The Pretenders at the Aotea Centre

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

That Chrissie Hynde still goes under the Pretenders flag is testament to something admirable.

Something about what bands can mean, even 26 years on. Something that suggests she's never been big on career moves.

Something that suggests she's happy in her work.

And having never really gone away or stopped recording, this didn't feel like the reform-and-cash-in tour.

Last night's show before a less-than-capacity Aotea Centre wasn't just a comfortable waltz down memory lane for the mostly middle-aged audience.

But it found that path in the end, and reminded that Hynde's best songs have aged as gracefully as their 52-year-old composer. For too long in the first half of the 1 hour 45 minute performance it did feel a bit like a grind - a lack of momentum and Hynde trying to connect with an audience trapped in their theatre seats.

Her sense of humour did win through, whether it was her dedication of Kid to late original Pretenders guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon "who couldn't be here tonight due to serious drug overdoses". Or her next dedication: "This is a song I wrote for my baby who was born 21 years ago. I'd like to sing it to her father who I haven't seen in 20 years."

Or when she encountered her number one fan in the front row, and shared her microphone with him for a particularly vampish take on Don't Get Me Wrong.

All joking aside, the emotional high-point of the show was the ballad Hymn to Her, which showed that Hynde's one-off of a voice is wasted on some of her more plodding rockers.

Most valuable player was original drummer Martin Chambers, who didn't let the perspex acoustic barrier around his kit hinder his own contributions to the comedy sideshow.

He did, however, threaten a drum solo which was in even poorer taste than Hynde's vocabulary. But when he hit the damn things during the songs, he was magic.

Of the other supporting players, guitarist Adam Seymour was impressive with his many lead breaks, even if some resembled that scene in Back to the Future when Michael J Fox invents rock'n'roll. That is, they did go on a bit.

If there was another slight flaw to the set, it felt the Pretenders were too often reading from the Pretenders song book without offering any new expression.

Nothing especially bad in that. But it made for a set that managed to stretch from perfunctory at the beginning to persuasive, especially when Hynde and band stretched out on the likes of Precious and ended - during their second encore - on the inevitable Brass In Pocket.