aka The Vinyl Villain incorporating Sexy Loser
#077: Pretenders – ‘Precious’ (Real Records ’80)
Hello friends,
today we have a track from most definitely one of the greatest debut albums of all-time, embodying equal parts of punk, ska and rock. New Wave may have been born a few years earlier but Chrissie Hynde and company brought it to the next level with their self-titled debut in 1980. James Honeyman-Scott‘s guitar talents are everywhere, the same is true for Chrissie Hynde’s vocal talents.
So it’s not too astonishing that all of the three tracks the record company chose to be singles turned out to become pretty successful – some 44 years later you still hear them on daytime radio here and there. I leave it up to you to decide whether this is an honour or not, but come on, they are all pretty neat: ‘Brass In Pocket’, ‘Kid’, ‘Stop Your Sobbing’ … nothing wrong with them, right?
‘But hold on’, I can hear you shout, ‘if the above were all of the three singles that were released, where does the one below come from?!’ Well, this is because Real Records licensed Hispavox in Spain to put ‘Precious’ out as a single, backed by ‘Stop Your Sobbing’ – in this form it wasn’t available anywhere else but in Spain. Well, that’s not entirely correct, ‘cos they also put it out as a single in The Netherlands, but with ‘The Phone Call’ as the B-Side.
And as far as I’m concerned, this was a very big mistake! I can understand that at the end of the day it’s all about money, and I also understand that a tune as raucous as ‘Precious’ may not really be as consumer-friendly as ‘Brass In Pocket’, ‘Kid’, or ‘Stop Your Sobbing’ – but hey, we are talking 1980 here, and punk was not entirely dead everywhere, so Real Records might have made a pretty penny when having had the guts to release this single Europe-wide!
I wish I could understand the thoughts of the record company decision-makers back then for not doing so: „Oh, those Spanish, they are all brutally hardcore, must be with this constant heat – they will buy this …and those Dutch, they have fallen off the dyke too often anyway, so they’ll buy it as well for sure!“.
Either way, me, I still listen to The Pretenders sometimes, also to their later albums, but whenever I put the debut album on, the first track puts a big smile on my face … the same smile that I produce when listening to the first track of The Clash‘s debut album!
And this, friends, this is an honour, at least in my little world!
mp3: Pretenders – Precious
Enjoy
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 
I remember going to London (by bus!) from Sweden as our end of secondary school travel spring 1980 – I bought the debut album by Pretenders then and still have (and treasure) it. Great reading as usual Dirk!
It wasn’t chosen as a single, I suppose, due to the lyric “I had to fuck off!” But everything you wrote about it is spot on, Dirk, it’s a classic. My cover band opened with ‘Precious’ just this past Saturday night!
Every week I look for 12 “new” songs for my playlist (all rules are allowed), which consists of 24 songs (so each song is in the playlist for exactly 2 weeks, which is sometimes too long, sometimes too short, but most of the time exactly is right ). I call this process “The Hunt for the Twelve”, which sounds a bit like the title of an Edgar Wallace novel.
“Precious,” which Wiki rates as the most threatening of all Pretenders songs, arrives just in time. I compared the single to the version of the album that I own on CD. In this case they appear to be identical (F*** off at about 2.55).
Only 8 left to find until Sunday evening.
Thanks [sk]