THE PRETENDERS – “Brass In Pocket”
I had a pub conversation once about Radiohead’s “Creep”, where we decided the ideal cover would be one grounded in full-on swagger, simply inverting every “I” and “You” in the song: “I’m so fucking special – you wish you were special…you’re a creep!”. “Brass In Pocket” isn’t quite what we were getting at – there’s no sense that Chrissie Hynde’s target is any weaker than her, even if his capitulation is inevitable – but as an exercise in total confidence it takes some beating. The danger in the song is that its determination could shade into desperation, but when you listen to it you never once doubt that Hynde’s got the moves to back up her words: if anything, the song’s a challenge to her lover-to-be to step up and match her.
The band keep things steady in the background, cresting and rolling back unobtrusively to give their singer the space and stage she needs – and her vocal is a box-of-tricks performance, snapping from purr to pounce in the space of a line. Without it, actually, the song is nothing at all – there’s no particuarly good hooks in “Brass In Pocket”, no chorus, just build and force: if you don’t like Hynde’s voice there’s not a lot of room for you to enjoy it. And the honest truth is, I don’t like it – she’s borrowing a lot from Patti Smith but there’s a spontaneity in Smith’s singing, a sense that her squeals and shouts are unbidden responses to musical and emotional momentum. I don’t hear that in Hynde, and it means I can’t buy into her technique here. Of course, it’s a song about going after what you want with laser focus, so no surprise that the delivery’s kind of calculating – but this is one of those singles where I can understand exactly why it’s loved, but can’t join in myself.
5
Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 1,630 views • Share/Save
Re: #12
Chrissie was a bit of a face on the London punk scene, in bands with Mick Jones and Sid Vicious, apparently taught John Lydon to play the guitar and sold her typewriter to Julie Burchill.
For me The Pretenders were one of the first instances of having your “own” special band that you obsessed about and no one else seemed that bothered by. I’m talking here of before this was released, I thought ‘Kid’ was one of the most gorgeous pop records I’d ever heard and I was one of the first members of their fan club (started by a bloke in a record shop in Putney) for which I got a photo signed by the all the band I wish I still had not least because half of them are dead now.
But I was a little underwhelmed by this when it came out, it seemed a bit plodding and obvious where ‘Kid’ had been subtle and seductive. It’s still nowhere near my favourite of theirs but I’d give it at least an 8, mostly because anything with Chrissie’s voice on it gets extra points to start (how can you not love that voice Tom? For shame).
For a song that so carefully places the vocal between the guitar chords, it certainly does have quite a few mystifying lyrics. “So reet” is another one… also whatever she says in the second line from the top. But to me it’s always been the most beautiful of all Pretenders songs (okay, along with “Talk of the Town”).
Perfect simplicity & pure expression.
One reason it may have charted so high was that the band were on tour with UB40 as support around this time -playing a lot of Universities and Colleges. I was studying Art at Newcastle at the time and remember fellow students queuing around the block to get tickets. I saw the queue and couldn’t be bothered – something I regret now.
Chrissie Hynde is one of the great female vocalists and a fine lyricist as well – much underrated. I’m amazed at the ‘no hooks’ claim. What about ‘gonna use my arms, gonna use my legs’ etc? It gets a higher mark than 5 from me – about 8.
This didn’t do much for me in 1980 and time hasn’t improved it. A fairly dreary guitar riff that doesn’t really go anywhere or build to anything. Then there’s Ms Hynde’s idiosyncratic vocals which I’m not a great fan of either (so Tom you are not alone). I couldn’t and I still can’t understand the vast majority of lyrics which only leaves me with the nasal whine and harsh tone of her voice to contemplate. It did work on other songs (as prev. mentioned Kid) – and my personal fav. Don’t Get Me Wrong which was great pop, but BIP is only average and I would totally buy into a theory that this was manipulated to number 1 – although the post-Christmas lull has given us some suprising results before.
PS – Sorry to see Waldo leave the blog – surely the point of this excercise is not just to comment on the stuff you know and grew up with but to then juxtapose it with the stuff you are less familiar with – but maybe I’m missing the point.
