“WHAT IT’S basically down to is pressure.”

Peter Farndon speaks slowly, his voice coloured with deliberation, exhaustion and a hint of bewilderment. The soft water vowels of his still distinct Hereford accent add bite to his new-found disillusionment with the ways of the world.

As he continues, the sympathetic side of me realises that I’ve caught him and the rest of The Pretenders at their lowest ebb, that one day when nothing seems worth it at all. The uncharitable metropolitan in me reckons he’s sounding off like the archetypal country kid who’s come to the big city and made the unsurprising discovery that the streets are paved with three card tricksters, not gold.

“All of a sudden it’s hard to understand how come a year ago you were just bumming around and some geezer is going to give you £25 a week to rehearse and all that and you think ‘Shit, I’m laughing’.

“And, before you know it — because there’s only one way to do it, work really hard, up and down the motorway, in and out of the studio, in and out of the BBC, non-stop, one day off a week — the pressure builds up and builds up until you think ‘Shit, a year ago, I was just sitting around getting half as much money and getting twice as pissed or whatever you’re into’ and you start thinking: ‘Is it worth all that hassle?'”

FOR WHAT seemed like the tenth time that evening, the tannoy at Blackpool’s Norbreck Castle Hotel (holidays for Scots and Ulstermen a speciality) blared into action with the same message: “Will Mr. Wayne Fontana please come to the reception desk where there is a phone call for him.”

In between batting a little white ball across a table tennis table (I told you it was a holiday hotel), James Honeyman Scott and I wondered aloud if this series of calls for Mr. Fontana might not have something to do with the fact that the man who sat in the park all those years ago and is now wandering around the country with the vain hope of trying to whip up some enthusiasm for a Merseybeat revival was doing a show down the road apiece the following night.

(Much later in the night I met the bassist in Fontana’s band. While he was attempting to convince me to persuade Chrissie Hynde to join us in the bar, I noticed his badge. Home-made and constructed with admirable wit but scant tact, it announced him as part of the ‘I Fowt E Woz Fuckin Dead Tour’.)

Still smiling over the thought that these days Wayne’s forehead is probably higher than the Empire State building, Jimmy and I heard a middle-aged woman shouting “C’mon, get out”. Imagining she was just hustling the couple of kids on the other side of the room to their beds, we ignored her till we heard “And you two… the fire alarm’s gone off. You’ve got to get out of the building.”

Normally, of course, being ejected temporarily from the hotel in the late evening would have been no sweat; the band could have just gone on to the gig early. But when a band stays at the Norbreck Castle, it plays at the Norbreck Castle and, one by one, The Pretenders had to join the pyjama-clad early-to-bedders, the screaming kids and the prospective audience for that night’s gig on the windy hotel forecourt.

As we were then informed that it was in fact a bomb scare and the police would take half an hour to search the hotel, I realised that, in the confusion, I’d left my beer behind. I looked round at Jimmy, guessing that he of anyone would have had the sense to remember the liquid sustenance. I was of course right, only it was my pint of lager he’d brought with him — he’d already finished his.

“I didn’t know it was yours, Silv, honest. But you know I wouldn’t miss something like that sitting around. In some fucking order.”

How can you get angry at someone with such a crude but effective understanding of survival? Especially when it’s James Honeyman Scott and you’ve just beaten him at table tennis.

“GET BACK, you bastards.” You didn’t have to be able to see Chrissie Hynde’s face to realise that she was fed up, frustrated that the first three or four rows of the crowd at the Norbreck Castle were making it impossible for the band to play with ease (flair and style were out of the question that night).

Not that it was their fault really, the shape of the Norbreck Nite Spot hall is such that it makes it inevitable that the front few rows will push forward, will knock over the mikes, force the band back to a close group round the drumkit, will drive Chrissie Hynde into losing her temper.

Presumably designed by someone with the aim of making life as difficult as possible for visiting rock and roll bands, it has an eight or so feet deep platform in front of the stage which is almost level with the stage but a good fifteen inches above the rest of the room. Which inevitably means that there’s a big crush to get up front of the stage where you can actually see which inevitably means…

Acoustically, it means the sound roars like an uncaged lion at the front and whimpers like a dying dog at the back, A true gem for collectors of rock and roll horrors.

Unwilling to brave the throngs at the front, I hovered around the safety of the mixing desk where the only disadvantage was a brace of Skrewdrivers falling around in an advanced stage of alcohol and fascist dementia — I couldn’t for the life of me understand why they’d come, maybe they thought Chrissie, having once hung around with biker gangs, would have absorbed a few of their attitudes on race — I never did find out; the tenth time they fell over a politely dressed courting couple on holiday and breathed a brewery down the girl’s cleavage, they were helped to the door by two large men in black suits and latter-day Zapata moustaches.

In all, it wasn’t a very happy night. The bomb scare meant they went onstage an hour and a half late. The sound brought a new meaning to the word ragged. And the audience gave the impression of having been scientifically selected as a cross-section of the 16-35 age group.

A small bondage hook of punks. The inevitable Bowie clones. Bedenimed ‘lads’. An odd balding hippy. Drunken women in their mid-thirties, thinking they’re Elsie Tanner but ending up just sloppily drunk. Smooth reps in their late-twenties — I don’t know what the Northern equivalent of Take Six is otherwise I’d tell you where they bought their suits. And the rest of them just there because they’re staying at the hotel and there’s not much to do in Blackpool of a night after twelve if you don’t have the money to fling handfuls of fivers on the roulette table at the casino.

Surprisingly, the crowd seemed to take the Pretenders to their hearts — they went so far as to demand an unreceived second encore and the waitress that Jimmy had tried to impress by calling nurse came and told me as she left that they’d been much better than she expected.

God knows what she’d thought they’d be like. On a scale of one to ten, I’d rate that night’s performance around one and a half to two. None of the band were too knocked out with it either. I realised that when Jimmy, never one to miss an open bar, went straight to bed after the show.

(I later discovered the band had given Chrissie a very hard time in the dressing room about her insulting the crowd. She defended herself by drinking almost a bottle of vodka. She too went for an early bed.)

Which was one of the constant paradoxes of life as it is lived on the rock and roll road. It’d been an easy day.

Short drive from Liverpool. Afternoon on the funfair.

“No, you’re not getting me on that big- dipper,” Jimmy shouted as I nodded in agreement, “You don’t realise what you’re asking me to do. Me, a man who got bumped on the dodgems when he was five, bashed his head on the pole and ended up in hospital, threw up his lunch into his lap on the big-dipper and suffered the tunnel of love with Barbara Charone.”

Everybody finally gets back into the van, stuffed with hot dogs, pop corn and candyfloss and topped with daft cowboy hats. On to the hotel. Check in. Swift soundcheck.

DINNER, MELON. Fish in a sauce that made Bird’s Eye ads look enticing. Ice cream “Sorry, we’ve got no chocolate, luv, will vanilla be alright?” Chrissie stares into her coffee and mumbles that two valium should be enough tonight, thank you, nurse. The waitress smiles and brings melted vanilla ice cream.