I had never heard this. Very interesting. Hynde's voice is so wonderful (not just here but always). Beguiling, knowing, yearning, melancholic. I ought to dig out some Pretenders again.

I don't prefer this to the Morrissey original, however. I think 'bored' is exactly how he should sound for EDILS. And I don't see it as being just, or even mainly, about the aftermath of war.

To me it conflates the experience of the tedium of dreary, rainy northwest English days out at a dismal beach, with Nevil Shute's apocalyptic On the Beach, by way of Threads, When The Wind Blows and other British nuclear war fiction that was so much part of our mindset in the 1980s. Along with Betjeman's poem Slough (Come, friendly bombs...).

He is retrospectively willing the apocalypse on the memories of his youth, of enforced attempts at beachside jollity that were nothing but a drawn-out, miserable torture.

The opening line Trudging slowly over wet sand / Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen is to my mind the best of any song written, and I say this as one who wouldn't touch old man Morrissey with a bargepole these days.