Tom – is the PF thread dead or will it be opened up again once the dust has settled ?
replaying BIP this mornin — after a day spent trying to find my pretenders best of, dear god my LPs need sorting out — i realise for the first time how much it makes me think of motown, in a slightly inside-out upside down-kind klein-bottly of way (not a pastiche at all; more like a sketch in one style of the essence of another style)
my problem with CH’s voice here is a bit hard to express — it’s that sounding great (which she does) comes TOO easy to her, i think, as if she’s setting herself an exercise that’s few levels too easy for her
is the source of honeyman-scott’s (and marr’s) guitarjangle richard thompson? — “kid” has a GORGEOUS thompson-esque break
i just realised one of the main sources of my disappoinment with BIP (don’y think i’ve EVER listened to it analytically): is the soundspace-separation of her harmonisation with herself… in “kid” and “SyS” the loveliest bits are where she doubletracks her singing on different harmony lines: there’s a main and a secondary melody, but they’re equal in presence
here, she does a cheer-chorus against herself, the main voice mixed up way out front, the chorus high and mixed distant, so it’s a bit like the “coloured girls go doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo” (which is a nice device actually, but i just wanted more of what she does in “kid” and “SyS”, there’s something incredibly velvety and blissed-out about those moments)
for many, many years i heard the lyric as:
gonna use my style
gonna use my SAUSAGE
Tom, not sure if you’re aware that the Pretenders covered ‘Creep’. There’s a fine version on Unplugged, if I remember rightly. Just got their new album which doesn’t seem to have had a UK release yet and on first play, it sounds like one of their better ones. I’m with Mike, this is a fantastic record, only superceded in the Pretenders pantheon by the follow-up, Talk Of The Town which, shamefully, only got to number 8. It’s still a mainstay of my party dance cds, and always fills the floor. Oh, and I’m really fond of this site though (as my occasional comments probably indicate) I only have time to read it every week or so and often have to skip to my favourite posters, of whom Marcello was number one. I understand your frustration with some of his posts, but couldn’t you give him a temporary touchline ban, or stop him from posting on Friday afternoons? The place will be poorer without him.
Those Pretenders singles in order of goodness:
1. Don’t Get Me Wrong (I quite like this even if it’s still got the Drivetime Classics thing going on)
2. Back On The Chain Gang (whoah-oha-OHH-ohh – hurray a chorus – weirdly cheerful considering they were all dead etc)
3. I’ll Stand By You (seems v suited to her voice but I’m not a fan of this tune and never have been)
4. Brass In Pocket (actually this can be v. entertaining if sung in a silly voice in the pub to remind other dudes how it goes)
…and I don’t know how the rest of them go. I guess I should check out ‘Kid’ – anything else?
Sensual, langourous, optimistic… This single makes me feel affectionate as a grown-up.
I realise that I may be out on a limb here, and its a bit indelicate – but I’ve always thought – well, since the idea struck me, anyway, not as a child – that the protagonist of this was was masturbating as she looked ahead to capturing the boyfriend. The whole pacing and breathiness of the thing, the fingers, using her imagination…
Am I alone in this interpretation?
Cover version Watch: 1992, Suede, from the Ruby Trax Spastics Society NME compilation, and performed on The Word.
Bernard Butler rethinks the music, making it sound oddly like Albatross by Fleetwood Mac. Over the top of this Brett Anderson ennunciates (and rewrites quite a lot of) the lyrics in that wierd whiney way. Butler comes out of the exercise rather better than Anderson. The cover has the effect of leaving me thinking “Wow, Suede really were good”, but doesn’t really do the sensuality of the song any favours, making it sound more preposerous than enticing.
Bizarrely, Chrissie Hynde claimed to much prefer this version to her own one.
hello, everyone. long time lurker, but since we have arrived at the year of my birth i’ve decided to join in the fun. tom, this is a fantastic project and your thoughts are insightful.
i share a hometown with chrissie hynde and she’s always been a local hero (along with devo, ubu, etc) so i have strong childhood associations with this tune. I’ve always viewed it as a classic example of early 80’s production, especially the jangly guitar with a slight chorus effect added to it, and the soft washy drum sound. everything about this one is fairly conventional with the exception of the vocal melody, which is all over the place in a way that is very atypical of other pretenders tunes (don’t get me wrong, kid, talk of the town).
not much else to say about this one. i’d give it a 6.
Just to mention in passing that I have spent a splendid afternoon and evening with Waldo, in the course of which more beer was consumed that I am used to, we saw Barrow beat Eastbourne Borough 3-1, and had a long walk including a goodly stretch of twilit coastline from Holker Street to the Queens Arms, Biggar where more beer was consumed before we set off home. Waldo has earned his early night I think. So have I…
I saw them on that tour with UB40 at the Hammersmith Palais (both of them were bloody great) but I’m sure their first album was out by then which meant it was after this topped the charts.
I’m pretty sure the tour helped UB40 though, I bought my copy of “Food For Thought/King” at the gig as did lots of other people there.
I always heard it as -
Gonna use my style,
Gonna use my sassy [sass-eh]
I know I’m wrong, but I still like the idea. I thought Hynde was pretty sassy; it’s a sexy record. That lingering, caressing guitar riff.
