and the band. Eventually the tour went so well that a live album was made and released. Did Hynde not think she was in the class of National Treasures that could call on her friends to make a duets album? The story is that a friend had to remind her that it was an opportunity, if not a duty, to do so. Consider Duets Special an opportunity/duty fulfilled.
Continue reading »
Possibly not the snappiest of album titles, but if you know, you know, and it is everything, much more, that it says on the tin. Which is a long winded way of saying party time. Sorry, PARTY TIME! And there won’t be a better party this year, that is for sure, with Valcour Records hoovering up about as stratospheric a line up you could ever imagine, in support this timely celebration of Chenier, the coolest man to ever tote an accordion in the name of rock and roll. And blues. And soul. For that is, loosely, what zydeco is, a defiantly idiosyncratic mixture of all those musical forms, cooked up in the swamps of Louisiana. Often sung in French. Lead instrument accordion.
