Great Love Songs (21)

I fret that it may be unwise for me to ponder too long on the question of love songs when I am trapped in a particularly deep and persistent depressive trough, much of that depression stemming from contemplation of the dismal state of my love life over the past five years.  However, Don't Get Me Wrong by The Pretenders is so irresistibly bouncy that I feel it may just perk me up out of my stubborn glumness.  At any rate, it's not a brooding-on-love-lost kind of song, so I don't think it will drag me down further into the pit.  I don't think there's much further to go.

There's quite a decent live version (well, you know, the usual awful bootleg sound, but a fun performance) by Chrissie and the gang from a 2007 concert in New Zealand (with a pond in front of the stage?!) here.

[Trivia Note:  Chrissie originally formed the band in my home town of Hereford (well, that's where I was born, anyway; I spent most of my early years in little towns and villages in the country round about, and then the next 14 years until the cusp of adulthood in Monmouth, a small farming market town on the Welsh border about 20 miles south of there.  The only other band of any note I can recall coming from there was Mott The Hoople - who were briefly quite a big thing in the early '70s (David Bowie let them cover his All The Young Dudes; and Queen first went to America as an opening act for them!).  However, in out-of-the-way Monmouth, we were quite a little hub of the recording industry.  Nimbus Records had an LP (and later CD) pressing plant nearby, and the tiny Rockfield recording studios at the bottom end of town was where Queen laid down their landmark A Night At The Opera album (not that I remember them being in town; I was only 9 or 10 at the time).  A number of quite big cheeses in the world of rock'n'roll bought country homes in the area - most notably Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant.  And there were some great session musicians who lived around there too, and would often perform impromptu gigs in one of the town's many, many fine public houses (we used to claim the record for the most generous per capita provision of boozers in the UK: when I was a kid, I think it stood at 37 bars for a population of around 12,000).  In fact, I think the first gig I ever saw (circa 1980) was by Nick Lowe, another regular - if not permanent - local resident, playing solo in the Nag's Head pub.  Nick produced the first Pretenders album.]