Mind you, The Smiths might have taken their cue from any number of Pretenders records, but this sounds like Texas.
I kind of like this; my hesitation comes from the vague sense of MOR in the arrangement. Those guitars chime a little too sweetly, the rhythm is sedate rather than strutting. I find her vocal style a bit mannered – comparisons are harsh but think of the way that someone like Patti Smith, who has a similar repertoire of vocal tics, makes her phrasing genuinely personal and expressive. This feels like an exercise in style on some level.
That said, it’s always been there and the hooks are all over it like velcro. The lyrics are memorable (if utterly cryptic to the 12-year-old me) and the title itself is such a confident statement of intent, it seems foolish to carp. It doesn’t have a chorus but in a sense the excitement of the song is that it goes from verse to bridge to verse and so on, each time adding passion and excitement and intensity. It doesn’t feel the need to aim for the anthemic climax, but releases its pleasures more multiply. (Hm, maybe there’s something in the ‘ditalini’ thesis…)
My mum liked this very much. In retrospect, there’s a female swagger in it that probably inched her forward to her divorce. I can’t quite separate my (generally positive) feelings about that from my own feelings for this song.
Brass In Pocket is really magical for me..Along with Kid and Talk Of THe Town they form a little trilogy of timelessly beautiful singles,where Chrissies ability to write truly lovely,atmospheric pop-songs full of yearning and empathy briefly matched her gorgeously seductive,sensual voice…
I like alot of other stuff Pretendrs’ve done but none come anywhere near close to those 3….I’d give it 9
I was coming up for 5 when this was out but remember it because my dad liked it and the pretenders and we had the record in the house and I must have loved it too. Hearing it now it sounds bland and dated to me. Very dull and much better to come from the eighties.
(#17 – the condensed version!)
In one of his old Attitude columns, Mark Simpson observed that every gay man who moves to London seems to go through a phase of strutting around Soho as if they were starring in their own personal remake of Miss Thing Comes To Town.
In which case, “Brass In Pocket” was my Miss Thing Comes To Town theme tune.
Blatantly hyped to the top of the pile, as was proven by a TV investigation. This is one of their worst singles.
Ugly old bag singing an ugly song with ugly tactics.
There really wasn’t any need for that last line was there?
Quite the contrary LondonLee:
Someone once told me “If you don’t have anything nasty to say, say nothing” and I think it was good advice which has stayed with me
I have to say that I am quite surprised to the ” cool” reactions to the Pretenders ” and , what I consider , over the top adoration for Debbie Harry.
I’d take the music and the sex appeal of Chrissie and The Pretenders above Blondie any day.
I was always amazed that Blondie were so popular, they always seemd to me as some disco-punk proto-type that I could never trust.
On the other hand , I thought the Pretenders to be more honest and an all around better bunch of musicians.
Point taken Brian, although bear in mind that much of the “cool” reaction is on the basis that BiP is not one of their better records – there’s still a lot of love for the band and their work. You’d no doubt see that coming out if they’d had as many number ones as Blondie, but unfortunately they didn’t.
Well, if WEA hadn’t hyped this single into the top spot, we wouldn’t be having this discussion re The Pretenders.
They had way more resonance amongst girl musician/guitarist/singers that came after, than Blondie, thanks to ‘understated’ glamour (a leather jacket always helps)
They had many better singles than this one (does anyone else have the love for the two groovy instrumentals on the b-side? Just me then), it’s a shame it wasn’t “Message of Love” or “Talk of the Town” or etc…
Thanks Erithian & Mark G ~ It’s often hard for me to get a focus on what’s really going on in the British musical scene when I see some of the numbers #1’s that get reviewed. Tougher still when you know that I was ( and still am ) in Canada and older than most of the contributors – so I actually remember the songs and the times .
So when I see so much praise lavished on Blondie and Pretenders being dissed – I gotta scratch my head and wonder what was going on in the UK that I missed,,,,,,
Thanks for throwing a light on this -
TOTPWatch: The Pretenders performed Brass In Pocket on four seperate occasions, over three consecutive years! November 22nd 1979 in an appearance that had to be prerecorded because of industrial action, January 3rd 1980, January 17th 1980, and January 1st 1981.
Also in the studio on January 3rd 1980 were; Madness, Boney M, The Beat, Fiddler’s Dram, Billy Preston & Syreeta and Kurtis Blow, plus Legs & Co’s interpretation of ‘My Feet Keep Dancing’. The host was Peter Powell.
