Rhino / Wea
2006
Pirate Radio
About This Album
To say that Warner/Rhino/Sire's 2006 four-CD, one-DVD box set Pirate Radio is for the die-hard Pretenders fan may be stating the obvious -- after all, career-spanning multi-disc sets heavy on rarities are by definition for diehards. But die-hard Pretenders fans are different than other die-hard fans, since they can be easily split into two separate camps: those who followed Chrissie Hynde throughout her career, and those who lost interest somewhere after 1983's Learning to Crawl, the triumphant third album that proved Hynde was above all a survivor. After that, Pretenders records were notoriously hit-or-miss affairs, sometimes holding together a little better than others, but patchy enough to whittle down their audience to just the dedicated, while still indicating that a killer comp could be pieced together from these records.

Is Pirate Radio that comp? No, not really. It has almost all of their charting singles and many of their best album tracks, but it's not a lean collection of nothing but the best from the Pretenders; it has too many rarities and treats each portion of their career too evenhandedly to be that. By the end of the first disc, Pirate Radio has already dipped into Learning to Crawl, and well over half the collection is devoted to music released from 1990 on -- an era that had two solid albums (1994's Last of the Independents and 2002's Loose Screw) and one strong one (1999's Viva el Amor), plus a popular if subdued live album (1995's Isle of View).
Track List

Disc 1 (try tracks 8,11,12,16,18 and 19)

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Disc 2 (try tracks 2,6,10,13,15,18,19 and 20)

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Disc 3 (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,8,9,11,15,16,17 and 18)

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Disc 4 (try tracks 1,6,9,10,15,16 and 18)

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Disc 5

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