March 13, 1980 review: The Pretenders at Buff State's Student Union Social Hall


A landmark show for the band, a legend in the annals of rock concerts in Buffalo.
March 13, 1980, review
The Pretenders Show They’re Real Thing
“See this?” Chrissie Hynde says, holding up a poster advertising the concert Wednesday night. It’s an image of her. “It ain’t the Chrissie Hynde Band, all right?”
Right, it’s the Pretenders. There are four of them and they’re one of the hottest new bands out of England right now. This date in Buffalo State College’s Student Union Social Hall is the first show on their first American tour. By the time it’s over, they may be one of the hottest new bands over here too.
They arrive with a blast of rhythm and a smear of guitar – classic punk rock. They bring out the vituperative “Precious” early. Hynde, bursting with implied threat, hisses her lines and bounces on her toes.
The Pretenders are smart. They mix the strong stuff with softer pop tunes, like Ray Davies’ old “Stop Your Sobbing,” where Hynde croons in her sexy alto and guitarist James Honeyman Scott summons that big, burnished sound you used to hear on Peter and Gordon records.
When they reach “Private Life” six songs into the set, the Pretenders begin to fulfill their promise. The vocal harmonies flow in a stunning interplay. Guitarist Scott adds a short, ringing solo. Hynde is all urgency, half-whispering, half-singing. She’s as tough as Patti Smith. She’s wonderful.
Better yet is the way they follow it with their first American single, “Brass in Pocket.” Hynde slips off her blue jacket and her guitar, raises he arms and sways to the perky rhythm of the piece. This could be love.
But the flame sputters after that. Sound problems are partly to blame. Although the crew has had a day to set up and test the new equipment, they still haven’t learned that they must turn down the bass.
The sound mix hobbles the hard-nosed punk songs from side one of the album. The troublesome stage monitors make the harmonies so precarious at times that the success of “Private Life” seems like something of a miracle, in retrospect.
Maybe that’s why they get less than wild acclaim from this crow of about 400 New Wave aficionados, many of them the same folks who were at Lene Lovich last Friday. There is one encore.
Hynde feels obliged to issue a reminder at the end. “Before we go,” she says, “I want to make one thing clear. This is not the Chrissie Hynde Band.”
OK, we’ll pretend it’s the Hynde-Scott-Farndon-Chambers Band. But let’s face it. Without Hynde, we wouldn’t be pretending at all.
* * * * *
IN THE PHOTO: The Pretenders in 1980 in New York City. From left, Pete Farndon, Chrissie Hynde, James Honeyman-Scott and Martin Chambers. Photo by Lynn Goldsmith.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: The Pretenders came back at the end of August to play a much bigger venue – Uncle Sam's on Walden Avenue. When they hit Buff State, however, they were virtually unknown in the U.S., even though their self-titled debut album already had spent four weeks at the top of the UK charts and "Brass in Pocket" had been a No. 1 hit in England.
This was, of course, the original band, with Pete Farndon on bass and Martin Chambers on drums, in addition to Hynde and James Honeyman-Scott. Honeyman-Scott died from too much cocaine in 1982, two days after he forced Farndon out of the band for bad drug habits. Farndon OD'ed on heroin in 1983.
Hynde and Chambers soldiered on with various others on guitar and bass. When Chambers left in 1985, it really did become Chrissie Hynde's band. He rejoined in 1994, although he has played on only some of the recordings since then. New Pretenders albums have appeared regularly, usually every three or four years. The most recent, "Relentless," was released in 2023. There's a Latin American tour this year that begins in Mexico City on May 7.
One of Honeyman-Scott's successors in 1987-88 was Johnny Marr after he departed from the Smiths. Marr says Honeyman-Scott was one of his major influences.
Setlist.fm recalls only four songs from the Buff State gig – "Kid," "Brass in Pocket" and two Kinks covers, "I Go to Sleep" and "Stop Your Sobbing." The full set shows up from March 21 date in a club called Detroit in Port Chester, N.Y.:
The Wait
Precious
Talk of the Town
Cuban Slide
Private Life
Space Invader
Brass in Pocket
Stop Your Sobbing
The Phone Call
I Go to Sleep
Kid
Porcelain
Tattooed Love Boys
Up the Neck
(encore)
Mystery Achievement
Stop Your Sobbing again, featuring Chris Spedding

Spedding, the versatile British session guitarist, regularly showed up in encores in late March and early April 1980 to do the solo on "Stop Your Sobbing." A longtime friend of Hynde, he was living and working in New York City at the time. 

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