Also in the studio on January the 17th were; New Musik, Sad Cafe, Sister Sledge, Positive Force, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Amii Stewart and Rupert Holmes, plus Legs & Co’s interpretation of Green Onions. The host was Simon Bates.
NMEWatch: 10 November 1979. A Charles Shaar Murray single of the week (uncharacteristic photograph of CSM in mod image);
“Will give Chrissie and her cohorts that major convincing hit. It’s the best kind of derivative, egocentric rock single: it insists ‘I’m special, give me your attention’ in a plangent, pleading manner, provides enough rhythmic poke to qualify as a dance record while still remaining smooth enough for continuous application. It blends ’60s guitar and ’70s drums with an exquisite kitten of a melody. It’s your basic nice record for middlebrows. (…) Not a record to kill for, but one to inspire great fondness.”
Also reviewed;
Boomtown Rats – Diamond Smiles
Barbara Streisand & Donna Summer – No More Tears
Sheila B Devotion – Spacer
Slade – Sign Of The Times
Phil Daniels & The Cross – Kill Another Night
ahh…plangent – a word that seemed beloved by NME writers at that time – and to this day I still don’t know what it means
..so after Googling it and getting sufficiently distracted to miss my editing time I learn that it means ’suggesting sadness’ which is clearly wrong in this case – he just likes the alliteration with pleading
it comes from latin plangere — to strike one’s breast in mourning — and means beating or striking, as in beating one’s breast, or the sound of the sea — also resonant, loud, plaintive, mournful
ie it means whatever you want it to mean!
(above is from new shorter oxford, which generally flails a bit less than this: viz it defines plangency as “the quality of being plangent”, which is as close as shorter gets to sayin “plz to F.OFF!”)
that reminds me of my art teacher telling me that my paintings needed to be more painterly. When I looked it up I discovered that it meant ‘having the quality of paint’ which seemed to state the bleeding obvious.My understanding is a little more nuanced now…
Clever marketing by WEA ensured that the eponymous debut album by the Pretenders became the first major album to be released in the eighties, and also helped “Brass In Pocket” to become that decade’s first number one single – and no one could begrudge either. Consider the Chrissie Hynde of 1974, fresh off the ‘plane from Akron, freelancing for the NME, yawning in agony at being asked to pen yet another Velvets retrospective, wishing inwardly for something much better. Then she falls in with the McLaren/Pistols crowd, suddenly feels exactly at home. She loves the future, winds a few tabloids up by helping out Steve Strange on that one-off Moors Murderers single, but essentially can’t let go of those Kinks and Marvelettes and Stooges sides which helped her grow up; so she finally gets the retro-nuevo pop/rock band she’d been craving, and then the world realises that she can sing…
The first two Pretenders singles, “Stop Your Sobbing” and “Kid,” were remarkably unclassifiable yet resolutely of the then-now; Hynde, with a voice deriving from, but reaching far wider than, Sandie Shaw (those elongated vibrati), managed the difficult feat of being sensual and comforting at the same time. “Kid” in particular is akin to being offered a long, lovely, selfless hug. The album was startling too, containing two of the most disturbing and unsettling, but rigidly rationalist, examples of tough love in pop in “Lovers Of Today” and “Private Life” – forthright and chilling.
But “Brass In Pocket” was the pop trump card. Set on paper, the lyric in isolation can look arrogant – “I’m special, so special/I’ve gotta have some of your attention/Give it to me!” One can only shudder at what the Beyoncés of this bereft age would make of such words; strident, clock-watching and loveless. But with Chrissie, you are compelled to agree: “damn right baby, you deserve it!” Because there is a cosmos of difference between arrogance and sassiness, between imposition and assertiveness. She wants that man, desires this world, and she knows the tactics required to secure either, or both: “Intention – I feel inventive!” And she beguiles the listener as she lists her attributes – “Gonna use my arms/gonna use my legs/gonna use my style…” – with her voice rising and swaying in total confidence, so much so that even lines like “Been driving, Detroit-leaning” and “Got new skank, it’s so reet” fly by without the listener taking much, if any, exception. She indulges in rhetorical triplets, almost like a political speech – “Gonna use my, my, my imagination,” “Gonna make you, make you, make you notice.”
The music is splendid; James Honeyman-Scott’s lucid guitars floating through tenderly, rhythm foursquare but fluid, the same bending bass and pre-coital “Oh!” which introduced “Message In A Bottle.” But Hynde’s demands demand attention because you recognise them for the pleas which they really are; I’ve got it all and you HAVE to notice me, acknowledge me. I was about to turn sixteen, so you can imagine my elementary response to all of this, but her delivery and stance are so naturally lovely that it’s impossible to resist her requests to give yourself to her.