See? With “Message of Love” and “Talk of the Town” opening and closing the album and both “Cuban Slide” and “Porcelain” there to shore up the back half of each side into, suddenly Pretenders II is a solid A- instead of a B. So allow me to present an alternate universe version of Pretenders II that I think would have been a worthy follow-up to Pretenders. I mean, “Bad Boys Get Spanked” was totally unnecessary, as was yet another Ray Davies cover, and while I get why they recycled both “Message of Love< " and "Talk of the Town” from Extended PlayExtended Play wouldn’t have ever been released, but I think it would have been worth it. Now, by no stretch of the imagination is Pretenders II a bad album, and I loved how the cover hearkened back to the days when the Rolling Stones would glower at you from one of their mid-1980s album covers - though Chrissie Hynde said in her book that she didn’t like it because of the airbrushing both made it look fake and yet still couldn’t hide Pete Farndon’s heroin pallor (not as bad as Brian Jones on the cover of Between The Buttons, but still) - but for a band who had made their name eschewing formula, it seemed, well. As you can imagine, after the twin triumphs of Pretenders and the Extended Play EP, I was totally looking forward to the follow-up.
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